The South China Sea (45 page)

Chinese officials privately recognise the legal absurdity of maintaining a claim to places like the James Shoal, which lie under water and within the EEZ of another country. Chinese diplomats are also reported to have given assurances to Indonesia that Beijing has no claim on the waters around the Natunas, even though they are partly enclosed within the ‘U-shaped line’. But those same officials say they cannot formally adjust the ‘U-shaped line’
for political reasons – the domestic criticism would be too great – so they must continue to maintain their claim. Some of this is the calculated result of political propaganda: deliberately bolstering the government's position abroad by spreading the message that it is under pressure at home. But it's clear that some of the risk is genuine. A ‘retreat’ from China's current position would provoke a howl of popular criticism. How then could a Chinese population be persuaded to take a different view of the history of the South China Sea?

Perhaps one answer lies in Taiwan. The chances of a freer debate on Chinese history are much greater in Taiwan than on the mainland. There are already a number of ‘dissident’ academics rethinking aspects of twentieth-century history. Taiwan is also where the archives of the Republic of China, the government that first drew up the ‘U-shaped line’, are stored. An open and thorough examination of the haphazard process through which the line came to be drawn might convince opinion-formers to re-examine some of the nationalist myths they have long declared to be gospel truth. Perhaps the strongest reason for starting in Taiwan is that the authorities in Beijing fear that any concession they might make would be loudly criticised in Taipei. As Professor Zha Daojiong of Peking University explained, ‘it's simple, it's the Communists versus the KMT’. If the Kuomintang or KMT government, the rulers of Taiwan, were to de-escalate the historiographical conflict in the South China Sea, it would be much easier for the Beijing government to do the same. The key to a peaceful future could lie in an honest and critical examination of the past.

Epilogue

I
N
M
ARCH
2014, immediately after the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, vessels from Vietnam, China, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and the United States scoured parts of the South China Sea for survivors. It was an unprecedented example of maritime cooperation. If the presumed crash site had been further south and east, however, the world might have been treated to an unseemly international argument as China insisted that it must lead any search and rescue mission within the ‘U-shaped line’ and other countries refused to cooperate for fear of legitimising the Chinese sovereignty claim. Instead, in a part of the Sea where territorial claims have been largely resolved, all sides worked together harmoniously.

Optimists might hope that such episodes could lead to a new era of cohabitation within the South China Sea: a virtuous circle of growing trust and building confidence. Practical cooperation is always welcome and would certainly be a step in the right direction but so long as the underlying disputes remain unresolved, the territorial question will continue to threaten peace. Within two months of MH370's disappearance, however, cooperation had turned to conflict as Vietnam resisted China's efforts to drill for oil off the Paracel Islands. The region again seemed to be headed towards potentially catastrophic confrontation. The threat stems both from the possibility that one claimant might use force to evict another from some
remote atoll and also from the chance that strategic jostling between China and the United States could create enough friction to ignite an unexpected blaze. The consequences of conflagration in one domain would quickly spread to the other and turn a virtuous circle into a vicious one.

If there were no islands in the South China Sea there would be no issue. There would be no land territory to occupy, no sense that this land belonged to anyone, no basis upon which to claim large areas of sea, no means to potentially close a vital international sea lane or trigger a contest over strategic access. But these specks of land, from which flow historical arguments and modern maritime zones, form the stage for an international chest-beating contest in which the status of a country, or rather the elite that runs that country, will be judged, abroad but more importantly at home, upon its public performance. We have entered a world in which psychology and perception trump any material calculations about the practical benefits and costs of owning these maritime features.

Some observers view the Chinese claim in the South China Sea as simply a huge bluff in a game of strategic poker that has enabled Beijing to get a seat at the table and impress the watching audiences. I believe the problem runs deeper than that. From primary school to politburo, the ‘U-shaped line’ has become a secular religion. This myth, with its origins in China's confused transition from empire to republic, will be difficult to dispel. While the fates of faraway rocks can be the perfect foil for leaders in need of distractions from domestic problems, the higher that governments raise the rhetorical stakes the more difficult they will find it to climb down and reach a settlement. The ‘U-shaped line’ will continue to poison relationships in Southeast Asia. The politicised map-making of nationalist cartographers over the last century has become a threat to the chances of a new ‘Asian Century’ bringing rising prosperity to billions of people.

