China's Great South China Sea Challenge: What Next and How to Respond

Malcolm Davis

Security, Asia

What will Beijing do next? 

China’s land reclamation in the South China Sea has generated concern across Asia about China’s challenge to U.S. strategic primacy in the Western Pacific. The U.S. has belatedly responded to this challenge with a single ‘Freedom of Navigation’ operation (FONOP) that saw the deployment of the USS Lassen within the 12nm limit of Subi Reef on 27 October. So what might happen next?

The U.S. has indicated further FONOPs will occur at roughly the rate of two every quarter, which hopefully will send a clear message that clarifies mixed signals emerging from the first deployment. Australia must choose whether it will join this effort by deploying its own vessels to reinforce a collective message that China’s claims to maritime rights under UNCLOS around artificial islands are not accepted by the region. Japan must also consider its response, given that Chinese assertion of control over the South China Sea—through which vital Japanese sea-lanes of communication run—would be an intolerable threat to Japan’s economic stability and national security.

When those events are taken together with the Philippine’s recent success in the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, which has declared it has jurisdiction and will hold hearings on the dispute, it’s clear that at a political and strategic level, China’s heavy handedness in building new islands is counter-productive.