Eurasia Review
07 October 2016
- RSIS
- Media Mentions
- China-Singapore Ties: The Four Rs Behind the Unhappiness – Analysis
China-Singapore Ties: The Four Rs Behind the Unhappiness – Analysis
Global Times, published by Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily, recently ran an article accusing Singapore of raising the South China Sea disputes at the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit held in Venezuela on Sept 18. What is at stake in this spat?
In perpetuating a falsehood – that Singapore had insisted on adding contents endorsing the Philippines’ South China Sea arbitration case against China in the final document of the recent Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit – the Chinese media apparatus and the Global Times are twisting facts to pander to their own internal nationalistic constituency and agenda.
The reality is that Venezuela, the host, did not allow regional states to follow the customary practice of settling and updating the relevant regional paragraphs (in this case the South-east Asian portion), despite a combined ASEAN request to the NAM chairman. What happened at NAM was no more, or no less, than the violation of long-established NAM principles.
… Shashi Jayakumar is Senior Fellow and Head, Centre of Excellence for National Security (CENS), S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. A version of this appeared in The Straits Times, 6 October 2016.
CENS / Online
Last updated on 10/10/2016
