China makes a splash with coastguard rules

The article below this comment originally appeared at Asia Times Online on December 8, 2012.  It can be reposted if ATOl is credited and a link provided.

Reuters for some reason continued to beat the Hainan coast guard regulations dead horse with an analysis posted on December 9 that begins: 

Imagine if the U.S. state of Hawaii passed a law allowing harbor police to board and seize foreign boats operating up to 1,000 km (600 miles) from Honolulu.

That, in effect, is what happened in China about a week ago. 

It’s not what happened in China a week ago, either actually or "in effect", as I think can be concluded by reading my ATOl piece.  Even if ATOl is not on Reuters’ radar, Dr. Fravel of MIT (and his commentary at The Diplomat, which is quoted and footnoted below) should be.  It’s not even what the article says, for that matter.

Actually, the Reuters piece looks like a factless rehash in the genre of Western journalists unable to extract useful information from stonewalling Chinese bureaucrats retaliate with inflammatory lede.

And it is a dismal fail as a piece of snark.   The jurisdiction of the state of Hawaii extends 1380 miles from Honolulu to the outermost Northwestern Hawaiian Island, the Kure Atoll. 

For the mathematically challenged Reuters scribe, that’s more than twice as far as 600 miles that supposedly symbolizes the irresponsible overreach of the Hainan provincial government.

Let's make it easier.  Divide 1380 by 0.6 and you get 2300 km.  Compare to 1000 km.  Exactly 2.3 times further.

Uggh.

The only noteworthy element of this dismal entry in the usually sterling Reuters canon is that it took seven people to write it:

John Ruwitch, with “[a]dditional reporting by Ben Blanchard and Michael Martina in Beijing, Manny Mogato in Manila and Ho Binh Minh in Hanoi; Editing by Bill Powell and Nick Macfie.”

Too many cooks, I guess.

CH, Dec. 10, 2012

China makes a splash with coastguard rules
By Peter Lee

New regulations for the Hainan Province Coast Guard - summarized in People's Republic of China (PRC) news agency reports on November 28 but as yet not published in full - generated a spasm of anxiety through the region and around the world.

Part of the anxiety was due to alarmist reporting by some otherwise prestigious outlets - more on that later - but the PRC government deserves the lion’s share of the blame for its sudden, incomplete, and ambiguous announcement.

If the PRC is going to succeed in its objective of ordering affairs in the South China Seas to its liking through bilateral negotiations with a number of rightfully resentful and suspicious states - chiefly Vietnam and the Philippines - it will have to communicate its tactical moves as escalations and concessions carefully calibrated to the demands of each local hot spot.

To play the rogue dragon blundering through the southern oceans simply reinforces the conviction of China’s neighbors that better behavior and, perhaps, better results can be obtained by the solution that the PRC abhors: the aggrieved nations clubbing together through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and with the support of the United States pursuing negotiations in a multilateral forum.

Announcing the new Hainan regulations through fragmentary reports invited China’s South China Sea adversaries/interlocutors to spin the news to suit their priorities and preoccupations.

Judging from the agency reports, the meat of the Hainan regulations was this:

Police in Hainan will be authorized to board and search ships that illegally enter the province's waters in 2013, the latest Chinese effort to protect the South China Sea.

Under a set of regulation revisions the Hainan People's Congress approved on Tuesday, provincial border police are authorized to board or seize foreign ships that illegally enter the province's waters and order them to change course or stop sailing.

The full texts of the regulations, which take effect on Jan 1, will soon be released to the public, said Huang Shunxiang, director of the congress's press office.

Activities such as entering the island province's waters without permission, damaging coastal defense facilities, and engaging in publicity that threatens national security are illegal.

If foreign ships or crew members violate regulations, Hainan police have the right to take over the ships or their communications systems, under the revised regulations. [1]

The next day, a Reuters report from Jakarta interviewed Surin Pitsawan, secretary-general of ASEAN, and came up with: ASEAN chief voices alarm at China plan to board ships in disputed waters. [2]

The Reuters article occasioned a concerned post by James Fallows at the Atlantic magazine's website: "The Next Global Hot Spot to Worry About". [3] Agence France-Presse's lede eschewed nuance and accuracy to push the "PRC restricting freedom of navigation" hot button:

China has granted its border patrol police the right to board and turn away foreign ships entering disputed waters in the South China Sea... [4]

Then it was the turn of the New York Times on December 1 to deliver an anxiety upgrade: "Alarm as China Issues Rules for Disputed Area". [5] Manila Times added a serving of gasoline to the fire: "Chinese Police to Seize Foreign Ships in Spratlys". [6] The Indian Express evoked the Hainan regulations in its coverage: "Ready to Protect Indian Interests in South China Sea: Navy Chief". [7]

The reliably unreliable Foreign Policy magazine website (which recently elevated artist-provocateur-Twittermaster Ai Weiwei to its list of 100 top world thinkers while ignoring the determinedly thoughtful, imprisoned, and Twitter-deprived Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo) outsourced its Hainan Coast Guard coverage to an "It's the end of the world!" commentary titled "Will China Go to War in 2013?" from the conservative American Enterprise Institute. It proposed the foreign policy prescription:

Washington needs to make clear in the strongest possible terms that freedom of navigation won't be interfered with under any circumstances, and that the US Navy will forcibly prevent any ship from being boarded or turned around by Chinese vessels. [8]

Thankfully, the Obama administration did nothing of the sort. As reported by the New York Times, it simply stated:

"All concerned parties should avoid provocative unilateral actions that raise tensions and undermine the prospects for a diplomatic or other peaceful resolution."

This was probably in response to a careful and informed reading of the news reports concerning the new coastguard regulations, coupled with the understanding that the Chinese coastguard's area of responsibility is within the PRC's 12-mile (19.3 kilometer) coastal waters immediately contiguous to the various pesky islands (the wide open spaces of the South China Sea within the PRC's notorious nine-dash line fall under the purview of the Maritime Surveillance Force).

The target of the regulations is not vessels exercising freedom of navigation to transit China's claimed exclusive economic zone, so the World War III hysterics of the American Enterprise Institute were apparently misplaced.

M Taylor Fravel, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, contributed an analysis to The Diplomat which concluded:

[T]he actions outlined above are all concerned with Chinese territory or territorial waters - not the much larger maritime areas that press accounts have suggested. This is, moreover, consistent with the duties of the China's public security border defense units that are the subject of the regulations. [9]