KUALA LUMPUR — On May 21, 2026, senior officials from ASEAN member states and China convened in Kuala Lumpur for the 26th ASEAN-China Senior Officials’ Meeting on the Implementation of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea. The agenda was familiar: advance negotiations toward a binding Code of Conduct that both parties have pledged to conclude since 2002. The context was not. Forty-eight hours earlier, Chinese coast guard and maritime militia vessels had once again confronted Philippine resupply ships attempting to reach the grounded BRP Sierra Madre at Second Thomas Shoal — the latest in a cycle of confrontation that has no durable resolution and no absent resolution mechanism.
The International Business Times reported on May 19 that Philippine Coast Guard escort vessels encountered what Manila described as “illegal, aggressive and destabilizing” actions from China Coast Guard and Chinese Maritime Militia ships during a resupply mission to the Sierra Madre. Philippine officials confirmed the mission succeeded — supplies reached the garrison — but the encounter underscored a structural problem that no communiqués from Kuala Lumpur have been able to solve. China claims most of the South China Sea under its expansive “nine-dash line” doctrine. A 2016 international arbitration ruling seated in The Hague ruled that claim inconsistent with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Beijing does not recognise that ruling. Manila does. And in the space between those two positions, the South China Sea remains what maritime analyst Nazery Khalid described to Bernama: a vital route for regional trade and imported energy flows that both sides understand is too important to let erupt into open conflict — but insufficiently governed to prevent the low-grade friction that erodes trust with every incident.
The COC negotiations have been ongoing for more than two decades. ASEAN and China had set a target of concluding a substantive, legally binding agreement by the end of 2026. Officials have accelerated the pace — monthly face-to-face technical meetings since early 2026, a direct response to the urgency that officials and analysts alike describe as no longer deferrable. Yet the consensus model that governs ASEAN’s negotiating posture gives each member state a veto over any language its government finds unacceptable. Cambodia and Laos, both close to Beijing, have historically softened language that would constrain Chinese behaviour. The result, as Professor Dr Adam Leong Kok Wey of the National Defence University of Malaysia observed, is that even a provisional COC would serve primarily as a confidence-building measure — a political signal rather than a legal instrument.
The Second Thomas Shoal standoff is instructive precisely because it lies inside the Philippines’ EEZ as defined by UNCLOS, a jurisdiction that China rejects and the arbitral tribunal affirmed. The Sierra Madre has been grounded on the shoal since 1999, a deliberate act of sovereignty assertion by Manila. Each resupply mission carries the same risk: a miscalculation, a water cannon discharge that causes casualties, an overreaction from either side that transforms a maritime patrol into an incident requiring escalation. The United States has stated clearly that its mutual defence treaty with the Philippines applies to attacks on Philippine forces in the South China Sea. Japan, through its own expanding defence cooperation with Manila and its Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement with the United States, has signalled increasing willingness to be drawn into scenarios it once treated as outside its scope.
The regional order, such as it is, rests on three overlapping and incomplete frameworks: the 2016 arbitral ruling (legally sound, politically contested), the DOC signed in 2002 (politically acknowledged, legally non-binding), and the pending COC (ambitious in target, uncertain in content). What exists between those instruments is a vacuum that the China Coast Guard and maritime militia operate in daily — below the threshold of kinetic conflict, above the threshold of acceptable sovereignty erosion. ASEAN’s Cebu Summit chair’s statement welcomed progress and reaffirmed the importance of concluding an agreement in line with international law, including UNCLOS. That language has appeared in communiqués before. It has not stopped the harassment at Second Thomas Shoal. It has not reversed Beijing’s construction programme on disputed features. It has not closed the gap between what ASEAN members collectively prefer and what any one of them will accept in a final text.
The honest assessment from Kuala Lumpur this week is that the COC, if concluded on schedule, will be a milestone — and an incomplete instrument. It will provide a framework for de-escalation that both sides will invoke when incidents occur. It will not prevent those incidents. The Sierra Madre will still need resupply. The CCG will still contest it. And ASEAN will still issue statements affirming principles that its own members interpret differently and whose enforcement mechanisms remain the unresolved question at the centre of every negotiation session.
