Foreign ministers from 27 countries will discuss ways to promote confidence-building at an annual Asian regional security forum in Hanoi on Friday July 23 amid China's rapid military-building that has raised the concern of neighboring countries and sparked an arms race in the region.
The ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and other major powers, including the United States, Japan, China and Russia are gathering in the capital of Vietnam for the ASEAN Regional Forum.
The buildup, meant to protect its growing economic clout, has been one of the main factors prompting China's economically dynamic Southeast Asian neighbors to sharply raise their defense spending and modernize their ageing military equipment in recent years.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's Arms Transfers Database, arms deliveries to Southeast Asia nearly doubled from 2005 to 2009 compared to the five preceding years, with weapons deliveries to Malaysia jumping by 722 percent, Singapore by 146 percent and Indonesia by 84 percent.
The Chinese navy, which used to be very backward in the mid-1990s, lagging behind the United States or Japanese navy by least 40 years, is already on the verge of operating across the deep waters of open oceans. China last year made the unprecedented move of sending its naval fleet on its first escort mission against pirates in the waters of the Gulf of Aden off Somalia. And in an apparent sign that the country is intent on securing its maritime interests and projecting force in the region and beyond, the Chinese military is building a naval base on Hainan, an island in the South China Sea, for nuclear submarines capable of firing ballistic missiles.
Several ASEAN countries, notably Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei, have a territorial dispute with China in the South China Sea, particularly over the resource-rich Spratly islands.
As part of confidence-building efforts, ASEAN has been working to elevate a 2002 declaration signed with China on the South China Sea into a "Regional Code of Conduct," but it has not been an easy task to get China to agree to it. So far they have agreed on several joint cooperation projects but there are still disagreements on even the guidelines to get the projects going. For example, China is against any mention in the guideline that ASEAN members will get together first before meeting China, because China does not want to multilateralize an issue that it regards as bilateral.
The annual ASEAN foreign ministers meeting will begin in Hanoi on Tuesday, followed by a meeting between ASEAN foreign ministers and their counterparts from Japan, China and South Korea on Wednesday, and the ASEAN Regional Forum, a multilateral forum on security in the Asia-Pacific region on Friday, which will be attended by ministers from major powers outside ASEAN, including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada. (Source: Mainichi Daily News, Jul 21, 2010).