China pulls out of UN process over territorial dispute with Philippines

“There is a price to be paid for branding yourself an international outlaw – a state that does not comply with the rules.” -- Paul Reichler
By Paul Lewis in Washington

Fallout over China’s territorial claims has become the dominant issue for Joe Biden. 

China is taking the highly unusual step of refusing to participate in a United Nations arbitration process over a territorial conflict with the Philippines, one of five countries challenging Beijing’s claims of ownership over the oil-rich South China Sea.
The legal dispute underscores the tough geopolitical approach China is adopting in the Pacific region. 

It has adopted an aggressive approach toward neighbours over a 2,000-mile stretch that also includes the East China Sea, over which it recently declared the air defence identification zone that has inflamed tensions with Japan and South Korea.
China sent its only aircraft carrier to the disputed waters off the coast of the Philippines for the first time last week, in a move Manila said raised tensions. 

China’s military said the carrier Liaoning will conduct drills in the area, accompanied by two destroyers and two frigates.
Dealing with the fallout over China’s territorial claims has become the dominant issue for the US vice-president, Joe Biden, who is currently touring the Asia Pacific region.
Biden arrived in South Korea on Thursday after high-level bilateral meetings in China and Japan that were dominated by the issue of the air defence zone.
The Philippines will submit its formal case to the UN arbitration tribunal of judges, which has agreed to hear the case at The Hague, in March. 

A preview of their arguments were outlined this week in Washington by Paul Reichler, an expert attorney at Foley Hoag LLP hired by Manila to handle the case.
He said China’s blank refusal to participate in the tribunal process, a move it revealed to the Philippines by way of diplomatic letter in February, marked the first time a state had ever refused to take part in an inter-state arbitration under the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Under the convention, the panel of senior international judges is still required to issue a ruling in the case, despite China’s non-cooperation, although Reichler conceded there were no way of enforcing any ruling.
But he added: “There is a price to be paid for branding yourself an international outlaw – a state that does not comply with the rules.” 

China declined an opportunity to comment on the case.
The dispute concerns China’s declaration of the so-called nine-dash line, which claims jurisdiction over nearly all of the mineral-rich South China Sea, overlapping with large segments of territory claimed by the Philippines as well as of Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei.
In parts, China’s declared jurisdiction, which enables it to exploit lucrative fishing waters and potential oil and gas reserves, stretch more than 800 miles from its mainland coast. 

It also comes to within 30 miles of the coast of the Philippines.
Under the convention, states have a right to an exclusive economic zone and continental shelf within 200 miles of their coast. 

Disputes over the South China Sea are not unlike those over the Japanese Senkaku islands which are dominating Biden’s visits to Japan, China and South Korea this week.
Although the ad-hoc tribunal formed to deal with the case cannot rule on the sovereignty of the islands claimed by both China and the Philippines, it can provide rulings about the nature of rock formations, with implications for any territorial claims under the convention. 

Some of the disputed territories are barely visible at high tide, while others are fully submerged even at low tide.
In a bid to strengthen its claims, China has constructed concrete installations on some underwater formations, complete with basketballs and helipads. 

“A state cannot transform an underwater feature into an island by building on top of it,” Reichler said at a seminar organised by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
In simple terms, the judges will in part be asked to determine when a rock can be defined as an island. 

If a rock protruding from the sea cannot sustain human life or economic activity, for example, the associated rights in surrounding waters are, under the convention, dramatically reduced, regardless of which state claims ownership.
Reichler also showed one slideshow of an island that, at high-tide, consisted of rocks that only just protruded out of the water. 

“It is barely big enough to support the Filipino flag,” he said.

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Philippines Eyes Swift Conclusion of S. China Sea Arbitration

by Simone Orendain
Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert Del Rosario at the Department of Foreign Affairs headquarters in Manila, Sept. 4, 2013.

The Philippines is pressing forward with its legal challenge to China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. 

Philippine officials this week said they were hopeful the U.N. arbitration body could issue a ruling sooner than initially expected.
A top diplomat says the country is hopeful that the panel of the United Nations International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea will have a ruling before President Benigno Aquino’s term ends in 2016. 

