Into this heated atmosphere came Obama, who flew to Phnom Penh for Tuesday's expanded East Asia Summit, in which the 10 ASEAN countries were joined by eight other nations, including China and the United States. "We do not want to give over emphasis to the territorial disputes and differences, and we don't think it's a good idea to spread a sense of tension in this region," Wen Jiabao told the summit, according to Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Fu Ying. The potentially oil- and gas-rich South China Sea islands and waters are contested by China, Taiwan and four ASEAN members _ Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam. There have been several recent standoffs involving boats and other shows of force, particularly between China and the Philippines, which both claim ownership of the Spratly Islands, a spray of tiny South China Sea atolls. Their latest diplomatic confrontation occurred a few hours before Obama touched down Monday in the Cambodian capital, when Hun Sen announced as he was closing a meeting that all ASEAN leaders had agreed not to discuss the divisive issue in talks between the 10-nation bloc and China. In July, after a foreign ministers' meeting also hosted by Cambodia, the group failed to publicly issue a traditional after-conference communique _ an embarrassing failure that was a first in ASEAN's 45-year history.
– President Obama is in Cambodia today, meeting with East Asian leaders amid a contentious territorial dispute over the South China Sea. Speaking publicly, neither Obama nor Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao responded to reporters' shouted questions about the tensions, the BBC reports. Instead, Obama referred to a "cooperative and constructive approach" to relations between the US and China, though he cited a need for "clear rules of the road" on trade. But the summit (which joins the 10 ASEAN countries with eight other nations, including China and the US) was expected to focus on the territorial issues. To wit, the AP reports that behind closed doors, the Chinese and Philippine leaders pressed their territorial claims while others called for restraint. Those two countries, along with Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei, all have claims to a portion of the South China Sea, while China and Japan disagree over control of islands in the East China Sea. Trade talks between the East Asian countries, as well as Australia and New Zealand, were expected to be another focus of the summit.