AFP
Half century on, US hawks revive criticism of China normalization
For half a century, Richard Nixon's opening to communist China has been viewed by many Americans as a diplomatic masterstroke, with successive presidents of both parties following his course.
US hawks have now revived an alternative view -- that normalization was a mistake that, in the view of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, set the stage for an aggressive China and soaring tensions between Washington and Beijing.
It all began in 1971 with secret trips to Beijing by Henry Kissinger, Nixon's national security advisor.
Nixon stunned the world when he announced his own 1972 visit to China to see supremo Mao Zedong. This time the trip was anything but quiet, with the pageantry broadcast back home to US television viewers in an election year.
Nixon had built his career as a staunch hardliner on communism, leading to what became a US political axiom that only Nixon could establish relations with communist China.
- Ending 'old paradigm' -
Pompeo last week delivered a rebuke -- all the more stinging as he spoke at the Nixon library and museum in southern California where the Republican president is buried.
"President Nixon once said he feared he had created a Frankenstein by opening the world to the CCP, and here we are," Pompeo said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.
"The old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won't get it done," Pompeo said.
Calling for a "new alliance of democracies," Pompeo said that Chinese President Xi Jinping "is not destined to tyrannize inside and outside of China forever, unless we allow it."
Stapleton Roy, who took part in the secret negotiations in the 1970s before becoming US ambassador to China two decades later, said that Pompeo's "old paradigm" was never the basis for US policymakers.
"It is historically inaccurate to say that the US policy of engagement with China was based on a naive expectation that China was bound to liberalize politically," said Roy, who later headed the Wilson Center's Kissinger Institute on China and the United States.
According to Roy, Nixon and Kissinger were "totally pragmatic" in their objectives with China.
"The original purpose of the Nixon/Kissinger breakthrough to China in 1971/72 was to strengthen our position in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and secondarily to get China's assistance in winding up the Vietnam War," he said.
"The main purpose was decisively achieved. The second was not."
Even with Nixon's anti-communist bona fides, many US conservatives as well as some liberals were livid at the prospect of abandoning ally Taiwan, where the mainland's nationalists had fled upon defeat in 1949.
It was not until 1979 that Jimmy Carter switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing, with Congress requiring that the United States still provide for the defense of Taiwan, which has since transformed into a vibrant democracy.
- Economic interests prevail, then frighten -
Mira Rapp-Hooper, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, called Pompeo's account a "very crude representation" of how normalization took place.
"Diplomats never believed that China was going to become Jeffersonian democracy," she said.
"While there was optimism for progress, there was not hope that the simple fact of American engagement was going to radically change the nature of the Chinese party's state," she said.
Any hopes that rose with Deng Xiaoping's opening of the Chinese economy were shattered in 1989 with troops' deadly repression of massive pro-democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 after vowing to get tough on what his campaign called the "butchers of Beijing" -- but he eventually ended the link between China's trading privileges and human rights.
"Economic interest did ultimately prevail," Rapp-Hooper said.
"There was a sense of China sort of inexorably rising in a way that had positive benefits for the United States."
With China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, the billion-plus nation witnessed soaring growth and its manufacturing-driven economy became intertwined with the world.
In the words of Pompeo, Western policies "resurrected China's failing economy, only to see Beijing bite the international hands that were feeding it."
A turning point came with the 2008 financial crisis when Chinese leaders came to believe "that the US democratic liberal model was faltering, and that China increasingly had an opportunity to assert itself on the global stage as a great power," Rapp-Hooper said.
Xi has amassed power since becoming president in 2013, suppressing dissent and clamping down both on the Uighur minority and in semi-autonomous Hong Kong.
Relations keep deteriorating with the United States, with President Donald Trump's administration, flexing muscle ahead of elections, slapping sanctions on Chinese officials, arresting Chinese nationals on espionage charges and closing down Beijing's consulate in Houston.
"China has taken on the characteristics of other rising powers by becoming more arrogant and demanding in advancing its interests," Roy said. "That is a problem that good diplomacy can deal with, without threats and bluster."