Philippine officials had previously said the case would take three to four years to complete.
​​This week Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario told an audience in Manila that pursuing arbitration was the only viable option after Manila had “exhausted all diplomatic avenues” to try to settle its dispute with Beijing over contested rocks and outcroppings in the South China Sea.
“China’s continuous overwhelming naval and maritime presence in the area is also contributing to the raising of regional tensions,” he said.
The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei have partial or total claims to the resource-rich and highly traversed sea. 

China maintains it has indisputable sovereignty over nearly the entire sea.
The Philippines filed its case in January under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which states that coastal nations are entitled to maritime territory that extends some 22 kilometers offshore. 

It also provides for a 370 kilometer economic exclusion zone for fishing and mining natural resources. 

While China has signed the convention, it has rejected the Philippine case. 

Beijing has not responded to any of the subsequent proceedings, effectively making the Philippines the only active party.
Last week Paul Reichler, the Philippines’ lead counsel, told the Wall Street Journal that if China continues “to hold to its position” he expects an award to come down by mid-to-late 2014.
Carl Thayer, a researcher on South China Sea disputes at the Australia Defense Force Academy, says international adjudicators, who are not connected to the case, have mixed views on the outcome.
He says there are two hurdles the Philippines must overcome before the tribunal can even hear its case.
“That the arbitral tribunal has jurisdiction, in other words it does not touch on matters that China has exempted itself from and that the Philippines’ claim is well-founded in law. And I think the latter is very strong,” he said.

China's position
Thayer explains that before Beijing signed the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, it chose to opt out of international jurisdiction over some territorial issues, effectively forbidding outside scrutiny of some issues. The Philippines is trying to convince the U.N. tribunal to reaffirm its own territorial claim based on international law.
During a regular news briefing in Beijing Friday, VOA asked Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying if China plans to participate in the U.N. tribunal when the Philippines submits evidence for its claims in March.
She said China does not accept the arbitration request submitted by the Philippines side. 

She also urged the Philippines to resolve the dispute through bilateral negotiation.
Last month, China hosted a meeting with the 10-member Association of Southeast Nations to discuss how they would implement the conditions of an 11-year old non-binding pledge to peacefully manage the disputes in the South China Sea. 

The Philippines has been pushing for negotiations on a legally binding code and is trying to drum up international support for it.

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Historical Fiction: China’s South China Sea Claims

China uses folklore, myths, and legends, as well as pseudohistory, to bolster greater territorial and maritime claims. Since the end of the Second World War, China has been redrawing its maps, redefining borders, manufacturing historical evidence, using force to create new territorial realities, renaming islands, and seeking to impose its version of history on the waters of the region.

By Mohan Malik

The Spratly Islands—not so long ago known primarily as a rich fishing ground—have turned into an international flashpoint as Chinese leaders insist with increasing truculence that the islands, rocks, and reefs have been, in the words of Wen Jiabao, “China’s historical territory since ancient times.”

Normally, the overlapping territorial claims to sovereignty and maritime boundaries ought to be resolved through a combination of customary international law, adjudication before the International Court of Justice or the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, or arbitration under Annex VII of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). 

While China has ratified UNCLOS, the treaty by and large rejects “historically based” claims, which are precisely the type Beijing periodically asserts. 

On September 4, 2012, China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, told US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that there is “plenty of historical and jurisprudence evidence to show that China has sovereignty over the islands in the South China Sea and the adjacent waters.”
As far as the “jurisprudence evidence” is concerned, the vast majority of international legal experts have concluded that China’s claim to historic title over the South China Sea, implying full sovereign authority and consent for other states to transit, is invalid. 

The historical evidence, if anything, is even less persuasive. 

There are several contradictions in China’s use of history to justify its claims to islands and reefs in the South China Sea, not least of which is its polemical assertion of parallels with imperialist expansion by the United States and European powers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

Justifying China’s attempts to expand its maritime frontiers by claiming islands and reefs far from its shores, Jia Qingguo, professor at Beijing University’s School of International Studies, argues that China is merely following the example set by the West. 

