Is China downplaying ‘restrained’ clash with Vietnamese fishermen near Paracel Islands ?

Vietnam says Chinese personnel boarded a local fishing boat on Sunday and beat the crew with iron bars, seriously injuring four of them

Beijing’s playing down of a recent confrontation in the South China Sea in which Vietnam claimed its fishermen were violently beaten by personnel from Chinese ships reflects a consistent strategy to convince the Chinese people of the superpower’s reasonable behaviour in the disputed waterway.

Observers also say the latest incident could be the “tip of the iceberg”, and Hanoi could pivot from its low-key diplomatic approach to its maritime dispute with Beijing if similar incidents were to recur.

Their comments follow a reported attack on a Vietnamese fishing boat on Sunday, with Hanoi protesting to Beijing days after the incident. In response, Beijing’s foreign ministry said “no injuries were found” and that on-site operations to handle a case of illegal fishing were “professional and restrained”.

Abdul Rahman Yaacob, a research fellow with the Australia-based Lowy Institute’s Southeast Asia programme, said although video evidence indicated otherwise, China has consistently maintained that its coastguard or military personnel behaved properly to protect its sovereignty.

“This approach is primarily taken to target the domestic audience – to convince them that Chinese forces are acting in a reasonable manner,” Rahman said.

Vietnam’s foreign ministry said in a statement that Chinese law enforcers beat its fishermen and took away their equipment when their boat was operating near Hoang Sa, Vietnam’s name for the Paracel Islands.

The Paracel Islands, also known as the Xisha Islands in China, is a group of more than 30 islands in the South China Sea located between the coastlines of Vietnam and China. They are currently controlled by China but also claimed by Vietnam.

Vietnamese state media has earlier reported that Chinese personnel boarded a local fishing boat and beat the crew with iron bars, seriously injuring four of them. The alleged Chinese attackers also smashed fishing equipment and took away the Vietnamese crew’s catch.

In interviews with the fishing boat’s crew that were released by Vietnamese media, the fishermen described a “terrifying attack” by about 40 Chinese personnel on two Chinese vessels.

One fisherman said the attackers beat him and other crew members with metre-long steel bars, breaking his arms and legs.

The captain was quoted as saying that the attack was “the most brutal aggression” he had seen during his 15-year career in the waters off the Paracel archipelago.

Collin Koh, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said this was not the first time Chinese attacks on Vietnamese fishermen had taken place near the Paracels.

“From time to time over the recent decades, this has happened”.

“Chinese enforcement officers were criticised by the Vietnamese authorities for having applied excessive force against the fishermen, and the former would confiscate items, even whole vessels,” Koh said.

Adding that the latest incident might be the “tip of the iceberg”, Koh said there could also be similar cases recently that were unreported or “just hushed down”.

New Vietnamese approach ?

Vietnam has adopted a much lower profile since a major confrontation in the South China Sea in 2014 after China deployed an oil rig in a region in the disputed waterway, leading to a series of anti-China protests followed by unrest and riots across the Southeast Asian nation.

To resolve the 2014 incident, Vietnamese and Chinese authorities met over 30 times in a month, reflecting Hanoi’s approach of using diplomacy primarily to resolve any territorial dispute with China, Rahman said.

“For now, the Vietnamese may utilise diplomatic means to resolve the incident with China,” he said. If such confrontations were to continue and more Vietnamese fishermen were threatened and injured by Chinese authorities, Vietnam might reconsider its approach, he added.

“For example, it could send its coastguard or navy to protect Vietnamese fishermen,” he said.

Pointing out that Vietnam did not want to allow the territorial disputes in the South China Sea to affect its overall good relations with China, Rahman recounted a conversation he had with a Vietnamese official.

“The South China Sea disputes form only 1 per cent of Vietnam-China relations, the other 99 per cent is good, we should not allow that 1 per cent to affect the 99 per cent,” the official had said, according to Rahman.

Benjamin Blandin, a maritime security expert at the Yokosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Studies, said the Chinese response against the Vietnamese fishermen in the latest incident matched a recent increase in Beijing’s aggression against other claimants in the South China Sea.

For instance, China recently deployed its navy and maritime militia ships in Malaysia’s exclusive economic zone, while maintaining a “massive presence” of maritime militia vessels at Sabina Shoal, Iroquois Reef and Whitsun Reef in waters off the Philippines.

“China has always let Vietnamese fishermen operate near the Paracels, usually without much incidents over the years,” Blandin said. Nonetheless, Hanoi’s ongoing reclamation in the South China Sea was seen as “unacceptable” to the Chinese as the action “changes the status quo”, he added.

“China needed to do something to keep face and decided to resort to a simple, cheap, but efficient way to remind Vietnam it still has the capacity to create problems for Vietnam any time it wants,” Blandin said.

A Chinese think tank said in May that Vietnam had reclaimed more land in the South China Sea in the past three years than in the previous four decades, warning that Hanoi’s activities could “complicate and expand” disputes in the waters.

In its report “Construction on Islands and Reefs Occupied by Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia in the Nansha Islands”, the Beijing-based Grandview Institution said that until 2019, Hanoi carried out only modest reclamation efforts on the 29 disputed islands and reefs it controlled in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.

But it has embarked on major dredging and landfill work on several islands and reefs since then by adding 3 sq km of new land to the original 0.7 sq km of land, far exceeding the construction scale over the previous 40 years, the report said.

By Maria Siow – The South China Morning Post – October 3, 2024