By Ankit Panda
ASEAN leaders will meet this weekend and China will be at the top of the agenda.
Leaders from the ten member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will meet in in Napyidaw, Myanmar this weekend. The meeting is historic due to its venue: Myanmar is hosting an ASEAN summit for the first time. However, the meeting unfortunately coincides with two major maritime disputes between two ASEAN states and China. Vietnam’s tryst with China over an oil rig near the disputed Paracel Islands and the Philippines detention of a Chinese fishing boat in the disputed waters of the Second Thomas Shoal will ensure that managing maritime disputes with China will top the agenda as the leaders meet in Napyidaw.
The timing of the summit could encourage both the Philippines and Vietnam, and the remaining ASEAN countries, to revisit the regional organization’s bid to develop effective multilateral means to manage the various disputes in the South China Sea. It is highly unlikely that the leaders would convene in Napyidaw and issue any sort of joint condemnation of Chinese behavior (not in the least owing to the host country’s complicated relationship with China). Instead, ASEAN leaders are likely to do what they have done in the past: emphasize international law, encourage restraint, and call for diplomacy.
More specifically, the timing of the summit with these two acute flare-ups in the South China Sea should be a rude reminder that ASEAN should double-down on its efforts to set in stone a binding code of conduct for the South China Sea. Without any such concerted effort, China is unlikely to reconsider its behavior in the South China Sea. As Flashpoints blogger Carl Thayer told the South China Morning Post, ”Asean protestations will not move China one inch.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat