Stoking up great-power rivalry only fuels South China Sea tensions

Regarding the scary swirl in the South China Sea: whatever happened to our peace-loving, consensus-driven East Asia? Why did Washington cry itself a river over China's infrastructure bank idea? And what's going on with roiling Sino-US relations?

Let's play the blame game, it's so much fun. For starters, Chinese diplomacy has been anything but suave. The Japanese had to re-elect a nationalist prime minister. And a bunch of Asian nations sweating over their mineral and fishing rights just have to rush into the waiting arms of Mother America. Then, the US has to don its superman cape and jump in to make even bigger waves. And so it goes.

The current scramble for resources and their control is being played out as a proxy game. Shabby shoals, flimsy sandbars, erector-set lighthouses and uninviting outcrops of seaweed and coral are being - in effect - Botoxed up like an ageing actor to simulate fresh faces of sovereignty justifying exclusivity claims. The Chinese are by far the most proactive of the geopolitical plastic surgeons, but almost everyone else is playing some game or other. But it's all China's fault, don't you just know?

With something like 1.4 billion mouths to feed, China's lunge to beat others to resources is hardly a sign of irrationality - it might even be a symptom of a massive survival instinct. Consider that China has to feed, house and keep employed more people than Indonesia by a factor of five. This cannot be the easiest task in the history of governance. This is certainly not a case of Russia grabbing Crimea. This is a nation with 22 per cent of the global population trying to grab three meals a day.

The tensions between China and its neighbours are substantive enough. One is the issue of who should have access to what oceanic resources - and by what reasonable process. Another is who owns what shoal or what cluster of sand or dumb rock so as to claim sovereign undersea rights in the area.

And a third factor is the role of the US, which is starting to surface like some great white whale. It has no real territory to speak of, but operates many bases in the Pacific, has a small school of treaty partners, and harbours the growing suspicion that China's rise looks to be less peaceful, as famously bannered by Beijing, than potent. (Superpowers worry about others' potency.) It worries that China's tactical shoring up of shoals has the strategic aim of blocking vital shipping lanes.

Let's look at these issues one by one. First, we accept that the sovereignty issues will not be resolved in the near future. Too many lines have been drawn in the sand and around the shoals; too many publics have been riled. After all, China dredged up that nine-dash line of sovereignty that, at first glance, looks to take in almost everything under the South China Sea sun.