Carving Up the East China Sea

摘要

It is a timeless and fundamental question: Must competition for scarce resources inevitably lead to conflict. Today, that age-old question is often asked in reference to the many sites in the world's oceans in which neighboring coastal states are shouldering each other for the authority to claim the potentially vast sources of hydrocarbons embedded in the continental shelf and the fishing rights to the waters above it. With more than a billion people to feed and a surging economy that demands ever more energy, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has become one of the world's fiercest competitors for the ocean's resources. China's oil consumption, already the second largest in the world after the United States, is forecast by some to grow to 590 million metric tons in 2020 (up from 220 million tons in 2000), nearly three-quarters of which will be imported by that time. By some estimates, gas and oil deposits in the central area of the East China Sea could go a long way to alleviating the energy deficit the country faces: the Chunxiao Natural Gas Development Project, an area of hydrocarbon exploitation by the Chinese, is publicly estimated to contain a reserve of 65.2 billion cubic meters of natural gas and 12.7 million tons of oil. This development project,which involves American and European oil companies as minority stakeholders, lies in the heart of the disputed zone in the East China Sea. China has accommodated and cooperated to develop disputed areas with several other of its maritime neighbors and even to resolve some of those disputes amicably -- most notably those with Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia, with whom it shares overlapping claims in the South China Sea; nonetheless, the competition between China and Japan over the resources in the East China Sea remains confrontational, causing some concern that the competition for regional predominance between these two powerful nations could spark armed conflict if not carefully managed.