China’s Aggressive Expansionism Hits Archaeology

China Has Begun Asserting Ownership of Thousands of Shipwrecks in the South China Sea
By JEREMY PAGE

A replica of a treasure ship sailed by Zheng He about 600 years ago at a museum in Nanjing. 
Underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio's team was exploring the wreckage of a 13th-century Chinese junk off the coast of the Philippines when it made an unwelcome discovery about China's maritime muscle in the 21st century.
As a twin-prop plane swooped overhead, a Chinese marine-surveillance vessel approached the team's Philippines-registered ship and began broadcasting instructions in English over a loudspeaker.
"They said this area belonged to the People's Republic of China, and they told us to scram," recalls one of the people on board last year. 

"It was pretty scary." 

Chinese officials confirm the incident took place but say the archaeologists' mission was illegal.

A boatman paddles away from the Sarangani, a ship on which archaeologists became embroiled in a standoff with China, in Manila Bay.

With territorial disputes escalating in the waters off China, the Chinese government has begun asserting ownership of thousands of shipwrecks within a vast U-shaped area that covers almost all of the South China Sea, which it says has been part of its territorial waters for centuries.
China has ordered its coast guard to prevent what it considers illegal archaeology in the waters it claims, and it is pouring money into a state-run marine-archaeology program. 

Chinese archaeologists are preparing their first comprehensive survey of undersea sites, including in disputed areas.
Chinese officials say their efforts will curb the theft and treasure hunting they say has destroyed numerous sites and flooded the global market with looted Chinese antiquities.

There is a political dimension to China's plans. 

Chinese archaeologists openly aspire to bolster their country's historical claims to the contested South China Sea, which overlap with those of Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines.
"We want to find more evidence that can prove Chinese people went there and lived there, historical evidence that can help prove China is the sovereign owner of the South China Sea," says Liu Shuguang, head of the Chinese government's Center of Underwater Cultural Heritage, set up in 2009 to oversee underwater archaeology in the country.
Tensions have been running high in the region over China's intensifying campaign to assert territorial claims, not only in the South China Sea, but in the East China Sea, which is contested by Japan. 

On Nov. 23, China proclaimed a new air-defense identification zone over Japanese Senkaku islands.
The South China Sea, one of the world's busiest trading routes, is littered with wrecks from the last two millennia, including Chinese junks, Indian and Arab dhows, Dutch and British trading schooners and World War II warships. 

Chinese archaeologists say they have gathered coordinates for 70 shipwrecks in those waters but estimate there are at least 2,000, and possibly many more.

A team working with French underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio, shown in 2010, was exploring the wreckage of a 13th-century Chinese junk off the coast of the Philippines when a Chinese marine-surveillance vessel ordered them to leave the area. 

Mr. Goddio, a Frenchman who is one of the world's leading marine archaeologists, had worked in the area since the 1980s, excavating 15th-century Chinese junks, 16th-century Spanish galleons and 18th-century British merchant ships. 

In addition to the trip last year, his team had visited the cluster of reefs and rocks off the Philippines, called the Scarborough Shoal, in 2011. 

Both expeditions were part of a joint research project with the National Museum of the Philippines, which collaborates with foreign archaeologists because of a shortage of state funding.
Different countries refer to the disputed islands by different names.
People involved in the project say it has no political or commercial agenda. 

During last year's trip, they say, they were examining pieces of celadon, a form of green-glazed ceramic, from a wreck that long ago broke apart on the sharp coral.
Chinese officials see ulterior motives.
"The Philippines sent some French archaeologists to do what? To drag away this shipwreck," says Mr. Liu of China's Center of Underwater Cultural Heritage. 

"Because this was material evidence that Chinese people first found the Scarborough Shoal, they wanted to destroy evidence that was beneficial to China." 

The archaeologists deny that.
Chinese archaeologists haven't started excavating sites at the Scarborough Shoal, but they have begun work on Chinese wrecks around the Paracel Islands, which lie about 200 miles from the coasts of China and Vietnam and are claimed by both countries. 

China has controlled the islands since 1974, when it defeated Vietnam in a brief naval battle.

