Beware the Illusion of China-ASEAN South China Sea Breakthroughs

Aug 17, 2016 | Prashanth Parameswaran
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According to China Daily, the 13th senior officials’ meeting on the implementation of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea ended with Beijing and ASEAN nations agreeing to “several breakthroughs.” These included approving guidelines for a ASEAN-China hotline for use during maritime emergencies, a joint declaration applying the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea (CUES) to the South China Sea, and finishing the draft framework for a code of conduct (CoC) for the South China Sea by mid-2017.

To be sure, advances in confidence-building measures in the South China Sea ought not to be dismissed as they often are by skeptics. Claimant states and interested parties alike, including China, ASEAN and the United States, ought to use the months following the July 12 arbitral ruling as an opportunity to deescalate tensions. This is also an opening for ASEAN and China to make some headway on the South China Sea issue so they can build trust to boost other dimensions of their wide-ranging partnership, especially since 2016 marks the much-awaited 25th anniversary of the establishment of their dialogue partnership.

That said, we also need to be clear-eyed about the progress that is made and the challenges that remain to manage expectations and inform policy. In that vein, several caveats need to be added to these so-called breakthroughs that we have seen thus far.