US President Barack Obama said Washington is concerned China is using its “sheer size and muscle” to push around smaller nations in the South China Sea, drawing a swift rebuke from Beijing, which accused the US of being the bully.
China’s rapid reclamation around seven reefs in the Spratly archipelago (Nansha Islands, 南沙群島) in the South China Sea has alarmed other claimants, such as the Philippines and Vietnam, and drawn growing criticism from US government officials and the military.
While the new islands will not overturn US military superiority in the region, workers are building ports and fuel storage depots and possibly two airstrips that experts have said would allow Beijing to project power deep into the maritime heart of Southeast Asia.
“Where we get concerned with China is where it is not necessarily abiding by international norms and rules and is using its sheer size and muscle to force countries into subordinate positions,” Obama told a town-hall event in Jamaica on Thursday ahead of a Caribbean summit in Panama.
“We think this can be solved diplomatically, but just because the Philippines or Vietnam are not as large as China doesn’t mean that they can just be elbowed aside,” he said.
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying (華春瑩) said the US had no right to accuse anyone of pushing anyone else around.
“I think everyone can see very clearly who it is in the world who is using the greatest size and muscle,” she told a daily news briefing in Beijing yesterday.
The US needed to do more to show that it really wanted to play a constructive, responsible and positive role in the South China Sea, and should not ignore the efforts China and Southeast Asian nations have made to try and address the dispute, Hua added.
China claims most of the potentially energy-rich South China Sea, through which US$5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year. Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei also have overlapping claims.
China, which has asked Washington not to take sides in the row, says it is willing to discuss the issue with individual countries directly involved in the dispute.
However, it has refused to participate in an international arbitration case filed by the Philippines in The Hague over the contested waterway.
US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, who is visiting Seoul, yesterday also gently chided China for its approach to territorial disputes in the South China Sea, suggesting Beijing has been isolated by its strong-arm tactics.
Speaking at a news conference with his South Korean counterpart, Carter implicitly accused the Chinese of militarizing the issue.
“One of the consequences” of not dealing with territorial disputes “in a multilateral, diplomatic fashion is it’s hard to have friends and allies that way,” Carter said. “And the United States has lots of friends and allies and partners in this part of the world.”
“We don’t conduct ourselves coercively, we don’t militarize situations like that,” he said.
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