CBS News Videos
U.S. announces shift in South China Sea policy
Business
US rejects nearly all Chinese claims in South China Sea
China US South China Sea
In this photo provided by U.S. Navy, the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) and USS Nimitz (CVN 68) Carrier Strike Groups steam in formation, in the South China Sea, Monday, July 6, 2020. China on Monday, July 6, accused the U.S. of flexing its military muscles in the South China Sea by conducting joint exercises with two U.S. aircraft carrier groups in the strategic waterway.(Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Jason Tarleton/U.S. Navy via AP)WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration escalated its actions against China on Monday by stepping squarely into one of the most sensitive regional issues dividing them and rejecting outright nearly all of Beijing’s significant maritime claims in the South China Sea.
The administration presented the decision as an attempt to curb China’s increasing assertiveness in the region with a commitment to recognizing international law. But it will almost certainly have the more immediate effect of further infuriating the Chinese, who are already retaliating against numerous U.S. sanctions and other penalties on other matters.
It also comes as President Donald Trump has come under growing fire for his response to the COVID-19 pandemic, stepped up criticism of China ahead of the 2020 election and sought to paint his expected Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, as weak on China.
Previously, U.S. policy had been to insist that maritime disputes between China and its smaller neighbors be resolved peacefully through U.N.-backed arbitration. But in a statement released Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the U.S. now regards virtually all Chinese maritime claims outside its internationally recognized waters to be illegitimate. The shift does not involve disputes over land features that are above sea level, which are considered to be "territorial" in nature.
“The world will not allow Beijing to treat the South China Sea as its maritime empire,” Pompeo said. “America stands with our Southeast Asian allies and partners in protecting their sovereign rights to offshore resources, consistent with their rights and obligations under international law. We stand with the international community in defense of freedom of the seas and respect for sovereignty and reject any push to impose 'might makes right' in the South China Sea or the wider region.”
Although the U.S. will continue to remain neutral in territorial disputes, the announcement means the administration is in effect siding with Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, all of which oppose Chinese assertions of sovereignty over maritime areas surrounding contested islands, reefs and shoals.
“There are clear cases where (China) is claiming sovereignty over areas that no country can lawfully claim,” the State Department said in a fact sheet that accompanied the statement.
The announcement was released a day after the fourth anniversary of a binding decision by an arbitration panel in favor of the Philippines that rejected China's maritime claims around the Spratly Islands and neighboring reefs and shoals.
China has refused to recognize that decision, which it has dismissed as a “sham,” and refused to participate in the arbitration proceedings. It has continued to defy the decision with aggressive actions that have brought it into territorial spats with Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia in recent years.
However, as a result, the administration says China has no valid maritime claims to the fish- and potentially energy-rich Scarborough Reef, Mischief Reef or Second Thomas Shoal. The U.S. has repeatedly said that areas regarded to be part of the Philippines are covered by a U.S.-Philippines mutual defense treaty in the event of an attack on them.
In addition to reiterating support for that decision, Pompeo said China cannot legally claim the James Shoal near Malaysia, waters surrounding the Vanguard Bank off Vietnam, the Luconia Shoals near Brunei and Natuna Besar off Indonesia. As such, it says the U.S. will regard any Chinese harassment of fishing vessels or oil exploration in those areas as unlawful.
The announcement came amid heightened tensions between the U.S. and China over numerous issues, including the coronavirus pandemic, human rights, Chinese policy in Hong Kong and Tibet and trade, that have sent relations plummeting in recent months.
But the practical impact wasn't immediately clear. The U.S. is not a party of the UN Law of the Sea treaty that sets out a mechanism for the resolution of disputes. Despite that, the State Department noted that China and its neighbors, including the Philippines, are parties to the treaty and should respect the decision.
China has sought to shore up its claim to the sea by building military bases on coral atolls, leading the U.S. to sail its warships through the region in what it calls freedom of operation missions. The United States has no claims itself to the waters but has deployed warships and aircraft for decades to patrol and promote freedom of navigation and overflight in the busy waterway.
