The South China Sea (12 page)

In May 2009, the Chinese authorities attached a map of the ‘U-shaped line’ to its submission to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, the first time it had ever used the line in an official international context. The response around the region was angry and vociferous. It showed how far ideas about boundaries and borders had shifted since an unknown Chinese cartographer drew the ‘Selden Map’ nearly 400 years before. The idea of drawing fixed lines on maps to demarcate political allegiance would have been nonsensical then and the idea that the sea could be ‘owned’ just ridiculous. These are all concepts that emerged in seventeenth-century Europe and were brought to Southeast
Asia by trading companies and empires. The Europeans drew new maps and then new lines and in the process spread new ways of thinking about both. It was the transition from one set of ideas to the other, from the
mandala
system to the Westphalian system, that left a legacy of historical confusion and, in the years since the ‘U-shaped line’ was published, spawned a rush for territory in the South China Sea.

CHAPTER 3

Danger and Mischief

1946 to 1995

I
MMEDIATELY AFTER THE
end of the Second World War, for just over a year, none of the Paracel or Spratly islands was occupied or controlled by anyone. But 50 years later, almost all of them were. There was not one single battle for control nor was the transition slow and steady; there were intense episodes in 1946–7, 1956, the early 1970s, 1988 and 1995 when actions by one side usually triggered reactions from others. Each time the original occupation was driven by a particular vision – of nationalistic legitimacy, strategic advantage or economic reward – but none delivered the expected results.

Chiang Kai-shek's vision was to use the islands to bolster his leadership in the face of the advances by Communist forces. He saw an opportunity to demonstrate his fitness to rule China by standing up to the Westerners who had once ravaged the country. In the closing months of 1946 his government despatched its newly acquired decommissioned US warships to stake a Chinese claim. His adversary would be a former monk turned naval admiral, Georges Thierry d'Argenlieu. Admiral d'Argenlieu had served France with distinction during the First World War but then adopted the cassock and sandals of a Catholic monastic order. He served the order with distinction too, becoming its head in France. However in September 1939, with the country facing the threat of German invasion, Father d'Argenlieu hung up his cassock, re-rendered his services to Caesar and rejoined the navy.

D'Argenlieu rose through the upper ranks of the Free French forces, serving as General de Gaulle's envoy and commander on missions to France's remaining colonies in Africa and Asia. Honours and promotion followed and in mid-August 1945 de Gaulle put him in charge of restoring French control in Indochina. The colony was in turmoil: Japan surrendered, a Communist-led revolution followed and Ho Chi Minh became president of the new ‘Democratic Republic of Vietnam’ which he proclaimed on 2 September. Meanwhile Chinese units began to move in from the north while British forces landed in the south. The Brits used Japanese troops to quell the local revolution and handed the colony over to d'Argenlieu. The admiral was no liberation theologist. In uniform his guiding belief was an all-encompassing devotion to the French empire.
¹
Clever but ultra-conservative, one critic joked that he possessed ‘the most brilliant mind of the twelfth century’.
²

Throughout 1945 and 1946 d'Argenlieu worked hard to undermine both the Vietnamese nationalists and the politicians back in Paris who favoured compromise with them. Tricky negotiations ensued between d'Argenlieu, the French government, Ho Chi Minh's nationalists and the Chinese nationalist government. The French and Vietnamese both wanted the Chinese to leave but couldn't agree on much else. D'Argenlieu wouldn't even use the word ‘Vietnam’, preferring the colonial name ‘Annam’.
³
The political situation became worse as d'Argenlieu pursued his own agenda. In June 1946 he proclaimed the creation of a rival ‘Republic of Cochin-China’, destroying Paris’ hopes of a peaceful compromise with Ho Chi Minh's ‘Vietnam’. Amid the infighting, the fate of the Paracel Islands, a couple of hundred kilometres off the coast, slipped down the agenda.

Unlike the better-known Spratlys, most of the Paracels are proper islands: dry enough to sustain human habitation. They lie about 350 kilometres south of Hainan Island and about the same distance east of Danang and have been used by fisher-folk and pirates from the Chinese and Vietnamese coasts and beyond for centuries. The Paracels are divided into two clusters. The northwestern Amphitrite group (named after the French ship that ‘discovered’ them in 1698)
⁴
has six islands (including the imaginatively named Woody, Rocky and Tree islands along with South, Middle and North islands). The largest, Woody, is nearly 2 kilometres long and just over 1 kilometre wide. A seventh island, Lincoln, is sometimes
included in the group. The Crescent group lies 64 kilometres southwest of the Amphitrites and contains a further seven islands: Pattle and Robert are the most significant. The others are: Triton, Duncan, Money, Drummond and Passu Keah. During the war French, ‘Annamite’ and then Japanese forces had occupied the islands – sometimes at the same times. But by late 1945 they were empty.