Mike Hatcher prepares to dive from his ship in the South China Sea in 1986. On the expedition he found the 'Nanking cargo,' a haul of Chinese porcelain and gold from the wreck of the Geldermalsen, an 18th-century Dutch East India Co. ship that raised more than $20 million at auction in Amsterdam. 

"Marine archaeology is an exercise that demonstrates national sovereignty," Li Xiaojie, the vice minister of culture, was quoted as saying by state media in September 2012 as he examined porcelain retrieved from a wreck off the Paracels.
Chinese archaeologists say the survey encompassing other disputed areas will begin this year or next.
They also say they hope to support the government's efforts to re-establish China as a world maritime power, by focusing their research on the "Maritime Silk Road," which connected China by sea with India and Africa beginning in about the second century B.C.
China's five-year plan for 2011 to 2015 calls for the government to promote a seafaring heritage embodied by Zheng He, a eunuch admiral who sailed an armada of treasure ships as far as Africa about 600 years ago. 

The admiral is celebrated in China as the face of an era when it projected power far beyond its shores.
Xi Jinping, China's new president, has repeatedly emphasized the importance of maritime power—at times invoking Zheng He—as part of a vision to reclaim China's world prominence.
Zhang Wei, one of China's first underwater archaeologists, says the nation is "extremely focused on being a great and strong maritime power," which he calls the "grand backdrop" to China's marine-archaeology program. 

The program was launched, he says, under the auspices of President Xi's father, who served as vice premier under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s.

Two enameled globular teapots painted with peony and bamboo below a border of trellis-pattern; the porcelain survived the wreck and lasted more than two centuries under the sea so well because it was packed inside the tea, which in turn was in wooden chests.

Mr. Zhang says interest was kindled by commercial treasure hunters who operated in the South China Sea. Among the most famous was Mike Hatcher, a Briton whose haul of Chinese porcelain from the wreck of the Geldermalsen, an 18th-century Dutch East India Co. ship that sank in the South China Sea, raised more than $20 million at auction in Amsterdam in 1986.
Chinese leaders dispatched two officials to that auction to try to buy some of the items with cash, according to Mr. Zhang. 

"They only took about $30,000, and they couldn't buy a single thing," he says.
China's National Museum established its Underwater Archaeology Center the following year and appointed Mr. Zhang to head it—mainly, he says, because he was one of the few Chinese archaeologists who could swim.
The first big find in Chinese waters—a roughly 800-year-old merchant ship named the Nanhai One—was made in 1987 while a British salvage company was searching for a Dutch East India Co. wreck. 

The British team was forced to withdraw after the Nanhai One was identified as a Chinese ship.
Since then, there has been almost no foreign participation in marine archaeology in China, according to Chinese and foreign archaeologists. 

And only Chinese wrecks have been excavated in Chinese waters.
Chinese authorities, meanwhile, have trained more than 100 marine archaeologists, built at least three underwater-archaeology museums and invested millions of dollars in research. 

On Thursday, they announced a new project to remove up to 80,000 artifacts from the Nanhai One, which was lifted off the seabed in 2007 and placed in a water tank in a museum.
Next year, China plans to launch a 184-foot ship designed for marine archaeology, the first of its kind in the country, according to state-media reports.
China also is funding joint projects in other countries' waters, focusing mostly on locating wrecks linked to Zheng He. 

Last year, Chinese archaeologists using sonar identified five wrecks they believe were part of his fleet in the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz, according to Chinese state media.
One reason Chinese authorities are so interested in tracing Zheng He's travels is that he is said to have visited several rocks and islands in the South China Sea.

Chinese archaeologists work with porcelain artifacts from the Nanhai One shipwreck, which dated back to the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279), in a structure in Yangjiang, China, in 2009.

