Vietnam condemns PRC’s South China Sea closure
FORUM Staff
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has again stoked tensions in the South China Sea by declaring a large portion of the disputed waters closed to accommodate what it called a surprise military drill.
Critics argued that the drills from March 4-15, 2022, were the PRC’s way of capitalizing on the world’s attention being diverted to Ukraine — where Russia is waging a deadly invasion — to infringe upon Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ).
The drills were held between China’s southern province of Hainan and Vietnam, “testing Hanoi’s sovereignty in this area,” stated a March 6 report from the International Business Times. Part of the area the PRC unilaterally closed is within Vietnam’s 200-nautical-mile EEZ.
“China won’t let a crisis go wasted,” the article stated. “With the world preoccupied with the Russia-Ukraine war, Beijing is stepping up its campaign to dominate the South China Sea.”
Other media organizations reported that Beijing’s unstated mission was to clear the area to search for an anti-submarine warfare aircraft that crashed March 1. In a report to lawmakers, Taiwan’s National Security Bureau said the naval drills were being held where the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) Y-8 aircraft crashed.
“The coast guard and research ships were only moving slowly within small areas, suggesting they were on a searching mission. Dozens of other naval ships were also continuously patrolling this area,” Vietnam maritime analyst Duan Dang wrote in his South China Sea Brief newsletter.
The PLAAF also appears to have grounded its fleet of Y-8 aircraft, adding credibility to reports that said the exercise was a cover for a search mission, said Su Tzu-yun, an associate research fellow with Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, Newsweek reported.
“Standard aviation safety protocol calls for the inspection of all similar aircraft types following an accident,” he said. (Pictured: A GX-6, also known as a Y-8FQ Cub, takes off from an airport in China. Researchers say the Chinese military has been searching for a variant of this aircraft that crashed in the South China Sea in March 2022.)
The PRC and Vietnam are among six countries with overlapping maritime claims in the South China Sea. Although the PRC claims most of the sea, an international tribunal in 2016 determined those claims are legally invalid. Despite the ruling, the PRC has occupied and militarized artificial features in the EEZs of other claimants.
Vietnam was quick to criticize the PRC for closing waters near its shores in early March. Part of the area “belongs to Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone and continental shelf as determined under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea,” Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang said, according to VnExpress, an online newspaper in Vietnam.
“We ask China to respect Vietnam’s sovereignty and not take actions to complicate the situation, thereby contributing to maintaining peace, security and stability in the East Sea area,” she said, using the Vietnamese name for the South China Sea.
IMAGE CREDIT: REUTERS