A year later, rumours of a Chinese plan to annex the islands reached Paris and on 22 October 1946 the Minister of Overseas France ordered d'Argenlieu to send a garrison to occupy the Paracels. D'Argenlieu ignored him and decided instead to teach the Vietnamese nationalists ‘a lesson’ for daring to resist French rule. On 23 November 1946, following clashes between French and Vietnamese forces in the port of Haiphong, d'Argenlieu ordered the cruiser
Suffren
and four other ships to shell the city. The bombardment levelled several districts and killed around 6,000 Vietnamese. Retaliation was not long coming. On 19 December, street fighting between the French and the Vietnamese rebels erupted in Hanoi. The first phase of the Vietnam War had begun. If d'Argenlieu had sent the
Suffren
to the Paracels instead, as Paris had ordered him to do, history might have been different.

D'Argenlieu was now so preoccupied with the war he had just started that he refused a further request from Paris to occupy the Paracels ‘without delay’, citing bad weather. The historian Stein Tønnesson has tracked down what happened next. The weather didn't dent Chiang Kai-shek's ambitions. His Chinese government despatched its new warships to the South China Sea. On 4 January 1947, the minesweeper
Yongxing
(formerly the USS
Embattle
) and the
Zhongjian
(formerly USS LST–716) landed around 60 Chinese troops on Woody Island. By this time d'Argenlieu had finally despatched a rival expedition aboard the ship
Tonkinois
. When the French arrived, two weeks after the Chinese, their captain attempted to bribe – and then force – the Chinese to leave, even firing shots in the air.
⁵
The Chinese held out and a furious diplomatic row erupted between the two governments. France backed down and ordered its ship to sail away and deploy troops on Pattle Island in the Crescent group instead. Nationalist China had its victory and France could only watch.

While the historical and legal arguments about the Paracels’ sovereignty date back much further than 1947, it's possible that if d'Argenlieu had
followed his instructions and occupied Woody Island before China did, the islands would still be in Vietnamese hands today. Within six weeks, then, Admiral d'Argenlieu's bellicose choice of priorities had condemned Vietnam to three decades of war and also to an enduring antagonism with China about the fate of the Paracels. The French government was livid and shortly afterwards sacked d'Argenlieu. While the war he'd started raged on, he returned to God and the Carmelites. He lived out the remaining years of his life with the order, finally passing away in 1967 at a monastery in Brittany.

After January 1947, rival claimants occupied the two halves of the Paracels: nationalist Chinese on Woody Island and Franco-Vietnamese on Pattle Island. But Chiang Kai-shek's island victory was pyrrhic. His position continued to weaken and his government was forced to flee to Taiwan. In 1950 the Communists captured Hainan Island and the nationalists chose to withdraw their forces from Woody Island and also from Itu Aba in the Spratlys. The colonial French meteorology service in Indochina noted that weather reports from the two islands ceased on 4 and 5 May 1950 respectively.
⁶
France knew the islands had been abandoned but never occupied them, partly for fear of provoking unnecessary diplomatic rows with Taipei and Beijing but mainly because they had a more pressing war to fight on the mainland.

For five years after May 1950, Pattle Island was the only South China Sea feature to be occupied by any country. The US, Britain and France controlled the waters, particularly during the Korean War that began in June 1950. Beijing simply didn't have the means to contest their supremacy. That didn't mean it had abandoned its claims, however, and by 1955 Communist Chinese units were established on Woody Island. Mao Zedong's forces had quietly trumped Chiang Kai-shek's proud gesture. But rather than a flag-waving expedition, their interest was more down to earth: to mine guano as fertiliser for the paddy fields back home. Chiang Kai-shek's vision for the islands had turned to excrement.