Foreign experts say they welcome China's new willingness to invest in underwater archaeology and relish the prospect of learning more about sites in China's waters.
But they are concerned that a political agenda might be driving China's choice of sites, its exclusion of foreign archaeologists and its relative lack of openness about its research.
"There's this strong sense of nationalism that flows through the Chinese program," says Jeffrey L. Adams, an anthropologist at the University of Minnesota who has written about Chinese archaeology.
Foreign archaeologists mostly agree that Chinese-built ships and cargo account for many of the sites in the South China Sea because of the international trade in Chinese porcelain and silk.
But many of the wrecks lie far from the Chinese mainland, around the reefs and rocks off the coast of Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines, because ships used to hug those shores to help with navigation and avoid bad weather.
Even if a wreck isn't in a disputed area, tracing its national "ownership" is often complicated. 

A ship, its owner, its cargo and its crew all may have originated in different countries.
Internationally, the trend in recent years has been toward acknowledging "common heritage," pursuing joint excavation and sharing results among academics from different nations. 

A 2001 Unesco convention on underwater cultural heritage encouraged states to cooperate when they had a shared interest in a site, but offered no guidance on jurisdiction and no mechanism for dealing with sites in disputed areas.
"If there's a disputed site, what we recommend is just get together and don't get into a fight over it," says Ulrike Guerin, who oversees protection of underwater cultural heritage at Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. 

"If you look around the world now, the majority of projects are multinational ones."
None of the countries involved in the South China Sea disputes have ratified the Unesco convention. 

Only China has the resources to enforce its claims to wrecks in the area and to excavate them.
China did little to enforce those claims until March 2012, when the government announced its first-ever crackdown on illegal salvage and archaeological work in China's territorial waters.
The incident at the Scarborough Shoal occurred less than a month later.
China says the standoff stemmed from an incident that April when a Philippines navy ship detained some Chinese fishermen near the Scarborough Shoal. 

But Chinese officials also have made it clear they regarded Mr. Goddio's project as illegal.
The Chinese marine-surveillance ship that approached the archaeologists was one of three Chinese vessels that took turns monitoring them over the next week or so, according to two people on board the archaeologists' ship and accounts in Chinese state media.
A Philippines coast guard ship was sent to the area but kept its distance. 

A tense standoff ensued as Chinese and Filipino officials accused one another of violating territorial boundaries.
Eventually, on April 18, the archaeologists' ship was forced to leave, prompting a formal protest from the Philippines' government. 

China has had effective control of the area since then.
The team abandoned its project. Mr. Goddio declined to comment.

Neither he nor the National Museum of the Philippines has a track record of using finds to justify territorial or ownership claims. 

"We don't really care who owns the ship," says Sheldon Clyde B. Jago-on, the head of underwater archaeology at the National Museum of the Philippines. 

"It's our shared heritage. It should be about collaboration. We care about the trade patterns, the trade routes, the cargo, the boat building."
Some experts say the overlap between politics and archaeology is neither surprising nor unique to China. Vietnam is expanding investment in its state-run archaeological program, and this year its Institute of Archaeology opened an underwater-archaeology department.
One of Vietnam's first projects has obvious political resonance—excavation of the site of a naval battle in which Vietnamese forces defeated a Chinese army in 938 A.D., bringing an end to centuries of Chinese rule over Vietnam. 

That site is on a river inside Vietnam.
The Scarborough Shoal incident, by contrast, marked the first time a country in the region used force to stop another nation's underwater archaeological project, experts say.
"China has the largest navy and the ability to chase people off, and then follow up with archaeological work," says Mark Staniforth, a marine archaeologist at Australia's Monash University who is working with Vietnam's Institute of Archaeology. 

"There's no sense they want to cooperate or collaborate with anyone."

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China looks to redraw Asian airspace

      

By Demetri Sevastopulo in Hong Kong

When China created a controversial “air defence identification zone” last Saturday, it sparked alarm about the rising risk of Sino-Japanese conflict over the Senkaku Islands.
But while the focus has been on the Japanese chain, China also said in the same statement it “will establish other air defence identification zones at the right moment after necessary preparations are completed”, raising the spectre of tensions spreading across the region.

