The Philippines government may believe it is in keeping with its role as gracious host to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Manila next week that it agreed with China to avoid discussing their South China Sea dispute in the course of the 21-nation gathering. A Philippine foreign affairs department spokesman said everything is being done to ensure the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping will be safe, comfortable and productive.
It is easy to accept the gracious host part. But for the spokesman to say APEC is not the proper venue to discuss the dispute stretches reality rather thinly, especially when he argues APEC as an economic forum is not the right venue to discuss political security issues. Political security always has an economic component to it. In fact, the South China Sea dispute is more economic than China, the Philippines and all countries with an interest in it would care to admit.
China is under no significant or credible political or security threat now or in the immediately foreseeable future. There is no cause or reason for it to start building artificial islands in the South China Sea for use as future military garrisons than to secure its exclusive use for economic purposes. With a population of 1.3 billion and growing -- it has just lifted its one-child policy -- China needs the mineral riches and food resources that the area offers all to itself.
But there is a huge problem in that desire of China. Its territorial claims are founded on nothing stronger than its growing economic and military might. China has absolutely no legal basis to claim the whole area, which is claimed in part by several other countries other than the Philippines. Besides, there is that no small matter about more than a trillion dollars worth of global trade shipped through the South China Sea each year.
And the Philippine government agrees with China that APEC as an economic forum is not the proper venue to discuss the South China Sea issue? If that is so then the Philippines has just sold off more marbles than it can afford to lose. Maybe it has grown heady from its initial victory when an international court found merit to hear the case it filed against China, a case that even if resolved in its favor will not be binding on China.
What the Philippines can win in an international court will largely be moral. It cannot be enforced against a behemoth like China that has already decided to grab the South China Sea by hook or by crook. Under such circumstances, the best venue to discuss the South China Sea should therefore be a forum like APEC where many of the members stand to be affected economically by China's designs in the area.
Political security issues that stem from conflicting territorial claims in the South China Sea can be set aside for now. The Philippines, which has been fed that baloney by China, can spit it out contemptuously. After all, none of these claims are ever likely to prosper any time soon in face of the great disparity in economic and military strength between China and any of the other claimants like Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Brunei and of course the Philippines.
The real crux of the South China Sea dispute is economic in nature. And that should make the South China Sea issue very relevant to APEC. Many large economies in APEC such as the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and Australia all have huge stakes in a South China Sea that is open to navigation and is not claimed to be owned by any one country.
Of course the Philippines, owing to its limp policy of equating success with an incident-free, no-feathers-ruffled gathering, is not likely to initiate any discussion of the issue during APEC. But it would be a big failure of APEC as an economic forum to completely ignore and gloss over the South China Sea issue when so much of the global economy is at stake in it.