Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has called for an end to the political manipulation and sensationalization of the South China Sea issue.
Wang also urged related parties to get back to the right track of implementing the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC), which was signed in November 2002 as a code of conduct for all parties involved in the South China Sea issue.
Wang made the call at a press briefing Monday following his meeting with the foreign ministers of the member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) -- Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, The Philippines and Vietnam -- in the Lao capital.
END TO POLITICIZATION OF SOUTH CHINA SEA ISSUE
Wang said the so-called award rendered recently by an ad hoc tribunal handling the South China Sea arbitration is tantamount to filling a wrong prescription for the South China Sea disputes.
The former Philippine government, headed by Benigno Aquino III, unilaterally initiated the South China Sea arbitration in 2013. The move has violated the Philippines' standing agreement with China to settle relevant disputes through bilateral negotiation, violated China's right to choose means of dispute settlement of its own will as a State Party to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and abused the UNCLOS dispute settlement procedures.
The ad hoc tribunal issued an award on July 12, siding with Manila's cunningly packaged claims and denying China's long-standing historic rights in the South China Sea.
"The Philippines' territorial claim over part of Nansha Qundao is groundless from the perspectives of either history or international law," the Chinese government said in a white paper issued on July 13.
"The arbitral tribunal established at the Philippines' unilateral request has no jurisdiction over relevant submissions, and awards rendered by it are null and void and have no binding force," said the document.
Wang said the wrong prescription has led to increasingly hot ballyhoo over the arbitration and some countries outside the region have become extremely excited, as if running an unabated high fever.