“The United States has Guam in Asia which is very far away from the US and the French have islands in the South Pacific, so it is nothing new,” Jia told AFP recently.
China’s claim to the Spratlys on the basis of history runs aground on the fact that the region’s past empires did not exercise sovereignty. 

In pre-modern Asia, empires were characterized by undefined, unprotected, and often changing frontiers. The notion of suzerainty prevailed. 

Unlike a nation-state, the frontiers of Chinese empires were neither carefully drawn nor policed but were more like circles or zones, tapering off from the center of civilization to the undefined periphery of alien barbarians. 

More importantly, in its territorial disputes with neighboring India, Burma, and Vietnam, Beijing always took the position that its land boundaries were never defined, demarcated, and delimited. 

But now, when it comes to islands, shoals, and reefs in the South China Sea, Beijing claims otherwise. 

In other words, China’s claim that its land boundaries were historically never defined and delimited stands in sharp contrast with the stance that China’s maritime boundaries were always clearly defined and delimited. Herein lies a basic contradiction in the Chinese stand on land and maritime boundaries which is untenable. 

Actually, it is the mid-twentieth-century attempts to convert the undefined frontiers of ancient civilizations and kingdoms enjoying suzerainty into clearly defined, delimited, and demarcated boundaries of modern nation-states exercising sovereignty that lie at the center of China’s territorial and maritime disputes with neighboring countries. 

Put simply, sovereignty is a post-imperial notion ascribed to nation-states, not ancient empires.
China’s present borders largely reflect the frontiers established during the spectacular episode of eighteenth-century Qing (Manchu) expansionism, which over time hardened into fixed national boundaries following the imposition of the Westphalian nation-state system over Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

Official Chinese history today often distorts this complex history, however, claiming that Mongols, Tibetans, Manchus, and Hans were all Chinese, when in fact the Great Wall was built by the Chinese dynasties to keep out the northern Mongol and Manchu tribes that repeatedly overran Han China; the wall actually represented the Han Chinese empire’s outer security perimeter. 

While most historians see the onslaught of the Mongol hordes led by Genghis Khan in the early 1200s as an apocalyptic event that threatened the very survival of ancient civilizations in India, Persia, and other nations (China chief among them), the Chinese have consciously promoted the myth that he was actually “Chinese,” and therefore all areas that the Mongols (the Yuan dynasty) had once occupied or conquered (such as Tibet and much of Central and Inner Asia) belong to China.

China’s claims on Taiwan and in the South China Sea are also based on the grounds that both were parts of the Manchu empire. (Actually, in the Manchu or Qing dynasty maps, it is Hainan Island, not the Paracel and Spratly Islands, that is depicted as China’s southern-most border.) 

In this version of history, any territory conquered by “Chinese” in the past remains immutably so, no matter when the conquest may have occurred.
Such writing and rewriting of history from a nationalistic perspective to promote national unity and regime legitimacy has been accorded the highest priority by China’s rulers, both Nationalists and Communists. 

The Chinese Communist Party leadership consciously conducts itself as the heir to China’s imperial legacy, often employing the symbolism and rhetoric of empire. 

From primary-school textbooks to television historical dramas, the state-controlled information system has force-fed generations of Chinese a diet of imperial China’s grandeur. 

As the Australian Sinologist Geremie Barmé points out, “For decades Chinese education and propaganda have emphasized the role of history in the fate of the Chinese nation-state... While Marxism-Leninism and Mao Thought have been abandoned in all but name, the role of history in China’s future remains steadfast.” So much so that history has been refined as an instrument of statecraft (also known as “cartographic aggression”) by state-controlled research institutions, media, and education bodies.
China uses folklore, myths, and legends, as well as pseudohistory, to bolster greater territorial and maritime claims. 

Chinese textbooks preach the notion of the Middle Kingdom as being the oldest and most advanced civilization that was at the very center of the universe, surrounded by lesser, partially Sinicized states in East and Southeast Asia that must constantly bow and pay their respects. 

