To amend the preamble.

SA 1819. Mr. REID (for Mrs. Feinstein) proposed an amendment to the resolution S. Res. 167, reaffirming the strong support of the United States for the peaceful resolution of territorial, sovereignty, and jurisdictional disputes in the Asia-Pacific maritime domains; as follows:

Insert after the third whereas clause of the preamble the following:

Whereas although the United States does not take a position on competing territorial claims over land features and maritime boundaries, it does have a strong and long-standing interest in the manner in which disputes in the South China Sea are addressed and in the conduct of the parties;

Insert after the ninth whereas clause of the preamble the following:

Whereas, on June 21, 2013, the Governments of the People's Republic of China and Vietnam announced that they had agreed to set up and use an emergency fishery hotline to inform each other of any detainment involving fishermen or boats within 48 hours, to help quickly resolve disputes and as part of efforts to prevent future incidents from derailing ties, and the Governments of the People's Republic of China and Indonesia on May 2, 2013, agreed to establish a hotline for incidents in their disputed waters;

In the thirteenth whereas clause of the preamble, strike “declaring the Senakaku Islands a “core interest”,”.

Insert after the thirteenth whereas clause of the preamble the following:

Whereas, on April 27, 2013, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, was quoted as saying, “The Diaoyu Islands are about sovereignty and territorial integrity. Of course it's China's core interest.”;

In the seventeenth whereas clause of the preamble, strike “; and” and insert a semicolon.

In the eighteenth whereas clause of the preamble, strike the colon at the end and insert a semicolon.

Insert after the eighteenth whereas clause of the preamble the following:

Whereas ASEAN and China announced on June 30, 2013, that official consultations on a Code of Conduct in the South China Sea will commence at the 6th Senior Officials' Meeting and the 9th Joint Working Group on the Implementation of the Declaration of Conduct of the Parties in the SCS, to be held in China in September 2013; Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi reaffirmed that China was willing to advance talks on a code of conduct as part of a “continual, gradual and deepening process”; and Secretary of State John F. Kerry, participating in the ASEAN Regional Forum Ministerial Meeting on July 2, 2013, expressed the hope that announcement of official consultations between ASEAN and China would be the beginning of sustained and substantive official engagement between the two on developing the new Code of Conduct; and

Whereas, from June 17-20, 2013, the 10 ASEAN members and their dialogue partners Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, South Korea, and the United States jointly participated in the First ASEAN Defense Ministers' Meeting Plus Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) and Military Medicine (MM) exercise, helping to establish a new pattern of cooperation among the militaries of the Asia-Pacific: