South China Sea: Next point of contention?

It is not without reason that the United States (US) is shifting its strategic outlook towards the Pacific. The South China Sea is a vast area of approximately 1.4million square miles and home to vast untapped natural resources. Heightened tensions with China (PRC) and Asean nations and India over supremacy on the high seas beg the question; will the next conflict be fought over water, or more importantly, what lies beneath?
PRC has laid claim to vast areas from the Malacca Straits to the Strait of Taiwan, areas that are also claimed by neighbouring South East Asian nations like Vietnam and the Philippines, that has, in effect, sparked an arms race in the region. With Vietnam ordering 6 modern diesel-electric submarines and a number of major surface combatants from Russia, and India embarking on ambitious aircraft carrier and nuclear-powered submarine building programmes, the race is effectively on to build "blue water" naval capabilities. Yet, no nation in Asia can match China's shipbuilding capacity or capability in the near or mid-term.
As stated in a recent article in The Diplomat: "China's military shipyards now are surpassing Western European, Japanese, and Korean military shipbuilders in terms of both the types and numbers of ships they can build. If Beijing prioritises progress, China's military shipbuilding technical capabilities can likely become as good as Russia's are now by 2020 and will near a current US shipbuilding technical proficiency levels by 2030. China is now mass producing at least six classes of modern diesel-electric submarines and surface warships." That is not all; analysts predict that China will have a substantial labour cost advantage over their counterparts in South Korea, Japan, and the US over the next five years or so. Were these predictions to come true, it would mean that the PRC could out-produce and outgun any nation in the South China Sea in the coming decade.
Getting back to the issue of natural resources, the US Energy Information Administration estimates untapped gas reserves to the tune of 2,000 trillion cubic feet. To put that in perspective, if tapped fully, this reserve could meet China's mammoth energy needs for four centuries based on 2011 consumption levels. With the PRC striving for self-sufficiency in energy, it becomes inherently clear as to why the "sleeping giant" has been so active in the area of power projection beyond its traditional territorial waters. According to Lin Boqiang, energy economist at Xiamen University: "China basically has no other choice because its resources are scarce, so in future China must head offshore. Once China gets started [in the deepwater South China Sea], exploration will really speed up."
Leaving aside the huge technical difficulties involved in actually extracting mineral resources from the deep blue sea of South China, the overlapping claims of Asean nations such as Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Philippines, as stated before, have brought about a realignment of US and Indian foreign policy. With so many navies shadowing one another, a conflict cannot be ruled out. The latest announcement coming out of Beijing that it would "begin enforcing new rules starting January 1st, that will have Chinese naval patrols escorting, or expelling, foreign ships from most of the South China Sea" is not going unchallenged, primarily because these new "rules" are in direct contravention to international law.
With both the US and India going on record to state these new boundaries are not going to be recognised and a regional arms race in the offing, precisely what does China have to gain from such bluster? While weaker nations may be coerced into coming to a settlement on off-shore exploration of resources, there is little PRC can do against countries like Japan, South Korea, India and the US. Leaving aside the international heavyweights, China ought not to count Vietnam out of the picture, which is turning into a favourite FDI destination and a nation that is not without friends in the international stage, especially after its rapprochement with the US and its long-term traditional ally, Russia.
According to Leslie Hook of Financial Times, who wrote in an article recently, deepwater exploration forms a cornerstone of PRC's future energy security. Hook states: "In May, the state-owned company launched its first home-built deepwater rig, the 'Cnooc 981,' which enables Cnooc to carry out independent in-house exploration, without renting foreign rigs….Cnooc aims to produce 500 million barrels of oil equivalent a day from the deepwater South China Sea by 2020, up from nothing today."
Thus, with PRC projecting its newly revamped military capabilities in claiming ownership over what it feels to be rightfully Chinese resources, geopolitics in the region is set to undergo some fundamental transformations. The Achilles heel for the West is not PRC's military capabilities which can effectively be countered by a new, broader pan-pacific and Asian alliance. Rather it is China's overwhelming dominance in the economic arena and its economy that is host to hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign investment by Asean nations, Japan, Taiwan and others. Yet at the end of the day, any military conflict, no matter how "limited" in nature, will not be to anybody's advantage. Time has arrived for policy "doves" to take the lead over "hawks" and let diplomacy do its work in ironing out sharing of resources that transcend national boundaries.

The writer is Assistant Editor, The Daily Star.