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Alan W. Dowd is a Senior Fellow with the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes on the full range of topics relating to national defense, foreign policy and international security. Dowd’s commentaries and essays have appeared in Policy Review, Parameters, Military Officer, The American Legion Magazine, The Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, The Claremont Review of Books, World Politics Review, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Jerusalem Post, The Financial Times Deutschland, The Washington Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Examiner, The Detroit News, The Sacramento Bee, The Vancouver Sun, The National Post, The Landing Zone, Current, The World & I, The American Enterprise, Fraser Forum, American Outlook, The American and the online editions of Weekly Standard, National Review and American Interest. Beyond his work in opinion journalism, Dowd has served as an adjunct professor and university lecturer; congressional aide; and administrator, researcher and writer at leading think tanks, including the Hudson Institute, Sagamore Institute and Fraser Institute. An award-winning writer, Dowd has been interviewed by Fox News Channel, Cox News Service, The Washington Times, The National Post, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and numerous radio programs across North America. In addition, his work has been quoted by and/or reprinted in The Guardian, CBS News, BBC News and the Council on Foreign Relations. Dowd holds degrees from Butler University and Indiana University. Follow him at twitter.com/alanwdowd.

ASCF News

Scott Tilley is a Senior Fellow at the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes the “Technical Power” column, focusing on the societal and national security implications of advanced technology in cybersecurity, space, and foreign relations.

He is an emeritus professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. Previously, he was with the University of California, Riverside, Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, and IBM. His research and teaching were in the areas of computer science, software & systems engineering, educational technology, the design of communication, and business information systems.

He is president and founder of the Center for Technology & Society, president and co-founder of Big Data Florida, past president of INCOSE Space Coast, and a Space Coast Writers’ Guild Fellow.

He has authored over 150 academic papers and has published 28 books (technical and non-technical), most recently Systems Analysis & Design (Cengage, 2020), SPACE (Anthology Alliance, 2019), and Technical Justice (CTS Press, 2019). He wrote the “Technology Today” column for FLORIDA TODAY from 2010 to 2018.

He is a popular public speaker, having delivered numerous keynote presentations and “Tech Talks” for a general audience. Recent examples include the role of big data in the space program, a four-part series on machine learning, and a four-part series on fake news.

He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Victoria (1995).

Contact him at stilley@cts.today.

5 Years After South China Sea Ruling, Rivals Quietly Accepting China’s Refusal to Comply

Sunday, August 1, 2021

Categories: ASCF News National Preparedness

Comments: 0

Source: https://www.voanews.com/east-asia-pacific/5-years-after-south-china-sea-ruling-rivals-quietly-accepting-chinas-refusal

Photo: VOA NEWS

TAIPEI - Five years after a landmark world court ruling against China’s claims to a disputed sea, smaller Asian countries that contest Chinese maritime sovereignty have learned to live with Beijing's adamant rejection of the verdict, experts in the region say.

China uses a “nine-dash line,” citing maritime records from dynastic times, to claim about 90% of the 3.5 million-square-kilometer South China Sea that other governments value for fisheries and undersea fossil fuel reserves. The nine dashes cut into some nations’ exclusive economic zones.

The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration issued a decision July 12, 2016, rejecting China’s claims as lacking a basis in international law. China dismissed the ruling then, and it did the same again in July this year.

Five other Asian governments that dispute China’s wide-ranging nine-dash line lack the military force or economic clout to require that China’s compliance with the arbitral ruling, while the court itself lacks police powers. At the same time, the rival states accept development aid, investment and trade from China, which has Asia’s biggest economy, along with the strongest armed forces.

China offered money to some maritime rivals after the arbitral verdict to keep the sovereignty issue at bay, analysts said at the time.

Neither the arbitral ruling nor anyone’s reaction to it will change China’s stance on its nine-dash line, so countries are raising the issue cautiously to stay on Beijing’s good side, said Shahriman Lockman, senior foreign policy and security studies analyst with the Institute of Strategic and International Studies in Malaysia.

“I think it’s a very calculated thing that they have to do,” Lockman said. “You say some things that are not pleasant to Chinese ears, but at the same time don’t push it too hard.”

To not raise the ruling at all would imply support for Beijing's claims, scholars have told VOA in the past.

China continues to upset rival maritime claimants by landfilling islets in the contested sea, between Hong Kong and Borneo, for military use. It periodically sends vessels into the exclusive economic zones of the other countries. The Philippines filed the arbitration case in 2013 after China pressured Filipino vessels a year earlier to leave a shoal in the contested sea after a long standoff.

Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam call all or parts of the same waterway their own. Claimant governments look to the sea for its fisheries, undersea fossil fuel reserves and marine shipping lanes. Malaysia, for one, quietly supports the 2016 verdict but has been “careful not to annoy China,” Lockman said.

China’s official Xinhua News Agency called the world court ruling illegal, null and void, citing a spokesperson in the Chinese Embassy in London on July 27 to rebut comments from the British defense secretary. The arbitration five years ago violated the “principle of state consent" and the court issued an award “in disregard of law,” the news agency said.

Foreign affairs officials in Vietnam, the Philippines and the United States, among other countries, made statements this month in support of the arbitral ruling and international law. A Philippine activist group said on its website that “militant” fishing operators had stormed the Chinese consulate in Metro Manila to mark the ruling’s anniversary.

The Philippine government statement is a repetition of the arbitration court’s ruling five years ago without moving the needle forward, according to Jay Batongbacal, international maritime affairs professor at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte spent his first two years in office, from 2016, befriending China in return for infrastructure development aid, the scholar noted.

Duterte’s Cabinet has openly criticized China since March of this year over 220 Chinese fishing vessels that had moored at a disputed feature in the Spratly Islands.

“This year it’s a very different tone, as well, but they’re still trying to balance a friendly tone because of the pandemic and their need to get vaccines from China,” Batongbacal said. The Philippines agreed in December to take China’s Sinovac Biotech vaccines for COVID-19.

Undersea oil drillers such as Malaysia and Vietnam may still cite the arbitral ruling to defend any challenges to exploration in their 370-kilometer-wide maritime exclusive economic zones overlapped by the nine-dash line, Lockman said.

China’s rejection of the court ruling, followed by acquiescence by its neighbors, ultimately widens a schism between Beijing’s own legal boundaries and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), said Alexander Vuving, professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Hawaii. The court used the convention as a basis for its 2016 ruling.

“The ruling and China’s rejection of the ruling signifies a struggle for international order,” Vuving said. “The struggle for international order is actually hiding in plain sight. We have the clash between UNCLOS and the Chinese nine-dash line.”

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