generalspeaking

Playing With Fire

China is big, awfully big, and it carries a big stick. It isn't at all reluctant to pull its considerable weight. And its neighbours are wary and considerably conscious of how fraught the future is with the kinds of tensions that build inexorably toward a war footing, given the tensions that exist at the present time.

With China, giant that it is, impressed with its own newfound sense of economic security as an emerging superpower, expressing its stolid determination of sole and complete ownership of the South China Sea.

Like ownership of the Arctic, made an imperative of aggressive stick-handling by national greed assuming the riches that are present in precious metals, oil and natural gas fields deep under water. Which has made Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark and Norway, all belligerent antagonists for their share of the frozen waters and what lies securely beneath them.

The South China Sea is assumed to be so rich in petroleum resources, oil and natural gas, that it has been likened to the Persian Gulf. And China claims its historic right to the entire area should be unchallenged to effectively satisfy its thirst for the energy resources that will continue to maintain its gigantic production facilities, ensuring it remains a global production giant.

Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan are unimpressed with China's claims of total ownership of the resources, since this is effectively what control of the South China Sea manifests. And the difference of opinion brings the United States into the picture on the back of its post-war assurances of East Asian security.

(Here is the United States whose large consumer base (along with that of Europe and indeed the world at large) now depends on cheap-labour Chinese production which has beggared the production capabilities of the U.S., while China holds the vast U.S. debt in its national banks.)
And the United States is committed to upholding the security of East Asia; indebtedness and debt from financial realities to political strategies.

Confrontation, for the time being, though serious, remain in the warning stages, with Chinese patrol boats harassing a Philippines survey ship, in contested waters; the Chinese navy severing seismic cables of a Vietnamese vessel, and both countries playing tit-for-tat in reverse, while calling on the U.S. to validate its mutual defence treaty in trust of which the U.S. and the Philippines are conducting a maritime security exercise.

Irrespective of the nationalist calls for legitimacy of ownership on all sides, China has gone one further, warning the world to expect oil-drilling rigs to be set up in areas of the South China Sea claimed by them and the Philippines and issuing due warnings to Washington that this is not their dispute.

"I believe some countries now are playing with fire. and I hope the U.S. won't be burned by this fire." Cui Tiankai, vice foreign minister, China.

Labels: China, Conflict, Energy, Environment, United States

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, July 02, 2011