There are clearly some within the Chinese leadership who would like to change the terms of the dispute and reach an accommodation based upon the principles of UNCLOS. But there are more powerful lobbies that, for reasons of prestige or profit, insist upon the maximalist claim. These domestic interests, particularly the military, oil companies and a few coastal provinces, pursue actions that pose threats to Southeast Asia's food, energy and political security. These actions threaten the credibility of Beijing's professed policy of ‘peaceful rise’ yet the central leadership seems
unwilling to rein in its subordinates. For the time being, the legitimacy of the Communist Party leadership depends more upon the approval of these lobbies than on the approbation of the outside world. Yet the further the lobbies lead Chinese policy down this road, the stronger will be the perception among neighbouring countries of a ‘Chinese threat’ and the greater their desire to take counterbalancing steps – whether through an indigenous military build-up or closer links with the United States or both. China's overall strategic interests are being jeopardised by junior actors within its Party-state.

All could yet be well: China could rise peacefully, Southeast Asia could look northeast without fear and the US and China could reach an accommodation about maritime access – if only China could abandon its claim to the whole of the ‘U-shaped line’. If, however, the Chinese military starts to believe its own propaganda and attempt to enforce a territorial claim within the ‘U-shaped line’, the result would be a head-on confrontation with the US. For the time being, given their relative strengths, that's highly unlikely. But how long will it be before the Chinese military leadership begins to think that it might be able to prevail? For the sake of world peace, the disputes in the South China Sea need to be resolved before then.

China is a relatively new actor on the international stage. For decades it chose isolation over engagement and its foreign policy was more often an extension of domestic power battles than the fruit of a coherent conception of the outside world. That changed under Deng Xiaoping and, to the surprise of many sceptics, since the 1980s China's leadership has pursued integration with the wider world on terms it would once have regarded as imperialist or, at the very least, bourgeois. China is still learning how to play this new role and the South China Sea is where it must make some hard decisions about the relative importance of domestic and international priorities. Adjusting its sense of entitlement to fit modern norms will not be easy.

I started writing this book because I believed, like many other people, that some kind of conflict in or around the South China Sea was imminent. In the very last phase of my research I changed my mind. I became convinced that the Chinese leadership understands that it can only lose from a shooting war, although it views everything short of war as a useful policy tool. I expect that, from time to time over the coming decades,
low-level confrontation will escalate into periods of diplomatic and military crisis and perhaps even superpower confrontation. During the course of my research I have seen a new world being forged around the South China Sea. China is emerging, the United States is retrenching and Southeast Asia is adjusting to the new realities. Reams of analogy have been mobilised to describe this new world. In particular, there's been much talk about the ancient Mediterranean and the inevitable confrontation between a declining Sparta and a rising Athens, analogous to the new world of the South China Sea.

However, there is nothing inevitable about the next phase in the history of the South China Sea. For all the bluster – on both sides of the Pacific – about China's growing capabilities, a cold empirical analysis of the relative strengths of the two militaries, and the societies behind them, makes the United States the dominant power into the foreseeable future. Instead I offer an alternative Mediterranean analogy: one that offers a richer prospect. It's a semi-enclosed Sea with a shared history and a connected present whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It will be a Sea with agreed boundaries based upon universal principles and governed by shared responsibilities to use its resources most wisely, a Sea where fish stocks are managed collectively for the benefit of all, where the impacts of oil exploration and international shipping are alleviated and where search and rescue operations can take place unimpeded. It could happen – if a line is redrawn.