China’s version of history often deliberately blurs the distinction between what was no more than hegemonic influence, tributary relationships, suzerainty, and actual control. 

Subscribing to the notion that those who have mastered the past control their present and chart their own futures, Beijing has always placed a very high value on “the history card” (often a revisionist interpretation of history) in its diplomatic efforts to achieve foreign policy objectives, especially to extract territorial and diplomatic concessions from other countries. 

Almost every contiguous state has, at one time or another, felt the force of Chinese arms—Mongolia, Tibet, Burma, Korea, Russia, India, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Taiwan—and been a subject of China’s revisionist history. 

As Martin Jacques notes in When China Rules the World, “Imperial Sinocentrism shapes and underpins modern Chinese nationalism.”
If the idea of national sovereignty goes back to seventeenth-century Europe and the system that originated with the Treaty of Westphalia, the idea of maritime sovereignty is largely a mid-twentieth-century American concoction China has seized upon to extend its maritime frontiers. 

As Jacques notes, “The idea of maritime sovereignty is a relatively recent invention, dating from 1945 when the United States declared that it intended to exercise sovereignty over its territorial waters.” 

In fact, the UN’s Law of the Sea agreement represented the most prominent international effort to apply the land-based notion of sovereignty to the maritime domain worldwide—although, importantly, it rejects the idea of justification by historical right. 

Thus although Beijing claims around eighty percent of the South China Sea as its “historic waters” (and is now seeking to elevate this claim to a “core interest” akin with its claims on Taiwan and Tibet), China has, historically speaking, about as much right to claim the South China Sea as Mexico has to claim the Gulf of Mexico for its exclusive use, or Iran the Persian Gulf, or India the Indian Ocean.
Ancient empires either won control over territories through aggression, annexation, or assimilation or lost them to rivals who possessed superior firepower or statecraft. 

Territorial expansion and contraction was the norm, determined by the strength or weakness of a kingdom or empire. 

The very idea of “sacred lands” is ahistorical because control of territory was based on who grabbed or stole what last from whom. 

The frontiers of the Qin, Han, Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties waxed and waned throughout history. 

A strong and powerful imperial China, much like czarist Russia, was expansionist in Inner Asia and Indochina as opportunity arose and strength allowed. 

The gradual expansion over the centuries under the non-Chinese Mongol and Manchu dynasties extended imperial China’s control over Tibet and parts of Central Asia (now Xinjiang), Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. Modern China is, in fact, an “empire-state” masquerading as a nation-state.
If China’s claims are justified on the basis of history, then so are the historical claims of Vietnamese and Filipinos based on their histories. 

Students of Asian history know, for instance, that Malay peoples related to today’s Filipinos have a better claim to Taiwan than Beijing does. 

Taiwan was originally settled by people of Malay-Polynesian descent—ancestors of the present-day aborigine groups—who populated the low-lying coastal plains. 

In the words of noted Asia-watcher Philip Bowring, writing last year in the South China Morning Post, “The fact that China has a long record of written history does not invalidate other nations’ histories as illustrated by artifacts, language, lineage and genetic affinities, the evidence of trade and travel.” 

Unless one subscribes to the notion of Chinese exceptionalism, imperial China’s “historical claims” are as valid as those of other kingdoms and empires in Southeast and South Asia. 

China laying claim to the Mongol and Manchu empires’ colonial possessions would be equivalent to India laying claim to Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Malaysia (Srivijaya), Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka on the grounds that they were all parts of either the Maurya, Chola, or the Moghul and the British Indian empires.
China’s claims in the South China Sea are also a major shift from its longstanding geopolitical orientation to continental power. 

In claiming a strong maritime tradition, China makes much of the early-fifteenth-century expeditions of Zheng He to the Indian Ocean and Africa. 

