The South China Sea issue is a product of contemporary geopolitics amid the relative decline of the United States and the rise of China, Zheng Yongnian, director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore, said on Monday.
Zheng made the remarks in a keynote speech at the Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development.
He said the United States has made a wrong judgment toward the rise of China, who always understands China based on its own experiences. In fact, China has said it admits and welcomes the U.S. existence in the region, and hopes the United States can play a neutral role on the South China Sea issue.
"If the U.S. can keep its neutral stance, it can play a very good role in promoting China-ASEAN relations. On the contrary, the U.S. chose to strengthen its alliance, which it in turn has been kidnapped by its alliances to some extent," Zheng noted.
Highlighting China and ASEAN countries have established a stable interaction model, Zheng said the U.S. existence in the Asia Pacific region has changed the way China and ASEAN countries get along over the last decades.
With regard to Japan's activeness in the South China Sea arbitration, Zheng said Japan needs to set up its own geopolitical influence, in order to proceed its normalization, and that influence is among the ASEAN countries. That's also why the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has always been active over the South China Sea issue.
Zheng said that China's rise is mainly the rise of economy, and it's hard for China to give up its core national interests such as the South China Sea.
He believed that the South China Sea will largely maintain peaceful as China and the United States in fact maintain a very good relationship.
"The Sino-U.S. relationship is quite different from that between America and the Soviet Union, and the two countries also have no direct geopolitical conflicts," he added.