The Senkaku spat has attracted much attention over the past year because of the potential for war between Asia’s two biggest economies.
But China is engaged in a number of equally contentious territorial disputes with Southeast Asian nations – particularly the Philippines and Vietnam – over the resource-rich South China Sea.
Ian Storey, a security expert at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, said the most obvious candidates for any new Chinese air defence zones were the northern part of the South China Sea and the Yellow Sea.
Chinese maps often include a controversial “nine-dash line” that loops the South China Sea, running close to the coasts of Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia, and stretching south to Indonesia.
It first emerged in a 1947 Republic of China map that was later used by the Communist government of Mao Zedong when it came to power in 1949.
While some Chinese scholars say China does not claim the entire South China Sea, the use of the map has sparked concern among Southeast Asian nations.

China last year started issuing passports that included an image of the “nine-dash line”, provoking angry responses from Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Mr Storey said China would probably not create an ADIZ for the whole South China Sea, saying it would be “absolutely outrageous” if they included the whole area inside the “nine-dash line”.
Instead, he said China was more likely to establish a zone in the northern part of the sea, and particularly surrounding Hainan Island.
Hainan hosts the Chinese navy’s South Sea fleet – one of its three naval fleets – and also a new generation of nuclear submarines that are an increasingly important part of China’s naval capabilities in the South China Sea.
But Mr Storey added that creating an ADIZ over even some of the South China Sea would be “unnecessarily provocative” at a time when China is trying to reduce tensions with its Southeast Asian neighbours.

In October, Chinese President Xi Jinping took advantage of the absence of US President Barack Obama at the Apec summit in Indonesia to launch a charm offensive with Southeast Asian countries, including by floating the idea of creating an “Asian infrastructure bank” to promote development in the region.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang then embarked on a tour of Southeast Asia that was widely seen as an effort to repair relations.
The creation of an ADIZ over the South China Sea would be unlikely to generate the same kind of military response that occurred this week when the US flew B-52 bombers near the Senkaku without alerting China – mainly because, with the exception of Singapore, most Southeast Asian nations have limited air power.
But Gary Li, a senior analyst at IHS maritime, said a Chinese ADIZ in the northern South China Sea would be “very, very sensitive”.
He said it would almost certainly overlap with Vietnam’s ADIZ, which reaches north to about 100km from Hainan Island, and includes the disputed Paracel Islands.
Mr Li said the Yellow Sea was also a contender for a new Chinese ADIZ.
China has repeatedly criticised the US and South Korea for holding joint military exercises in the Yellow Sea, which lies between east China and the Korean peninsula, and particularly so when the US sails its aircraft carriers through the area.
Wu Shicun, president of the National Institute for South China Sea Studies in Hainan, a think-tank that advises the Chinese foreign ministry, said that while China had the right to create new zones, it would take its time.
“We cannot rule out the possibility of setting up new ADIZs, but not in the short term,” said Mr Wu.
“Given the strong reaction from the international community to the East China Sea ADIZ, China will further evaluate when and how to set up new ADIZs. But it will happen sooner or later, since it is related to its national security.”
Shi Yinhong, an international relations expert at Renmin University, agreed that China was unlikely to create a zone in the South China Sea anytime soon, mainly because Beijing does not see the same urgency, but he said that could change if “confrontations in the South China Sea escalate”.
China and Japan had for decades put the Senkaku dispute to the side.
But Beijing reacted angrily last year when Japan bought three of the islands from their private owner, in a move that sparked anti-Japan protests across China.
Mr Li said China probably decided to create an ADIZ – which other countries such as Japan and the US did long ago – because Tokyo has routinely pointed to the number of Chinese incursions into Japan’s zone as a way to rally public support.
“That caused the Chinese side to say we need to get one too. There is a huge PR war here,” said Mr Li.

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Historical Fiction: China’s South China Sea Claims

China uses folklore, myths, and legends, as well as pseudohistory, to bolster greater territorial and maritime claims. Since the end of the Second World War, China has been redrawing its maps, redefining borders, manufacturing historical evidence, using force to create new territorial realities, renaming islands, and seeking to impose its version of history on the waters of the region.

By Mohan Malik

The Spratly Islands—not so long ago known primarily as a rich fishing ground—have turned into an international flashpoint as Chinese leaders insist with increasing truculence that the islands, rocks, and reefs have been, in the words of Wen Jiabao, “China’s historical territory since ancient times.”