But, as Bowring points out, “Chinese were actually latecomers to navigation beyond coastal waters. For centuries, the masters of the oceans were the Malayo-Polynesian peoples who colonized much of the world, from Taiwan to New Zealand and Hawaii to the south and east, and to Madagascar in the west. Bronze vessels were being traded with Palawan, just south of Scarborough, at the time of Confucius. When Chinese Buddhist pilgrims like Faxian went to Sri Lanka and India in the fifth century, they went in ships owned and operated by Malay peoples. Ships from what is now the Philippines traded with Funan, a state in what is now southern Vietnam, a thousand years before the Yuan dynasty.”

And finally, China’s so-called “historic claims” to the South China Sea are actually not “centuries old.” 

They only go back to 1947, when Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government drew the so-called “eleven-dash line” on Chinese maps of the South China Sea, enclosing the Spratly Islands and other chains that the ruling Kuomintang party declared were now under Chinese sovereignty. 

Chiang himself, saying he saw German fascism as a model for China, was fascinated by the Nazi concept of an expanded Lebensraum (“living space”) for the Chinese nation. 

He did not have the opportunity to be expansionist himself because the Japanese put him on the defensive, but cartographers of the nationalist regime drew the U-shape of eleven dashes in an attempt to enlarge China’s “living space” in the South China Sea. 

First map with the so-called “eleven-dash line” fabricated in 1947 by the Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government. 

Following the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the civil war in 1949, the People’s Republic of China adopted this cartographic coup, revising Chiang’s notion into a “nine-dash line” after erasing two dashes in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1953.

Since the end of the Second World War, China has been redrawing its maps, redefining borders, manufacturing historical evidence, using force to create new territorial realities, renaming islands, and seeking to impose its version of history on the waters of the region. 

The passage of domestic legislation in 1992, “Law on the Territorial Waters and Their Contiguous Areas,” which claimed four-fifths of the South China Sea, was followed by armed skirmishes with the Philippines and Vietnamese navies throughout the 1990s. 

More recently, the dispatch of large numbers of Chinese fishing boats and maritime surveillance vessels to the disputed waters in what is tantamount to a “people’s war on the high seas” has further heightened tensions. 

To quote commentator Sujit Dutta, “China’s unmitigated irredentism [is] based on the theory that the periphery must be occupied in order to secure the core. [This] is an essentially imperial notion that was internalized by the Chinese nationalists—both Kuomintang and Communist. The current regime’s attempts to reach its imagined geographical frontiers often with little historical basis have had and continue to have highly destabilizing strategic consequences.”
One reason Southeast Asians find it difficult to accept Chinese territorial claims is that they carry with them an assertion of Han racial superiority over other Asian races and empires. 

Says Jay Batongbacal of the University of the Philippines law school: “Intuitively, acceptance of the nine-dash line is a corresponding denial of the very identity and history of the ancestors of the Vietnamese, Filipinos, and Malays; it is practically a modern revival of China’s denigration of non-Chinese as ‘barbarians’ not entitled to equal respect and dignity as peoples.”
Empires and kingdoms never exercised sovereignty. 

If historical claims had any validity then Mongolia could claim all of Asia simply because it once conquered the lands of the continent. 

There is absolutely no historical basis to support either of the dash-line claims, especially considering that the territories of Chinese empires were never as carefully delimited as nation-states, but rather existed as zones of influence tapering away from a civilized center. 

This is the position contemporary China took starting in the 1960s, while negotiating its land boundaries with several of its neighboring countries. 

But this is not the position it takes today in the cartographic, diplomatic, and low-intensity military skirmishes to define its maritime borders. 

The continued reinterpretation of history to advance contemporary political, territorial, and maritime claims, coupled with the Communist leadership’s ability to turn “nationalistic eruptions” on and off like a tap during moments of tension with the United States, Japan, South Korea, India, Vietnam, and the Philippines, makes it difficult for Beijing to reassure neighbors that its “peaceful rise” is wholly peaceful. 

Since there are six claimants to various atolls, islands, rocks, and oil deposits in the South China Sea, the Spratly Islands disputes are, by definition, multilateral disputes requiring international arbitration. 

But Beijing has insisted that these disputes are bilateral in order to place its opponents between the anvil of its revisionist history and the hammer of its growing military power.

