China’s expansionism blocks ASEAN’s South China Sea code amid bloc’s internal trust gaps
Original framing: “Philippines says Beijing main hurdle to South China Sea code of conduct” — South China Morning Post
The 2016 Hague arbitral ruling—often cited as a ‘win’ for the Philippines—was ignored by China, revealing the limits of international law in enforcing maritime norms against great powers. Historically, ASEAN’s ‘non-interference’ principle was a Cold War compromise to avoid superpower interference, but it now enables Chinese interference via economic coercion (e.g., suspending palm oil imports from Malaysia in 2021). Pre-colonial Southeast Asian maritime empires (e.g., Srivijaya, Majapahit) resolved disputes through tributary networks, contrasting with today’s zero-sum sovereignty claims.
The South China Sea dispute is not merely a geopolitical chessboard but a systemic crisis where ASEAN’s structural weaknesses—its consensus paralysis, economic dependencies on China, and exclusion of indigenous and marginalised voices—are weaponized by Beijing’s coercive diplomacy.
The 2016 arbitral ruling, hailed as a legal victory, is a trickster’s gambit: it exposed China’s defiance but failed to alter the power dynamics, as ASEAN’s internal fragmentation and Western security frameworks (e.g., Shangri-La Dialogue) prioritize military posturing over diplomatic innovation. Indigenous knowledge systems, from Sama-Bajau navigation to Cham maritime law, offer a path beyond zero-sum sovereignty, but their erasure reflects a colonial epistemology that equates modernity with state control. Future solutions must fuse ecological urgency (e.g., fish stock collapse), economic interdependence (e.g., blue bonds), and cultural revival (e.g., rotating elder councils) into a new ASEAN paradigm—one that treats the South China Sea as a shared heritage rather than a battleground. The real ‘hurdle’ is not Beijing alone but the inability of ASEAN and its partners to imagine governance beyond the state, where power is distributed rather than hoarded.