南海区域合作的法律困境及对策研究

The Legal Dilemma in the Regional Cooperation in the South China Sea and Its Countermeasures

南海区域合作在全球层面、区域层面和双边层面都具有一定的法律基础,但这些法律基础较为薄弱,从法律性质看,绝大多数属于软法,硬法严重缺位;从合作领域看,主要集中在环境保护等低敏感领域,合作的范围比较狭窄;从合作的密切程度看,南海区域合作缺少有效的机制约束,表现出较强的随意性。因此,南海区域合作需要进一步强化,从软法合作过渡到硬法合作;从低敏感合作发展到深层次合作;从松散型合作转变到紧密型合作。

While there are some legal foundations for the international, regional and bilateral cooperation in the South China Sea, they tend to be much weak. Most of them belong to the soft law and lack in the hard one from the perspective of legal nature. In terms of cooperative fields, the scope of cooperation is narrowly limited in the environmental protection and other less sensitive fields. In terms of the intimate degree of cooperation, the regional cooperation in this area lacks the constraints of effective mechanism, showing a strong tendency of randomness. Therefore, the regional cooperation in the South China Sea should be further enhanced through the trans- formation from the soft-law cooperation to the hard-law one, from the low sensitive to the deep and from the loose to the tight.