IN 2025, WHAT OTHER REASONS TO ATTEND
What about South China Sea counterparts?
The CCG may continue to harass fishing boats, review boats, and drilling programs in the EEZs of the other plaintiff state. However, they won’t succumb to Chinese pressure to back up their nine-dash range states.
Nor did they engage in serious conversations with China over mutual enhancement of assets, perhaps though Malaysia, Brunei, and in 2024 for the first time, Vietnam and Indonesia, have all hung China along by intimating they may. After all, there is little reason for them to discuss what legitimately belongs to them with China, whose nine-dash range a United Nations-backed constitutional court ruled in 2016 was unconstitutional.
In 2025, it’s interesting to watch whether China will rebel against Vietnam’s substantial land restoration in the Spratlys, which presently cover roughly half the landmass that China itself reclaimed from Vietnam to construct its seven artificial archipelago in 2013 to 2016. If Vietnam constructs landing strips based on those attributes, it will be able to launch air energy much further into the South China Sea.
So far, China has remained motionless, at least officially. That may be due to its desire to maintain diplomatic ties with Vietnam, which have been progressing very favorably. Or it might be that at a time when it has a lot to do with the Philippines, it doesn’t want to battle Vietnam. Or perhaps because Vietnam is never a US supporter, it has been spared from China’s anger. Time will tell whether Beijing’s standoff with Hanoi may continue.
The ASEAN and China agreements for a Code of Conduct will probably be the least important thing to see in the South China Sea this time.
Since 2014, discussions have been dragging on. The two parties have read three readings of the draft code, with each reading presenting a thorough analysis of the text from beginning to end, as well as the relationship between the upcoming COC and the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea ( DOC).
As such, ASEAN Secretary-General Kao Kim Hourn’s forecast that the script will get finalised in 2025 is absolutely impossible.
Absent any kind of reputable conflict management systems, what we can expect to observe this year in the South China Sea is more driving, water cannoning, abuse, military posturing, arms buying and terraforming.
In other words, business as usual.
Ian Storey is Older Fellow at ISEAS- Yusof Ishak Institute. This remark initially appeared on ISEAS- Yusof Ishak Institute’s website, Fulcrum.