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6- Creating a real partnership
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discussing the issue at institutional level with top officials.
5- Economically affordable
Promoting Initiatives that uses the present means and programs, as well as
distributing burdens of any new solution among the actors involved.
6- Creating a real partnership.
This imply that outer states do not play the main role in maritime security
issues in the region, instead they will do better ceding the leadership while
providing support to regional programs as a partner.
In conclusion, ReCAAP is playing an important role in combating piracy in Asia.
However, it still needs some modifications as well as the participation of other actors
in the region (e.g. Indonesia, Malaysia, or Taiwan), in order to increase its
effectiveness and create space for new initiatives for cooperation, for instance our
proposal of integrated SLOCs protection in SCS.
4.3.3 South China Sea Code of Conduct
ASEAN and China’s talks concerning the development of a COC for SCS, it is
considered one of the CBMs to provide trust and credibility to the actors involved,
due to it can be used as a declaratory tool to express commitment in a specific issue,
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or to exert constraints on other countries over unilateral actions in disputes zones
(Jang, 2003). Thus, we consider that a COC will support not only our SLOCs
protection proposal, but also will create space for new cooperation initiatives on joint
resources extraction, or talks concerning the sovereignty issue.
Negotiations between China and ASEAN, has resulted in several non-binding
agreements to manage the disputes in SCS. In 1992 ASEAN agreed on the
Declaration of the South China Sea, and in 2002, ASEAN and China agreed on the
Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in The South China Sea (DOC) in order to find
peaceful solutions and improve cooperation in the region. At the 7th ASEAN China
summit in 2003, China joined the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia.
These two agreements showed an evolution of Chinese way to manage the dispute,
from a bilateral issue towards multilateralism. They also took actions to implement
the DOC, among which there are the ASEAN-China Senior Officials Meeting (SOM),
and the creation of a joint working group (JWG) to make a draft for the
implementation of the DOC. During the first ASEAN-China JWG in Manila 2005,
they developed a draft of the guidelines. However, there was no agreement in how to
discuss the issues, between ASEAN and China, or between ASEAN and the relevant
parties (Truong, 2011). It was not until July 2011, when the controversial point 2 was
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change to make reference to the parties involved, and that the activities and projects
related to the DOC have to be reported to the ASEAN-China Ministerial Meeting. At
the beginning of January 2012, ASEAN and Chinese senior officials met in Beijing to
establish four expert committees on: maritime scientific research, environmental
protection, search and rescue, and transnational crime. Despite no expert committee
on safety of navigation and communication has been created yet (Thayer, 2013), it
was an important advancement to improve their relationship through cooperation and
consultation.
There was also some controversial issues related to the Philippine’s draft on the Code
of Conduct in 2012, which caused Cambodia not to issue a joint statement in the
ASEAN Ministerial Meeting (AMM) due to disagreement on the wording of the SCS
issue. As a consequence, Indonesia’s Foreign Minister, Marty Natalegawa, had to use
shuttle diplomacy to negotiate with several ministers and agree in a six point
principles document for SCS. This document is focus on the creation of guidelines
and implementation of the DOC, its development into a COC, the respect of
international law/UNCLOS, self-retrain in the use of force, and Peaceful resolution of
the issue. China announced that it was willing to work in the implementation of the
DOC on the basis of consensus, which implies that he will not discuss with a weak
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ASEAN in which decisions will not be implemented due to the lack of common
agreement. In fact, it seems that when ASEAN and China had discussed and agreed
together on a binding COC, only in that moment, China will accept their joint
decisions. For instance, Indonesia drafted a “Zero Draft Regional Code of Conduct in
the South China Sea”, which incorporated the Convention on the International
Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGS), and was presented to
ASEAN members to reach a common position before discussing it with China
(Thayer, 2013). However, some scholars argue that the provisions are too vague, and
not including China in the talks will make it to be rejected due to inequalities (Storey,
2013). Thus, even when there is progress in the development of a COC for SCS, in
order to have significant advancements, it has to be done not first by ASEAN, but
through joint consultations between a strong ASEAN and China.
Scholars also suggest other CBMs that can be used to lead the DOC into a real COC,
and are related with the safety of navigation and the communication issue. These are
(Storey, 2013):