Normally, the overlapping territorial claims to sovereignty and maritime boundaries ought to be resolved through a combination of customary international law, adjudication before the International Court of Justice or the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, or arbitration under Annex VII of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). 

While China has ratified UNCLOS, the treaty by and large rejects “historically based” claims, which are precisely the type Beijing periodically asserts. 

On September 4, 2012, China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, told US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that there is “plenty of historical and jurisprudence evidence to show that China has sovereignty over the islands in the South China Sea and the adjacent waters.”
As far as the “jurisprudence evidence” is concerned, the vast majority of international legal experts have concluded that China’s claim to historic title over the South China Sea, implying full sovereign authority and consent for other states to transit, is invalid. 

The historical evidence, if anything, is even less persuasive. 

There are several contradictions in China’s use of history to justify its claims to islands and reefs in the South China Sea, not least of which is its polemical assertion of parallels with imperialist expansion by the United States and European powers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

Justifying China’s attempts to expand its maritime frontiers by claiming islands and reefs far from its shores, Jia Qingguo, professor at Beijing University’s School of International Studies, argues that China is merely following the example set by the West. 

“The United States has Guam in Asia which is very far away from the US and the French have islands in the South Pacific, so it is nothing new,” Jia told AFP recently.
China’s claim to the Spratlys on the basis of history runs aground on the fact that the region’s past empires did not exercise sovereignty. 

In pre-modern Asia, empires were characterized by undefined, unprotected, and often changing frontiers. The notion of suzerainty prevailed. 

Unlike a nation-state, the frontiers of Chinese empires were neither carefully drawn nor policed but were more like circles or zones, tapering off from the center of civilization to the undefined periphery of alien barbarians. 

More importantly, in its territorial disputes with neighboring India, Burma, and Vietnam, Beijing always took the position that its land boundaries were never defined, demarcated, and delimited. 

But now, when it comes to islands, shoals, and reefs in the South China Sea, Beijing claims otherwise. 

In other words, China’s claim that its land boundaries were historically never defined and delimited stands in sharp contrast with the stance that China’s maritime boundaries were always clearly defined and delimited. Herein lies a basic contradiction in the Chinese stand on land and maritime boundaries which is untenable. 

Actually, it is the mid-twentieth-century attempts to convert the undefined frontiers of ancient civilizations and kingdoms enjoying suzerainty into clearly defined, delimited, and demarcated boundaries of modern nation-states exercising sovereignty that lie at the center of China’s territorial and maritime disputes with neighboring countries. 

Put simply, sovereignty is a post-imperial notion ascribed to nation-states, not ancient empires.
China’s present borders largely reflect the frontiers established during the spectacular episode of eighteenth-century Qing (Manchu) expansionism, which over time hardened into fixed national boundaries following the imposition of the Westphalian nation-state system over Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

Official Chinese history today often distorts this complex history, however, claiming that Mongols, Tibetans, Manchus, and Hans were all Chinese, when in fact the Great Wall was built by the Chinese dynasties to keep out the northern Mongol and Manchu tribes that repeatedly overran Han China; the wall actually represented the Han Chinese empire’s outer security perimeter. 

While most historians see the onslaught of the Mongol hordes led by Genghis Khan in the early 1200s as an apocalyptic event that threatened the very survival of ancient civilizations in India, Persia, and other nations (China chief among them), the Chinese have consciously promoted the myth that he was actually “Chinese,” and therefore all areas that the Mongols (the Yuan dynasty) had once occupied or conquered (such as Tibet and much of Central and Inner Asia) belong to China.

China’s claims on Taiwan and in the South China Sea are also based on the grounds that both were parts of the Manchu empire. (Actually, in the Manchu or Qing dynasty maps, it is Hainan Island, not the Paracel and Spratly Islands, that is depicted as China’s southern-most border.) 

In this version of history, any territory conquered by “Chinese” in the past remains immutably so, no matter when the conquest may have occurred.
Such writing and rewriting of history from a nationalistic perspective to promote national unity and regime legitimacy has been accorded the highest priority by China’s rulers, both Nationalists and Communists. 

