Month: March 2019

A planned expansion of the biggest city in the once all but uninhabitable South China Sea will strengthen China’s control over the waterway, despite rival claims by five governments.

The city of Sansha, anchored by a tiny tropical islet south of the Chinese mainland, will “obtain new breakthroughs” in infrastructure, environmental protection, people’s livelihoods and integration of the military, municipal Communist Party Secretary Zhang Jun said March 22 on the city’s website.

A population today of about 1,500 makes Sansha the largest city in the South China Sea and helps China control the whole Paracel archipelago. Taiwan and Vietnam also claim the Paracels. The Chinese government spars over sovereignty in parts of the South China Sea’s Spratly Islands with Taiwan, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines.

Expansion of Sansha would bolster China’s military and research advantages in the disputed 3.5 million-square-kilometer sea, in turn making its sovereignty claim more convincing, said Oh Ei Sun, senior fellow at the Singapore Institute of International Affairs.

“To strengthen your case under international law that you exercise sovereignty over a stretch of land or sea, you would have to show that you have administration, you would have to show that you have people actually living there and then they are making a livelihood, for example,” Oh said.

Growing city

Last year was a “milestone” period for Sansha’s expansion, the party secretary said on the city website. He did not announce specific plans for 2019.

Today the city centered on Woody Island covers 10 square kilometers, enough for a hospital, a bank branch and stores. The most developed of any settlement in the sea, Sansha has the “role as both a military and civilian basing and logistics hub,” said Gregory Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative under the Washington-based research organization Center for Strategic and International Studies.

A bigger city will let China expand ocean research at nearby islands, reinforce military installations and develop tourism, analysts believe.

A cruise ship named the Princess Coconut is planned to make two-day journeys, the booking service Chinatravelguide.com says.

Woody Island is already pivotal to Chinese military power in the resource-rich sea, CSIS says. The island now supports an air base, early-warning radar facilities and a surface-to-air missile system, the initiative says. The other claimant countries lack China’s military strength.

Bolstering claims

Chinese officials cite historic documents to back their claim of about 90 percent of the sea, which stretches from Hong Kong to the island of Borneo. China and the other five governments that claim sovereignty value the sea for its fisheries, shipping lanes and energy reserves under the seabed.

Growth of the city will give China a “track record” of administration over the islands, said Stephen Nagy, senior associate politics and international studies professor at International Christian University in Tokyo.

The Permanent Court of International Justice considers a continual display of authority as an “effective administrative exercise” in the South China Sea, according to a Cambridge International Law Journal analysis in 2015.

“What we’re seeing is China trying to build a case that fits in within the context of international law and erodes the claims of other claimants in the region,” Nagy said. “It has the unique capacity based on its ability to build infrastructure in ways that Vietnam and [the] Philippines and other countries in the region can’t do.”

China lost a world arbitration court ruling to the Philippines over the disputed sea in 2016 because the court disagreed with the legal basis for its maritime claims.

Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines send civilians to the Spratly chain. Other countries’ civilian activity lacks the scale of China’s, Shinji Yamaguchi, senior research fellow at the Tokyo-based National Institute for Defense Studies, wrote in a 2017 research paper.

“Although China is not alone in using non-military measures to enhance its claims, its efforts are greater than its neighbors’ in both scale and impact,” Yamaguchi wrote.

Offshore reactions

Other countries will probably say little, though Vietnam might “make noise,” the Singapore Institute’s Oh said.

Vietnam might just repeat verbal assertions of its claims to the South China Sea, said Trung Nguyen, international relations dean at Ho Chi Minh University of Social Sciences and Humanities. If it feels increasingly pushed out, he said, the government might turn to foreign powers including Western European countries for help, he said.

“They are waiting for goodwill behavior from China,” Nguyen said. “I think that if China keeps pushing forward with their territorial expansions in the South China Sea, Vietnamese leaders, especially those who are China-friendly, will realize they’ve got to find another way to counter against China.”

Since the 2016 arbitration court ruling, China has kept peaceful ties with most other maritime claimants by offering them economic support.
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American and Chinese trade negotiators made progress during “candid and constructive discussions” in Beijing Friday, said the White House, and will continue talks in Washington next week.

The two sides are working to strike a deal to lift eight-month-old tariffs affecting $250 billion of Chinese imports to the U.S., and about $110 billion of American exports to China.

The latest round of talks comes amid a report by the Bureau of Economic Analysis that the U.S. trade deficit with China again rose in 2018.