Last week, China angrily complained about the U.S. flexing its military muscle in the South China Sea by conducting joint exercises with two U.S. aircraft carrier groups in the strategic waterway. The Navy said the USS Nimitz and the USS Ronald Reagan, along with their accompanying vessels and aircraft, conducted exercises “designed to maximize air defense capabilities, and extend the reach of long-range precision maritime strikes from carrier-based aircraft in a rapidly evolving area of operations.”
China claims almost all of the South China Sea and routinely objects to any action by the U.S. military in the region. Five other governments claim all or part of the sea, through which approximately $5 trillion in goods are shipped every year.
AFP
US brands Beijing's South China Sea claims illegal
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, seen here in November 2018, has sharply criticized China over the South China Sea
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, seen here in November 2018, has sharply criticized China over the South China Sea (AFP Photo/MANDEL NGAN)Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday the United States would treat Beijing's pursuit of resources in the dispute-rife South China Sea as illegal, ramping up support for Southeast Asian nations and triggering a furious response from Beijing.
It was the latest forceful statement by President Donald Trump's administration to challenge China, which he has increasingly cast as an enemy ahead of November elections.
"We are making clear: Beijing's claims to offshore resources across most of the South China Sea are completely unlawful, as is its campaign of bullying to control them," Pompeo said in a statement.
"The world will not allow Beijing to treat the South China Sea as its maritime empire."
The United States has long rejected Beijing's sweeping claims in the South China Sea, which is both home to valuable oil and gas deposits and a vital waterway for the world's commerce.
Pompeo's statement goes further by explicitly siding with Southeast Asian nations including the Philippines and Vietnam, after years of the US saying it took no position on individual claims.
"America stands with our Southeast Asian allies and partners in protecting their sovereign rights to offshore resources, consistent with their rights and obligations under international law," Pompeo said.
"We stand with the international community in defense of freedom of the seas and respect for sovereignty and reject any push to impose 'might makes right' in the South China Sea or the wider region."
- Rejecting basis of claims -
Beijing claims most of the South China Sea through a so-called nine-dash line, a vague delineation based on maps from the 1940s.
It has spent years building military bases on artificial islands in the contested areas to cement its claims, while dragging out a diplomatic process to resolve the disputes for nearly two decades.
China on Tuesday responded forcefully to Pompeo's comments, saying the accusation of unlawfulness was "completely unjustified".
"We advise the US side to earnestly honor its commitment of not taking sides on the issue of territorial sovereignty, respect regional countries' efforts for a peaceful and stable South China Sea and stop its attempts to disrupt and sabotage regional peace and stability," said the US embassy in Washington.
The statement accused the United States of trying to "sow discord" between China and its fellow claimants in the sea.
Pompeo issued his statement to mark the fourth anniversary of a tribunal decision that sided with the Philippines against the nine-dash line.
Pompeo said that China, based on the court decision, cannot make claims based on the Scarborough Reef or Spratly Islands, a vast uninhabited archipelago.
The United States as a result now rejects Beijing's claims in the waters surrounding Vanguard Bank off Vietnam, Lucania Shoals off Malaysia, waters considered in Brunei's exclusive economic zone and Natuna Besar off Indonesia, Pompeo said.
"Any PRC action to harass other states' fishing or hydrocarbon development in these waters -- or to carry out such activities unilaterally -- is unlawful," Pompeo said.
Pompeo also rejected Beijing's southernmost claim of Malaysian-administered James Shoal, which is 1,800 kilometers (1,150 miles) from the Chinese mainland.
The 2016 decision was issued by a tribunal under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Pompeo noted that China is a party to it and called the ruling legally binding.
The United States, however, is one of the few countries that is not part of the convention, with conservatives opposing any loss of autonomy to a global body.
- Friction across fronts -
The South China Sea statement comes amid rising tensions surrounding China, including a deadly border clash last month with India that Pompeo called part of a strategy by Beijing to challenge its neighbors.
Trump has also strongly criticized China for not doing more to stop the coronavirus pandemic, news of which was initially suppressed when it emerged in Wuhan late last year.
Critics both at home and abroad say that Trump is hoping to deflect attention ahead of the November election over his handling of the virus in the US, which has suffered by far the highest death toll of any country.
