China’s Xi says wants South China Sea issue resolved peacefully

Lynn Kuok, a fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank, said that the combination of legal pressure and freedom of navigation operations could yet prod Beijing into conforming more to the United Nations convention, even if it does not change its official stance on its South China Sea claims.

Those concerns, Carter said, were discussed yesterday at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Defense Ministers’ Meeting – Plus in Malaysia’s capital city, Kuala Lumpur. China must refrain from constructing its artificial islands, and the USA must keep its demonstration of military power to a minimum to avert an escalation of tension.

Wang Yi’s comments to US Secretary of State John Kerry, reported by Chinese state television on Friday, come a week after an American guided-missile destroyer sailed close to one of Beijing’s man-made islands in the South China Sea.

Moscow’s airstrikes in Syria, support for separatists in eastern Ukraine and loose talk about using nuclear weapons is making the world a more risky place, Carter said. Carter adhered to this time-worn script. Japan is increasing its defence rollout here, so is India.

“The United States joins virtually everyone else in the region in being deeply concerned about the pace and scope of land reclamation in the South China Sea”, Carter continued, emphasizing China’s regional isolation on the issue of the South China Sea. “And I don’t expect that to occur because I think the United States will continue to play the role it has”, Carter told reporters.

And, in fact, that is really what we did in this case. As for Francis and his crew of 300 sailors, they have been unfazed by the extreme media protection of one of the crucial extremely anticipated United States naval patrols in years, though Francis stated his mom, having seen the information, did name to ask whether or not he was truly in China.

He harkened back to the aircraft carrier’s presidential namesake in stressing that the U.S. was in the region to stay, and that China should become “part of the security system of Asia and not to stand apart from it”. A few officials have stated that it was a freedom of navigation exercise – in which military vessels undertake activity that is legitimate on the high seas but not acceptable in territorial waters.

Writing on the website of The National Interest magazine, Bonnie Tyler, senior adviser for Asia at CSIS and Peter Dutton, director of the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College, offered an explanation for the mixed messages. “We intend to. The power of the TR is a reflection of that”, he added, alluding to the carrier’s nickname, “The Big Stick”.

The claim that the USA has promoted “stability” in the region is a total fiction.

The Nixon-Mao agreement was the starting point for the process of capitalist restoration by the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy that has led to China becoming the cheap-labour platform for global transnational corporations, and its elevation to the position of the second largest economy in the world.

However, this very economic growth has eroded the basis of the previous relative equilibrium. China has reclaimed approximately 2,000 acres of land in the Spratly island chain since past year and is now adding harbors, housing and airstrips.

“We enjoyed the extra publicity”, he said. This is the underlying driving force of the “pivot to Asia” or “rebalancing” formally launched by the Obama administration in 2011.

Xi, on the second leg of a Southeast Asian trip that has also taken in Vietnam, has sought to strike a more conciliatory tone on the South China sea while in the region. In that context, Defense Minister Han Min-koo rightfully made it clear in the defense ministers’ meeting at the Asean Plus Three meeting on Wednesday that the freedom of navigation must be guaranteed in the disputed waters.