“The 2018 goods and services trade deficit with China alone was $379 billion. That’s $70 billion, or 23 percent, higher than in 2016. It’s more than 3 times the size of the 2018 deficit with the entire European Union. China by itself contributed 61 percent of the total US deficit both in 2016 and last year,” according to Derek Scissors, Resident Scholar of American Enterprise Institute.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who is in Beijing, posted on Twitter that the talks will continue next week.

The United States is demanding deep changes to Chinese industrial policy, including an end to large-scale state intervention in markets, subsidies for various industries and policies that force foreign companies to transfer technology to their Chinese partners.

“That’s just wrong; we’ve got to fix it,” said U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who ran a small business in Kansas before launching his career in the U.S. government.

Speaking from his personal experience, Pompeo questioned the reciprocity in China’s market access.

“Had I wanted a Chinese company to be my partner for my U.S.-based company in Kansas, they could have,” said Pompeo Thursday evening at an event in Washington.

“Had I wanted to be a partner in a business there, it would have been impossible, and if they would have permitted it, they would have demanded to steal the intellectual property that my company had invested heavily in to do that,” he added.

U.S. President Donald Trump said last week he remains confident the United States can strike a deal with China, but added, “if this isn’t a great deal, I won’t make a deal.”

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow says the talks are not time-dependent and could last weeks or even months. 
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China has launched a month-long nationwide probe into hazardous chemicals, mines, transportation, and fire safety one week after a chemical plant explosion in eastern Jiangsu province killed 78 people.

Observers say that will put the world’s largest chemical industry under tighter scrutiny and regulation of the management of hazardous chemicals to prevent similar man-made disasters from happening again.

Some argue the sector’s malpractice and corruption is so deeply-rooted, however, that any quick-fix measures are unlikely to change the “blood-stained” growth pattern of the industry.

Ongoing probe

Authorities continue investigating the cause of last Friday’s blast in Chenjiagan Industrial Park in Xiangshui county, which injured another 600 people.

State media reported that a manufacturing facility belonging to Tianjiayi Chemical Co that contained benzene, a highly flammable chemical, has been linked to the blast.

Tianjiayi Chemical is a pesticide maker and producer of more than 30 chemical compounds. In February, the State Administration of Work Safety found 13 types of safety risks at the factory, including the mishandling of toxic benzene tanks.

According to local environmental protection bureaus, the producer has rolled up more than $262,000 in fines since 2016 for breaches of environmental regulations.

“The explosion in Xiangshui has uncovered much negligence in law enforcement. For example, the staff’s [lack of] qualifications [in managing hazardous chemicals],” said Cao Mingde, professor of law, environment legislation at the China University of Political Science and Law.

“Also,” he added, “two top executives of Tianjiayi Chemical who have been convicted of violations of environment pollution and illegal management of hazardous chemicals, should have been banned from undertaking similar business ventures” for a minimum period of two years.

Lessons not learned

Mingde said a sweeping overhaul of China’s chemical sector is much needed, with an urgency to facilitate legislation governing the management of hazardous chemicals and tighten regulations to ensure strict enforcement.

Similar calls, though, were heard in the wake of the 2015 blast in Tianjin that took 173 lives.

But few lessons appear to have been learned as statistics show that 620 chemical accidents have occurred over the past three years, claiming a total of 728 lives.

“There is an urgent need to enact the Dangerous Chemical Safety Law and bring systemic change to chemical management,” said Greenpeace East Asia toxics campaigner Deng Tingting in an email to VOA.

She noted that a national law, which was proposed after the Tianjin explosion, is still being drafted. The law has been slowed because of government restructuring and resistance from industries.

After the Tianjin blast, the investigative body proposed using market mechanisms to encourage better management, increasing transparency, and improving the legal system. But she said  few of those suggestions have been implemented.

Illicit industries

Citing the matter’s sensitivity, a representative at Jiangsu Chemical Industry Association and a chemistry engineering professor, contacted by VOA, refused to comment.

An industry insider, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, blamed illicit businesses, saying the government can’t possibly monitor the country’s 26,000-strong chemical producers 24/7 like a babysitter.

He also argued that the minimum distance between a chemical plant and a residential area, currently at 500 meters by law, should be flexible in accordance with the risk level a chemical plant poses.

Both Cao and Deng urged increasing  the minimum distance as it seems insufficient to prevent risks after several schools and kindergartens, located two kilometers away from the Jiangsu blast site, were found to have been affected. Estimates show that one-third of the country’s chemical producers are set up in densely-populated areas.

