By Luke Hunt
A meeting with ASEAN has made little progress on resolving maritime disputes in the South China Sea.
It passed with barely a word. A two-day meet in Bali this week was supposed to improve relations between China and the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). It was touted widely in the Chinese-friendly press but in the end not even the sycophantic scribes of Beijing had much to say.
Senior officials were meeting on the Indonesian island as part of a joint working group to thrash out a common approach to resolving maritime disputes in the South China Sea – known as the East Sea in Vietnam and the West Philippine Sea in Manila.
But Beijing’s stance ahead of the meeting probably did not help the 11th ASEAN/China meet, which was meant to make some inroads on the much-vaunted Code of Conduct (CoC), first raised in 2002, and the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties (DoC) in the South China Sea.
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