New land claims in India and the South China Sea spark anger in Asia

Angry and indignant reactions spread across the South China Sea area and India this week, after China released a new official map that renews its illegal claims over most of the sea and adds new claims along the Indian border. new claims along the Indian border. The Philippines has also flatly rejected Chinese claims.

China's latest hegemonic behavior comes in the form of what is being dubbed the " new standard map ," released by China's Ministry of Natural Resources on Aug. 28. The new map repeats the claims of the previous version 9 Chinese map rejected by the United Nations Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, also claiming new territories around Taiwan and north of India. This comes just days after President Xi Jinping declared at the last BRIC summit that "hegemonism is not in China's DNA".

The greatest furore has been unleashed in India, where China has unilaterally claimed two new areas bordering New Delhi and also Nepal, but India is not alone.” Most of the disputes seem to concern the fact that China claims Indian territory – Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin – as Chinese territory, but also claims some territory of Russia (the Bolshoy Ussuriysky river island), as well as the entirety of the South China Sea and Taiwan,” explains Malcolm Davis, Indo expert -Pacific at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra.

I believe the way the dashes were drawn near Taiwan may indicate that China also regards the Japanese islands in the Ryukyu as its territory.” China had previously claimed Indian Territory, the South China Sea and Taiwan, but the reaffirmation of Russian territory claims and the potential Japanese territory claim are new,” Davis said in an email. ”. I don't know how Russia will react, given that Moscow needs Beijing's support in the war in Ukraine."

As is often the case with sovereignty issues in the Indo-Pacific, different experts have offered different perspectives on what is actually going on. Asked whether the new map includes new claims, Ian Chong, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore, said the "claims are not new, although the timing is surprising".

“Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the Philippines and Vietnam have made public the use of water cannons by PRC vessels to blockade their vessels,” Chong continued. “Perhaps it has to do with the fact that Vietnam and India they sided with the 2016 arbitration court ruling on the lack of islands in the South China Sea, which means that areas occupied by Beijing cannot generate expansionary claims. But all of these are speculations. There is no official explanation yet. So why involve Russia?”.

local reactions

The new map has drawn strong reactions from India, Nepal, Vietnam, Malaysia and Taiwan. The new document was released a week before the G-20 summit in India, which Xi declined to attend, perhaps because of these claims.

India has filed "a strong protest through diplomatic channels with the Chinese side on China's 2023 so-called 'standard map' claiming Indian territory," Arindam Bagchi, spokesman for India's foreign affairs ministry, said on Wednesday. press release. "We reject these claims because they have no basis. These steps by the Chinese side only complicate the resolution of the border issue". China and India have clashed militarily over these borders since 1962, resulting in numerous deaths.

“Malaysia does not recognize China's 2023 standard map, which delineates portions of Malaysian waters near Sabah and Sarawak as belonging to China,” the foreign ministry said in an Aug. 30 statement. Foreign Affairs of the Philippines issued a statement saying it “rejected the 2023 version of the standard map of China…because of its inclusion of the nine-dash line (now the ten-dash line) which purportedly shows China's borders in the China Sea Southern… This latest attempt to legitimize China's alleged sovereignty and jurisdiction over the maritime features and zones of the Philippines has no basis in international law, especially the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).Map of the Chinese 2023 10-dash line

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a regular press briefing on Aug. 30 that "China's position on the South China Sea is consistent and clear. China's relevant authorities regularly issue standard maps every year." of various types, with the aim of making them available to all sectors of society and raising public awareness of the standardized use of maps. We hope that interested parties can consider this objectively and rationally”. The day before, Wang had responded to India's protest in a similar way, with a little more condescension: "We hope that interested parties can remain objective and calm, and avoid overinterpreting the issue."

Naturally, the UN court ruled that China's previous claims had no validity under international law and that China's claims to the allotted territories were legally and historically groundless.

Since then, China has destroyed some of the world's most pristine coral reefs to build naval and air bases in an attempt to consolidate its claims, fired water cannons and hanged the crew of small Philippine boats trying to resupply troops on a reef within its Exclusive Economic Zone, threatened the USS Chung-Hoon as she and a Canadian ship, HMCS Montreal, made a joint transit through the Taiwan Strait, and carried out a number of other belligerent maneuvers and sometimes dangerous around U.S. military ships and aircraft of other nations – all operating in international arenas.

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The article New land claims in India and the South China Sea spark anger in Asia comes from Economic Scenarios .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/nuove-rivendicazioni-territoriali-in-india-e-mar-cinese-meridionale-scatenano-la-rabbia-in-asia/ on Sun, 03 Sep 2023 08:00:12 +0000.