Blood-stained industry

Wu Lihong, a long-time environmental activist in Jiangsu, is pessimistic about pledges to overhaul the sector. He claimed local officials not only cut corners, but also take bribes and collude with businesses to maximize the province’s or their own personal gains.

The province has the highest number of chemical producers with approximately 4,500.

“Over the past decade, Jiangsu has made one of the largest financial contributions to the central government,” said Wu. “It serves as a cash cow for the central government. So, businesses go to authorities, who will cut corners for them by lowering environmental standards or making their trouble go away, even if an explosion is involved.”

Making things worse, the sector’s financially-disadvantaged workers often side with their business owners in fending off environmentalists or reporters, who try to bring their malpractice or pollution to light.

“Workers at chemical plants [are fully aware that] their own health is at risk, but they are given a salary level, which is 35 to 50 percent higher than that of their peers in the shoemaking and metal hardware industries,” Wu said. “So, many take up the chores, putting incomes before their health. People in the poor county of Xiangshui [are short-sighted and] would prefer to be poisoned to death than starved to death,”

Any whistleblowers there will be violently suppressed or even imprisoned, he said.

This is something he knows from personal experience; Wu previously served a three-year jail term when a local court enacted retribution for his 10-year crusade against pollution in the Jiangsu’s Lake Tai.
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Influential figures in Washington are calling for the establishment of a bilateral free-trade agreement with Taiwan, even as U.S. and Chinese officials move toward a resolution of their long-running trade dispute. 

“We have a lot of issues with Beijing, and a lot of opportunities with Taiwan,” said Edwin J. Feulner in an interview with VOA. Feulner is the founder and former president of the Heritage Foundation, an influential think tank in Washington known for its conservative views and ties with the Republican Party. 

Feulner thinks trade negotiations between Washington and Beijing will most likely conclude within 60 days, at which point a full-force push for a bilateral trade agreement with Taiwan could begin. Those talks would be “more or less independent of what’s going on with bilateral negotiations with Beijing,” he said. 

WATCH: Feulner: Taiwan Not Seen by Administration as ‘Bargaining Chip’

Feulner predicted “huge bipartisan support on Capitol Hill” for such an agreement. “Both Republican and Democrat, both House and Senate members, are overwhelmingly positive that a free China can exist, and can be there in the world community today,” he said.  

WATCH: Feulner: ‘We Intend to Strengthen Our Friends’ 

However, any such deal could be expected to anger authorities in Beijing, who see Taiwan as a renegade Chinese province and adamantly oppose any initiatives that treat the island as an independent country.   

The international community has seen how Beijing tries to make Taiwan pay for any inroads it makes toward international recognition, said Scott W. Harold, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, a global policy research group. But Beijing’s problem, he said, “is that they’ve dialed the pain up so high, so often, that it’s hard to see what more they can do.”  

On Wednesday, Feulner invited Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen to participate by Skype in a conference at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. Tsai, on a stopover in Hawaii after visiting three Indo-Pacific nations that still maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan, told the audience her government was enthusiastic about the prospect of bilateral trade talks with the U.S. 

“If we can have a breakthrough in trade with the U.S., this will be very helpful in terms of encouraging many other trading partners to do the same,” she said, adding that a trade deal with the United States would reduce Taipei’s reliance on China “as they increase their political influence in Taiwan, primarily using economic actors.” 

Tsai expressed hope that talks with Washington will include discussion about Taiwan’s role in the global high-tech supply chain “amid concerns of technology theft and control over 5G networks” by Beijing. 

Two prominent members of the U.S. Congress joined Feulner in welcoming Tsai to the U.S. and expressed their support for a bilateral free-trade agreement. Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado, a Republican and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, called the pursuit of a bilateral free-trade agreement with Taiwan “imperative.” 

Common values

Rep. Ted Yoho of Florida, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the most senior Republican on its subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific and Nonproliferation, told Tsai and the audience that “trade is important between our nations, but more important than that is our common belief in the values we hold, the democracies that we have together. That in itself is the thing that really binds us together.” 

Steve Yates, former U.S. government official and longtime observer of U.S.-Taiwan relations, told VOA that President Donald Trump has “unhesitatingly signed” a series of resolutions and bills in support of closer ties between Washington and Taipei. He said that signaled that it might be time “for the administration and Congress to be able to cross that bridge and get some results.” 
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