After years of ongoing tensions and unresolved disputes with the Philippines over maritime rights to the South China Sea, a five-member panel of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague ruled unanimously Tuesday that there is “no inherent evidence” that China has “historically exercised exclusive control” over those waters.
Not surprisingly, China summarily dismissed the panel’s ruling as “ill-founded” and proclaimed that it would not comply with the decision.
In other words, China essentially told the PCA to “shove it” and proceeded to reiterate its indifference to the authority of the United Nations organization by declaring that it will continue to flex its military muscles by conducting new air and sea drills in the disputed area of the Spratly Islands and Scarborough Shoal.
There are a lot of reasons that Beijing has refused to accept the PCA verdict, not least of which are the old Chinese concept of preserving face and a long-held nationalist view by the Chinese people that the waters are a fundamental and critical part of their territorial integrity.
But more importantly, there is a financial incentive.
The South China Sea is believed to have untapped carbon reserves of about 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
Moreover, some $4.5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes through the maritime region every year.
Beijing maintains that it has sole maritime rights over 90 percent of the South China Sea, despite the fact that the Philippines, along with Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan, have long contested China’s claims to those waters.
China bases its right to the region on a historical precedent set by the “nine-dash line” that Beijing drew in 1947, following the surrender of Japan.
That line has been included in subsequent maps issued under communist rule and thus imbedded in the Chinese people’s psyche.
And although the PCA decision focused narrowly on the specific issue of competing Chinese-Philippine entitlements, it clearly opened the door for a wider discrediting of Beijing’s claims throughout most of the South China Sea.
Beijing sees the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling as an offense against its national sovereignty and, for domestic political and global economic reasons, simply cannot afford to acknowledge the PCA arbitration outright.
China’s arrogance regarding the PCA arbitration is nothing new.
When it comes to trade, Beijing has also dug in its heels regarding the opening of its markets to foreign imports.
Even though it became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001, the world’s second-largest economy only plays by the rules of international law when those rules suit its interests.
The last major holdout of the communist world simply doesn’t believe in the capitalist concept of globalized trade and liberal, neoclassic, free-market exchange.
Commerce for the Chinese is about exporting, not importing, so it gets around its commitment to free markets by creating non-tariff trade barriers, manipulating its currency and providing subsidies for Chinese corporations, much to the chagrin of the rest of the world.
As for the PCA judgment, there is little the Philippines — or any other country — can do to force China to comply.
Like most U.N. organizations, The Hague court has no power to enforce its ruling.
Consequently, the PCA ruling has no teeth, other than to try to shame Beijing into compliance by effectively painting it as a rouge nation in the eyes of the international community if doesn’t back down and accept the tribunal’s verdict.
For the last decade, China has been maneuvering diplomatically to gain a key seat at the global negotiating table, and ignoring the PCA could prove to be counterproductive as far as that objective is concerned.
Also, a boycott of Chinese goods by the Philippines and its fellow Association of Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN) members could put pressure on Beijing to comply with the ruling, but a trade embargo would probably be more costly for ASEAN than for China.
In the end, Beijing will — as it has in the past — do whatever it wants in the South China Sea.
But, at the very least, the Philippines has won a symbolic victory against China, and that might just provoke the Asian dragon to rethink its current foreign policy and stop bullying its neighbors.
Thérèse Margolis can be reached at [email protected].
