While Chinese
envoy chats up Hanoi’s leaders, more provocation looms
China's former Foreign Minister was in Hanoi on
June 18, the first high level talks since Beijing deployed the deepsea rig
Haiyang Shihua 981 (HY 981) in early May to explore for oil and gas in a
promising patch in Vietnam's exclusive economic zone.
Almost surely not a coincidence, news services
reported the same day a mariners' warning sourced to the Hainan branch of
China's Marine Security Agency to the effect that tugs are towing another
deepsea drilling rig south, parallel to Vietnam's central coast. The Nanhai Jiuhao
was acquired late last year by a subsidiary of the China National Offshore Oil
Company (CNOOC) from the Switzerland-based multinational deepsea drilling giant
Transocean Ltd. According to the industry website deepwater.com, the
semi-submersible rig can drill in waters up to 1500 meters' depth and penetrate
some 15,000 meters into the seabed.
The Chinese emissary, Yang Jiechi, is the same
official who famously lost his cool at an Asean meeting some years back and
reminded his counterparts that "China is a big country, and yours are
small countries, and that's a fact." Yang has now been recycled as a State
Councilor, and also co-chairs the annual meetings of the Steering Committee for
Sino-Vietnamese Cooperation. The Hanoi regime has been trying for weeks to
persuade Beijing to discuss the HY 981 affair. Beijing said it is willing, but
only if Hanoi acknowledges China's sovereignty over the waters where HY 981 and
its flotilla of escort boats have deployed. The long-scheduled bilateral
meeting offered a way around the impasse.
It did not begin auspiciously. At the end of the
day on June 18, there was no statement from the Vietnamese side, but at the
ritual photo op, the best Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister Pham Binh Minh could
muster was a cold-eyed stare. A Chinese spokesman said Yang in his meeting with
Minh and a follow-on with Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung told the two that
Vietnam "must cease interfering with China's [drilling] activities and
exaggerating related matters."
What the top officials said in private can only be
guessed. The meetings offered an opportunity for Yang to dissuade Dung and Minh
from much-discussed plans to lodge a complaint against China at the Law of the
Sea Tribunal, and (separately) for Vietnamese Communist Party Chief Nguyen Phu
Trong to impress on Yang that China's brazen aggression has severely undercut
the position of Beijing's remaining friends in Hanoi.
Meanwhile, the new drilling rig is moving south at
4 knots per hour, a pace that should bring it to the vicinity of the HY 981 in
about three days. That's the Nanhai Jiuhao's probable destination, but it
conceivably might just keep going, heading southeast across the South China Sea
for the Reed Bank.
The deep waters off Vietnam where HY 981 has been
drilling and where, closer inshore, Exxon Mobil has made some encouraging
finds, are above the so-called Phu Khanh formation. Phu Khanh is considered the
second most promising place in the South China Sea to look for new pools of oil
or gas. The most promising, hands down, is the Reed Bank, a table mount in
relatively shallow waters between the Philippines and the dozens of reefs and
islets that constitute the Spratly Islands. Manila has authorized a Philippine
company, Philex Petroleum, to begin test drilling in the Reed Bank in 2015.
That's just the sort of "provocation"
that Beijing might be in a hurry to forestall.
David Brown is a retired US diplomat with wide
experience in Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam
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