Notes

Introduction

1.
United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Article 121.

Chapter 1: Wrecks and Wrongs: Prehistory to 1500

1.
Atholl Anderson, ‘Slow Boats from China: Issues in the Prehistory of Indo-Pacific Seafaring’, in Sue O'Connor and Peter Veth (eds),
East of Wallace's Line: Studies of Past and Present Maritime Cultures of the Indo-Pacific Region
(Rotterdam, 2000) (
Modern Quaternary Research in Southeast Asia
, vol. 16), 13–50, plus personal communication.

2.
‘Historical Evidence to Support China's Sovereignty over Nansha Islands’, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, People's Republic of China, 17 November 2000. Available at <
http://www.coi.gov.cn/scs/article/z.htm
>

3.
Pierre-Yves Manguin, ‘Trading Ships of the South China Sea’,
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
, vol. 36, no. 3 (1993), 253–80.

4.
Michael Churchman, ‘Before Chinese and Vietnamese in the Red River Plain: The Han–Tang Period’,
Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies
, vol. 4 (2010), 25–37.

5.
Pye, Lucian W. “China: Erratic State, Frustrated Society.”
Foreign Affairs
. 1 Sept. 1990. Web. 17 July 2014. <
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/45998/lucian-w-pye/china-erratic-state-frustrated-society
>.

6.
Wilhelm Solheim,
Archaeology and Culture in Southeast Asia: Unraveling the Nusantao
(Quezon City 2007), 74.

7.
Derek Heng,
Sino-Malay Trade and Diplomacy from the Tenth Through the Fourteenth Century
(Athens, Ohio, 2007).

8.
Personal interview. Singapore 1 June 2012.

9.
Kate Taylor, ‘Treasures Pose Ethics Issues for Smithsonian’,
New York Times
, 24 April 2011.

10.
Personal interview. Singapore 1 June 2012.

11.
The origins of the word ‘China’ seem to come from Southeast Asia. See Chapter 3 of Anthony Reid,
Imperial Alchemy: Nationalism and Political Identity in Southeast Asia
(Cambridge, 2011), and Geoff Wade, ‘The Polity of Yelang and the Origins of the Name “China”’,
Sino-Platonic Papers
, no. 188 (May 2009). Available at <
http://www.sino-platonic.org
>.

12.
Geoff Wade, ‘An Early Age of Commerce in Southeast Asia, 900–1300
CE
’,
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies
, vol. 40 (2009), 221–65.

13.
Personal email. 12 December 2013.

14.
Quoted in Geoff Wade, ‘The Zheng He Voyages: A Reassessment’,
ARI Working
Paper, no. 31 (October 2004). Available at <
http://www.ari.nus.edu.sg/docs/wps/wps04_031.pdf
>.

15.
Ibid.

16.
Zhang Wei, ‘The Problems Encounter [
sic
] in the Protection of UCH [underwater cultural heritages]’, paper delivered at the 15th ICOMOS General Assembly and Scientific Symposium in Xi'an, China, 17–21 October 2005. Available at <
http://www.international.icomos.org/xian2005/papers/4-45.pdf
>.

17.
Jeff Adams, ‘The Role of Underwater Archaeology in Framing and Facilitating the Chinese National Strategic Agenda’, in Tami Blumenfield and Helaine Silverman (eds),
Cultural Heritage Politics in China
(New York, 2013), 261–82.

18.
‘China Starts Building Base for Researching Underwater Relics’,
Xinhua
, 17 March 2012.

19.
‘On China's Sovereignty over Xisha and Nansha Islands’,
Beijing Review
, 24 August 1979, 24.

20.
Chi-Kin Lo,
China's Policy Towards Territorial Disputes: The Case of the South China Sea Islands
(London, 1989), 94.

Chapter 2: Maps and Lines: 1500 to 1948

1.
Robert Batchelor, ‘The Selden Map Rediscovered: A Chinese Map of East Asian Shipping Routes,
c
.1619’,
Imago Mundi
, vol. 65 (2013), 37–63. For an alternative account of how the map might have reached England, see Timothy Brook's
Mr Selden's Map of China: The Spice Trade, a Lost Chart and the South China Sea
(Rotterdam, 2014).