Southeast Asian Newspapers’ take on the Special ASEAN-China FM Meeting
The Special ASEAN-China Foreign Ministers’ Meeting might have concluded a week ago, but its aftershocks continue to rattle ASEAN as it reassesses its strategy in handling the South China Sea (SCS) dispute. If ASEAN member states had any conflicting understanding of China’s growing assertiveness in bulldozing its national agenda on the region, the two-day meeting and the confusion surrounding the issuance and eventual retraction of the “media statement” almost certainly exacerbated those divides.
A look at some of the editorial pieces and reporting in Southeast Asian newspapers over the last week show some ASEAN member states more willing to publicly show signs of discord and assign blame for the “media statement” fiasco. Almost all the newspapers quoted sources which fingered Laos and Cambodia – two of China’s closest allies in ASEAN – as the reason behind the statement’s withdrawal even though all ten countries had decided to adopt the statement and release it at the conclusion of the meeting.
The Star (Malaysia) featured a column on 16 June that was particularly harsh to Laos given its role as the ASEAN chair this year, writing that “maybe Laos needs to ensure that the ASEAN tradition of issuing joint communiques is not broken again and send a signal to the world the ASEAN is united on the SCS”. The Bangkok Post took a different stance and published a column on 17 June that instead called on ASEAN as an institution to encourage the Philippines to backtrack its “outright antagonism” towards Beijing in order to entice China to agree to some sort of a rules-based arrangement even as it continues to press China on the SCS issue. The Phnom Penh Post’s first article on the entire event came only on 21 June – one week after the meeting’s last day – when it covered Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen’s strident attacks on countries that “(used) Cambodia to attack China”, adding that “they don’t dare blame Brunei.”