Trump, after bipartisan calls in Congress, has also stepped up pressure on China over its incarceration of more than one million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims.
The United States last week imposed sanctions on Chinese officials over Xinjiang, leading to a reciprocal effort by Bejiing against senior American lawmakers.
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Affirming the RVN's sovereignty over the Paracel and Spratly Islands.
On April 18, 2020, the Global Times published an article on the city of Sansha on Hainan Island, establishing two districts of Xisha and Nansha: “Xisha District is set to administer the Xisha and Zhongsha islands and surrounding waters with government located in Yongxing Island; Nansha District has jurisdiction over the Nansha Islands and its waters with government located in the Yongshu Isles. ”
VNR Vietnam Review is completely against the establishment of administrative units by the People's Republic of China (PRC) on the Paracel and Spratly Islands under the sovereignty of the Republic of Vietnam.
We would like to recall that the sovereignty of the Republic of Vietnam on the Paracel and Spratly Islands was inexorable or usurping and this sovereignty existed before the People's Democratic Republic of China was born in 1949. when the Chinese communist army defeated the Nationalist Party of Chiang Kai-shek. The long history of sovereignty of the Republic of Vietnam on the two islands was declared before the international community in the White Book issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Vietnam in 1974.
It is possible that the PRC leadership did not know about the human values and sovereignty of the RVN in this White Paper along with hundreds of other documents such as maps, images, sovereignty markers, and the history of the two archipelagos Hoang Sa and Truong Sa are related to the Vietnamese people.
The two archipelagos of Hoang Sa and Truong Sa of the Republic of Vietnam have great human and international values. The Republic of Vietnam has a free, democratic regime and has a friendship-friendly polity and fulfills the aspirations of everyone in the international community. During the period of the Republic of Vietnam's regime, from 1954 to 1975, Southeast Asian neighbors were peaceful and friendship countries, and the Republic of Vietnam had a multitude of material, spiritual, and life-saving assistance from neighbors and non-communist Western nations. Today the RVN regime is not the entity, but the legacy of sovereignty remains and we believe that the PRC appropriated islands in the Paracel and Spratly Islands by killing and annexed them into Chinese territory is irrational and cannot be respected in civilized society.
United Nations law (UN Nations) disputes over maritime boundaries need to be resolved peacefully and need arbitration at the Law of the Sea Commission to help avoid war, but in fact the PRC did, on the contrary, when it attacked and seized the Paracel Islands of the Republic of Vietnam in 1974 and brutally slaughtered the Vietnamese communist naval soldiers on the Gac Ma Rock in the Spratly Islands in 1988. Those PRC 's acts were crimes evil in human history.
If the PRC doubts about the evidence of sovereignty of the RVN on the Paracel and Spratly Islands, the Vietnamese who inherit the RVN heritage will be ready for bilateral dialogue with the PRC country at the United Nations Forum.
Today the Paracel and Spratly Islands are right on the important maritime route that connects the most important waterways around the globe. Continuing the good heritage and traditions and the friendship with neighboring countries sharing the East Coast, the Republic of Vietnam requests the PRC to immediately stop building artificial islands, dismantling war tools, stop illegal exploration on the continental shelf of Vietnam and at the same time do not shoot or sink the boats of any fishermen without knowing their nationality.
The satellite map of the Paracel and Spratly Islands is an intermediate route from Africa, Asia Minor, the Middle East and Malaysia to Japan, the Western Pacific and the West Coast of the United States.
Source: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:128.6/centery:15.8/zoom:4
The RVN asserted sovereignty over the Paracel and Spratly Islands and declared it fully accepted that the navies of other nations could freely circulate anti-piracy patrols and maintain order and security on the East Sea, or free movement of goods and unlimited trade, on this multi-dimensional international waterway. Therefore, if a collision or confrontation occurs with means of damage between the PRC's navy and the other nations' navies, the South Vietnamese believe that it is the responsibility of the PRC to the world for its military confrontations. occurred on islands under the sovereignty of the Republic of Vietnam.
Vietnam Review
05/20 2020
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