China is right to favour bilateral talks to resolve South China Sea rows
Luo Jia says America has no right to insist on multilateral negotiations on South China Sea
The US State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland made some odd comments on the South China Sea last month. "We don't think that [the South China Sea] issue … can be resolved through a series of bilateral intersections," she said. "We don't think that cutting deals with these countries individually is going to work, let alone be the expedient way or the best way under international law to get this done."
She continued: "Bilateral diplomacy that leads to, and is supportive of, an overall multilateral deal where all of the claimants are satisfied and the arrangement that emerges is supportable under international law is fine. But an effort to divide and conquer and end up with a competitive situation among the different claimants is not going to get where we need to go."
The implications of her statement are clear: one, on the South China Sea, issues have to be resolved through multilateral means; and two, any efforts at bilateral negotiation could be interpreted as an attempt to divide and conquer.
This is really odd. It's pretty hard to find on what grounds she could draw such conclusions.
It rather seemed Nuland must have been poorly informed about the South China Sea issues.
At the core of the issue are two categories of disputes - namely, territorial disputes around certain islands, reefs or shoals of the Nansha Islands (Spratlys), and disputes related to maritime jurisdiction in some parts of the sea area.