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San Francisco Treaty and the South China Sea

By Masahiro Matsumura

OSAKA – Territorial and maritime disputes among China and several Southeast Asian countries are roiling the South China Sea region with little prospect of resolution anytime soon.
The current uneasy status quo may be tenable so long as the parties embrace serious confidence-building measures through multilateral forums while maintaining effective deterrence vis-a-vis China and a commitment not to use offensive force.
Naturally China is eager to exclude interference by extraregional great powers, particularly the United States, preferring bilateral negotiations with weaker regional claimants that it can more easily dominate. 

Extraregional powers, however, cite the United Nations Convention on the Law of Sea — specifically, the freedom of navigation and the right of innocent passage — to justify their involvement.
Given that the South China Sea disputes stem from overlapping claims to “exclusive economic zones” — not open ocean — the U.N. convention is not entirely relevant.
But another international agreement does provide some guidance for settling these disputes: the San Francisco Peace Treaty, which entered into force in 1952 and officially ended World War II in the Asia-Pacific region.
Under the treaty, Japan renounced its sovereignty claims over the Spratly and the Paracel Islands but did not reassign them to any single country. 

As a result, these islands remain legally under the collective custody of the treaty’s 48 other parties — including two claimants to the islands, the Philippines and Vietnam.
China — then in the third year of Mao Zedong’s rule — was not even invited to participate in the peace conference. 

Although Mao’s communists had clearly won the civil war and secured control of China, the conference organizers disagreed about which government — Mao’s People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing or Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China (ROC) in Taipei — truly represented China. 

As a result, the PRC denies that it is legally bound by the treaty.
But the treaty applies to the PRC indirectly through the ROC-Japan bilateral peace treaty of 1952, which was signed just hours before the San Francisco Treaty and reaffirmed its terms — especially Japan’s renunciation of Taiwan.

Indeed, the San Francisco Treaty required that the ROC-Japan treaty be consistent with it, thereby preventing Japan from assigning in its treaty with the ROC any additional right or title to any country other than the parties to the San Francisco Treaty.

As a result, Japan is unable to recognize Taiwan as part of PRC sovereign territory.
To be sure, the San Francisco Treaty, per se, is not legally binding for the PRC. 

But for Japan, the PRC has clearly succeeded the ROC in Taiwan, as demonstrated by the 1972 Japan-PRC Joint Communique, on the basis of the bilateral Treaty of Peace and Friendship that was concluded six years later. 

When Japan shifted its diplomatic recognition from the ROC to the PRC, it recognized the latter as the “sole legal government of China.”
Given that Japan was not recognizing China as a new state — international recognition of the Chinese state had existed without interruption since the ROC government emerged in 1912 — the PRC effectively accepted the rights and obligations of the previous government.
Moreover, Japan did not recognize Taiwan as part of China on the grounds that doing so would infringe on its obligations under the San Francisco Treaty. 

While Japan fully “understood” and “respected” the PRC’s declaration that Taiwan was an “inalienable” part of its territory, it did not recognize the claim in accordance with international law. 

The two countries simply agreed to disagree over Taiwan’s legal status.

In other words, Japan renounced Taiwan without reassigning it.
To date, China has been silent about the implications of the San Francisco Treaty with regard to its claims in the South China Sea. 

This may simply reflect a dearth of international legal expertise in this field or the state of China’s segmented, stove-piped policy communities.
It could also stem from concerns that using the treaty’s legal reasoning, which conflicts with China’s stance on Taiwan, to resolve today’s territorial disputes would undermine its credibility and position.
If left unchecked, China may use the South China Sea disputes to gain effective hegemony over weaker claimants. 

All parties to the disputes, including China, can cite geographic and historical connections to the islands to back their claims, but none of them has solid legal title under the San Francisco Treaty.
The U.S. and other extra-regional powers should take advantage of this fact, invoking their latent collective custody of the Spratly and the Paracel Islands in accordance with the San Francisco Treaty, and internationalize separate bilateral diplomatic processes between China and regional claimants.
The treaty’s parties could even hold a conference to deliberate on the matter. 

