Members of the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations are urging calm among those who operate in the increasingly volatile South China Sea.
The plea was made Wednesday in a joint statement between ASEAN and Australia at the end of a three-day summit in Melbourne. The summit marked the 50th anniversary of Australia establishing formal ties with ASEAN.
The declaration said Australia and ASEAN “recognize the benefits of having the South China Sea as a sea of peace, stability and prosperity,” and encouraged “all countries to avoid any unilateral actions” that could threaten those aspects.
But the statement did not include language that directly called out China for numerous confrontations with others in the region. The latest incident occurred Tuesday near the Second Thomas Shoal, when two Philippines Coast Guard ships were confronted by Chinese Coast Guard ships.
Manila says one of its ships sustained damage in a collision with a Chinese vessel as it carried out “dangerous” blocking maneuvers, while four coast guardsmen on the other Philippine ship were injured when it was hit by water cannon from the Chinese Coast Guard ships.
The two Philippine ships were escorting two civilian vessels carrying supplies and a fresh rotation of troops to a Philippine warship intentionally grounded on the Second Thomas Shoal to maintain the archipelago’s claims to the submerged reef.
China has claimed sovereignty over nearly the entire South China Sea, ignoring competing claims by regional neighbors, including the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam.
Beijing and Manila have been locked in a bitter standoff over the Scarborough Shoal, a fisheries-rich atoll that was seized by China in 2012, despite it being inside the Philippines' 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone.
An international arbitration tribunal in the Hague said in 2016 that China's claims had no legal basis - a decision Beijing has rejected.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse.