* * * * * *

Tomas Cloma's vision for the islands also featured guano – in conjunction with canned fish – but his dream was more personal: to make a fortune.
Just 165 centimetres tall, what he lacked in height he made up in ambition. He left his native island of Bohol to work as a tailor's assistant in Manila, put himself through high school, got a job as a telegraph operator, then as a freight broker and then, in 1933, as assistant shipping editor for the
Manila Bulletin
newspaper. He wrote about shipping movements by day and studied law by night, eventually passing his bar exams in 1941. Within months, though, his putative legal career had been destroyed by Japan's invasion of the Philippines. To feed and clothe his family, Cloma went to sea for three years, using his Boholano fishing skills to sail passengers and cargo between the islands. The family survived the war and life was just starting to get better when Cloma's six-year-old son Basilio was killed in a traffic accident in the city of Calamba. Tomas’ heart-broken wife, Luz, stopped going to church. Tomas buried his grief in his work.

In March 1947 Tomas and Luz Cloma, along with his brother Filemon and three friends, formed the Visayan Fish Corporation. With the compensation money they received after Basilio's death they converted some decommissioned US military tugs into fishing boats. They hired experienced crews and set them to work. Business was good but Tomas was always quick to see other opportunities. When, in September 1948, the government-run Philippine Nautical School (PNS) was closed by a strike, Cloma set up the rival Philippine Maritime Institute (PMI). It offered three-month courses, only half the length of those at the PNS, from a cut-price base: a barge near the mouth of the Pasig River in Manila. After a while the institute moved to a fishing boat that gave on-the-job training (while also providing the Visayan Fish Corporation with cheap labour). Within 18 months the institute had been formally recognised by the government and had classrooms on dry land. Another idea came from a near disaster. In 1947 Filemon had been fishing off Palawan when Typhoon Jennie, one of the strongest storms on record, forced him to seek shelter among a mysterious group of offshore islands. Over the following years, the brothers made plans to open a fish-canning factory there and also mine the guano.

In later accounts of their adventures Tomas Cloma would say that he checked various maps but could find nothing that mentioned the islands. Even today, Cloma is often described in the Philippines as the man who ‘discovered’ the islands. But Cloma must have known this wasn't true. It seems unlikely that a man who had worked as an assistant shipping editor
on a national newspaper for eight years, and as an international freight broker before that, would have not known about the reefs and islands lying off the country's coast.

Cloma may have claimed to be ignorant of the Spratly Islands but his government had been well aware of their existence for some time. Remembering that they had been used as a jumping-off point for the Japanese invasion, local newspapers had been pressing for government action to secure them. In July 1946, immediately after the Philippines became independent of the United States, the then Vice-President and Foreign Secretary, Elpido Quirino, told a press conference that the Philippines would claim the islands as essential to its security.
⁷
On 17 May 1950, by which time he was president, Quirino declared that the islands belonged to the Philippines but added that the country would not press its claim so long as nationalist (Taiwanese) Chinese forces remained in control. He can't have been aware that they'd actually left 12 days earlier. Things would be different – he warned – if the Communists moved in. Strangely, however, the Philippines did not press its claim at the San Francisco peace conference in 1951.
⁸
It's hard to believe that Cloma was unaware of all these developments.

Cloma had a key ally, Carlos P. Garcia, another Boholano, with whom he had been at high school. Garcia was elected to the Senate in 1946 and became Vice-President and Foreign Minister in 1953. Cloma and his brother organised fund-raising for Garcia's election campaigns and – says Filemon's son – Garcia provided government contracts and other favours in return.
⁹
This connection would become crucial as Cloma manoeuvred himself ever deeper into the murky waters of international politics.

There's evidence to suggest the Clomas were engaged in smuggling and, in 1955, Filemon was jailed for six months for stockpiling small arms and explosives. He was freed in that year's Christmas amnesty, however, and the plotting to claim the islands continued.
¹⁰
On 1 March 1956 Vice-President Garcia was the guest of honour at a send-off dinner for Filemon's occupation party.
¹¹
Garcia failed to persuade the rest of President Magsaysay's government to support the Clomas but the mission set off anyway. On 15 March, Filemon and his merry band landed on the islands.
¹²
Two months later, on 15 May, Tomas sent letters to Garcia and several embassies in Manila claiming for himself a hexagonal area of
sea off the coast of Palawan totalling 64,976 square miles and all the islands, reefs and cays within it (Spratly Island itself was deliberately left out of the claim). He based the claim ‘on the rights of discovery and/or occupation’. Then, six days later, he issued a second notice declaring he had named the territory, tautologically, as ‘The Free Territory of Freedomland’.