Given that it would exclude China, such a discussion alone would be a game changer.

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Kerry, in Asia, Urges Focus on Law in China Disputes

By JANE PERLEZ
From left, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung of Vietnam; Secretary of State John Kerry; the sultan of Brunei, Hassanal Bolkiah; and President Thein Sein of Myanmar, in Brunei.

BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, Brunei — Secretary of State John Kerry encouraged Southeast Asian leaders on Wednesday in their efforts to resolve maritime disputes with China based on international legal principles, rather than by making individual deals as China would prefer.
Mr. Kerry arrived in Brunei to substitute for President Obama at the annual meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, and the broader East Asia Summit meeting of 18 countries on Thursday. Mr. Obama canceled his appearances because of the government shutdown in Washington.
“A finalized code of conduct, in which all abide by a common set of rules and standards, is something that will benefit the entire Asia-Pacific community of nations — and beyond,” Mr. Kerry told the leaders.
Mr. Kerry was referring to the recent stepped-up efforts by the Asean countries to persuade a resistant China to agree to a legally binding code of conduct that would govern the peaceful resolution of disputes.
In particular, Mr. Kerry was throwing American support behind the Philippines, a treaty ally of Washington, in a legal case it brought this year against China over the Scarborough Shoal, a reef about 120 miles off the Philippine coast that China claims.
China has excoriated the Philippines for initiating the arbitration case, which is now before a panel under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
China has refused to recognize the challenge, and in a show of anger, some senior Chinese officials have declined to meet their Filipino counterparts and China has refused to invite the Philippines to certain meetings.
“The United States has been very happy to see Asean’s efforts to push forward on the negotiations toward a code of conduct,” Mr. Kerry said.
In a direct criticism of China, a senior State Department official told reporters traveling with Mr. Kerry that the “Chinese consistently indicate their view that ‘difficult issues’ that might fall outside the comfort zone of any member need not be discussed” at Asean meetings.
“That is not a view that is held by the United States, or, I believe, many if not most of the East Asia Summit member states,” the official said. 

China has serious territorial and maritime disputes with Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam.
The shipping lanes in the South China Sea are estimated to carry more than half the world’s trade, and substantial deposits of oil and gas lie in the seabed.
On the sidelines of the Asean meeting, Mr. Kerry met for 75 minutes with the Chinese prime minister, Li Keqiang, and discussed Syria, North Korea economic issues and the South China Sea, a State Department official said.
At the start of the session, Mr. Li referred to China as still a developing country, something Chinese officials do frequently.

Mr. Kerry suggested that the description was not quite accurate.

“We think you are a little more developed than you may want to say,” Mr. Kerry said.
Echoing Mr. Kerry’s theme, the president of the Philippines, Benigno S. Aquino III, made an impassioned argument to the Asean leaders that the rule of law should decide the territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
“Our development as a region cannot be realized in an international environment where the rule of law does not exist,” Mr. Aquino said. 

“The challenge that confronts one is a challenge that confronts all.”
China claims the waters and the islands of the South China Sea within the so-called nine-dash line, a boundary that was drawn by China in the 1940s but is not recognized by any other country.

The line covers 80 percent of the South China Sea.
To counter China, Mr. Aquino said the Philippines had adopted a two-track approach that was “both peaceful and rules-based.”
First, he said, the Philippines was advocating the expeditious adoption of a code of conduct. 

Second, the Philippines would continue to pursue the arbitration.

“Both tracks are legally binding and both are anchored in international law,” Mr. Aquino said.
Last month, under pressure from Asean countries, China called a meeting in the city of Suzhou to begin discussions on the code of conduct.
The Chinese agreed at the meeting to consultations on the code of conduct, but stopped short of agreeing to negotiations. 

A statement by the Foreign Ministry after the Suzhou meeting said that the code should be developed “gradually.”
China has criticized the United States for unreasonable involvement in the South China Sea, saying the United States is not a party to the disputes. 

Last month, Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin said the intrusion of countries outside the region complicated the issue.

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