China harasses Malaysian oil and gas vessels on a ‘daily’ basis
Chinese boats have been harassing civilian vessels in
Malaysian oil and gas fields in the South China Sea “on a daily basis” for the
past two years, according to the Washington-based Asia Maritime Transparency
Initiative.
The Chinese coastguard was aiming to “control” the Luconia
Shoals, where Malaysia’s state-owned Petronas company has several oil and gas
fields, and was harassing vessels involved in “any new exploration or drilling
operations”, said Greg Poling, director of the initiative at the Centre for
Strategic and International Studies.
The Luconia Shoals, which lie within Malaysia’s exclusive
economic zone, are home to the Kasawari gas field, which is being developed by
Petronas and is situated some 200km (124 miles) from the coast of Bintulu in
Sarawak.
Last week, Malaysian Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah
said he expected more Chinese vessels to enter the country’s waters “for as
long as” Petronas continued to develop the field, which was discovered in
November 2011 and is thought to contain 3 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of
recoverable gas resources. He also said Malaysia’s current relationship with
China was “very difficult to quantify but is much better now”, despite what
happened in the South China Sea.
Poling said, in an email response to questions from This
Week in Asia, that the Chinese boats would harass offshore supply vessels
servicing the rigs.
“They manoeuvre dangerously and intentionally create risks
of collision to dissuade civilians from accepting such contracts,” Poling said.
If the Malaysian vessels didn’t back down, China would
deploy one of its state-owned survey vessels to conduct illegal seabed surveys
in Malaysian waters and these vessels would usually be accompanied by “a large
contingent of maritime militia boats and a smaller number of Chinese coastguard
vessels”, Poling said.
Beijing’s competing claimants to territory in the South
China Sea have long accused it of using a paramilitary maritime militia,
consisting of hundreds of civilian fishing boats, to help enforce its claims.
Some countries, including the United States, believe these
irregular forces to be under the command of the People’s Liberation Army Navy,
but China insists they are merely commercial fishing vessels acting in their
own interests.
The richness of the Kasawari field – which Petronas CEO
Tengku Muhammad Taufik Tengku Aziz has said is big enough to ensure his company
remains one of the world’s top five exporters of liquefied natural gas –
demonstrates how high the stakes in the South China Sea have become.
Malaysia claims waters in the disputed South China Sea that
extend 200 nautical miles from its coast. This includes an extended continental
shelf claim it jointly submitted to the United Nations with Vietnam in 2009.
Malaysia also lays claim to 12 islands in the disputed
Spratlys archipelago, and occupies five.
China rejects these assertions and instead lays claim to
more than 85 per cent of the South China Sea. It marks the area it claims to
have historic rights over with a nine-dash line on maps.
China’s envoy in Kuala Lumpur has been summoned twice this
year by the Malaysian government in protest over Beijing’s activities in the
South China Sea. The first came after Malaysia scrambled jets to intercept
Chinese planes on an unannounced patrol that came close to violating the Southeast
Asian country’s airspace. China said the “reported activities” were part of
routine flight training that “do not target any country” and abided by
international law.
Indonesian drilling harassed
Poling said the Chinese coastguard had also recently begun
to harass Indonesian drilling operations in the oil and gas field at the “Tuna
Block” area of the Natuna Sea.
Indonesia and China have often clashed in the past over
fishing rights around the Natuna Islands, a region that borders the disputed
South China Sea, though Indonesia does not consider itself a claimant state in
the South China Sea disputes.
Poling said Chinese patrols in these waters were less
regular than in Malaysian-claimed territory as there were no symbolically
important reefs in the area.
However, this had changed in recent months and the Chinese
coastguard was beginning to “harass Indonesian drilling in the Tuna Block in
the same way it has harassed Malaysian and Vietnamese oil and gas operations
for years,” he said.
Poling said that as at the Luconia Shoals, China had
deployed a survey vessel in Indonesian waters to make life difficult for its
drilling operations.
“In Indonesian waters, the Chinese coastguard generally
deploys to protect large state-sanctioned fishing expeditions, as we saw in
late 2019 and early 2020,” said Poling, referring to when a fleet of Chinese
fishing vessels, backed by Chinese coastguard boats, entered the Natuna Sea and
sparked a major confrontation with Indonesia.
“But so far we have not seen the militia used against
Indonesia in the same way it has been against Malaysia and the other
claimants,” he said.
Poling said that over the past four years or so China had
become “increasingly bold” in harassing oil and gas operations and that its
actions had been enabled by the completion of Chinese bases in the Spratly
Islands, which acted as a launch pad for its naval, law enforcement and militia
boats.
He added that a nationalistic turn in China’s foreign policy
following the emergence of the coronavirus had “supercharged” the situation.
A report by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative last
month said China’s deployment of radar, combat aircraft and missile platforms
to its outposts in the South China Sea had greatly expanded its ability to
project power far from its own coast.
The report said China operated four large outposts with
10,000-foot runways in disputed areas of the South China Sea – at Woody Island,
Fiery Cross Reef, Mischief Reef, and Subi Reef.
China had deployed substantial military assets to these
islands, including HQ-9 anti-air and YJ-12B anti-ship missiles, sensing and
communications facilities, and hangars capable of housing military transport,
patrol, and combat aircraft, the report said.
Poling said that until now neither Malaysia nor Indonesia
had tried to “publicise Chinese bad behaviour in the way that Vietnam and the
Philippines do”, but this was beginning to change.
“Malaysia has become more vocal in the last two to three
years, though it still avoids talking about most cases of Chinese harassment
since there is little it can do to stop it,” Poling said.
However, he said that Indonesia had been “noticeably less
vocal in recent months than it was the last time there was large-scale Chinese
harassment in 2019-2020”.
A Chinese survey vessel, the Haiyang Dizhi 10, entered the
North Natuna Sea near the Tuna Block area on August 31, left in late September,
then returned in early October. Indonesia’s maritime security agency Bakamla
said on Monday the vessel was “no longer there”.
Indonesia’s Coordinating Minister of Maritime and Investment
Affairs Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan played down the presence of Chinese vessels in
the Natuna sea, saying “we respect freedom of navigation in Natuna Sea” during
a lecture at the Catholic University of America in Washington on October 18.
However, Bill Hayton, an associate fellow of the
Asia-Pacific programme at London-based Chatham House and author of The South
China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia, was derisive of Luhut’s comments.
“If Minister Luhut really thinks this is a case of ‘freedom
of navigation’ then he should take advice from someone better qualified in the
law of the sea,” Hayton said.
“If his government has not already sent a protest to Beijing
then it needs to do so urgently or it will risk creating a precedent and losing
its rights. Successive Indonesian governments have stuck their head in the sand
when it comes to China’s behaviour near the Natuna Islands,” Hayton said.
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