The Chinese Communist Party leadership consciously conducts itself as the heir to China’s imperial legacy, often employing the symbolism and rhetoric of empire. 

From primary-school textbooks to television historical dramas, the state-controlled information system has force-fed generations of Chinese a diet of imperial China’s grandeur. 

As the Australian Sinologist Geremie Barmé points out, “For decades Chinese education and propaganda have emphasized the role of history in the fate of the Chinese nation-state... While Marxism-Leninism and Mao Thought have been abandoned in all but name, the role of history in China’s future remains steadfast.” So much so that history has been refined as an instrument of statecraft (also known as “cartographic aggression”) by state-controlled research institutions, media, and education bodies.
China uses folklore, myths, and legends, as well as pseudohistory, to bolster greater territorial and maritime claims. 

Chinese textbooks preach the notion of the Middle Kingdom as being the oldest and most advanced civilization that was at the very center of the universe, surrounded by lesser, partially Sinicized states in East and Southeast Asia that must constantly bow and pay their respects. 

China’s version of history often deliberately blurs the distinction between what was no more than hegemonic influence, tributary relationships, suzerainty, and actual control. 

Subscribing to the notion that those who have mastered the past control their present and chart their own futures, Beijing has always placed a very high value on “the history card” (often a revisionist interpretation of history) in its diplomatic efforts to achieve foreign policy objectives, especially to extract territorial and diplomatic concessions from other countries. 

Almost every contiguous state has, at one time or another, felt the force of Chinese arms—Mongolia, Tibet, Burma, Korea, Russia, India, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Taiwan—and been a subject of China’s revisionist history. 

As Martin Jacques notes in When China Rules the World, “Imperial Sinocentrism shapes and underpins modern Chinese nationalism.”
If the idea of national sovereignty goes back to seventeenth-century Europe and the system that originated with the Treaty of Westphalia, the idea of maritime sovereignty is largely a mid-twentieth-century American concoction China has seized upon to extend its maritime frontiers. 

As Jacques notes, “The idea of maritime sovereignty is a relatively recent invention, dating from 1945 when the United States declared that it intended to exercise sovereignty over its territorial waters.” 

In fact, the UN’s Law of the Sea agreement represented the most prominent international effort to apply the land-based notion of sovereignty to the maritime domain worldwide—although, importantly, it rejects the idea of justification by historical right. 

Thus although Beijing claims around eighty percent of the South China Sea as its “historic waters” (and is now seeking to elevate this claim to a “core interest” akin with its claims on Taiwan and Tibet), China has, historically speaking, about as much right to claim the South China Sea as Mexico has to claim the Gulf of Mexico for its exclusive use, or Iran the Persian Gulf, or India the Indian Ocean.
Ancient empires either won control over territories through aggression, annexation, or assimilation or lost them to rivals who possessed superior firepower or statecraft. 

Territorial expansion and contraction was the norm, determined by the strength or weakness of a kingdom or empire. 

The very idea of “sacred lands” is ahistorical because control of territory was based on who grabbed or stole what last from whom. 

The frontiers of the Qin, Han, Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties waxed and waned throughout history. 

A strong and powerful imperial China, much like czarist Russia, was expansionist in Inner Asia and Indochina as opportunity arose and strength allowed. 

The gradual expansion over the centuries under the non-Chinese Mongol and Manchu dynasties extended imperial China’s control over Tibet and parts of Central Asia (now Xinjiang), Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. Modern China is, in fact, an “empire-state” masquerading as a nation-state.
If China’s claims are justified on the basis of history, then so are the historical claims of Vietnamese and Filipinos based on their histories. 

Students of Asian history know, for instance, that Malay peoples related to today’s Filipinos have a better claim to Taiwan than Beijing does. 

Taiwan was originally settled by people of Malay-Polynesian descent—ancestors of the present-day aborigine groups—who populated the low-lying coastal plains. 

In the words of noted Asia-watcher Philip Bowring, writing last year in the South China Morning Post, “The fact that China has a long record of written history does not invalidate other nations’ histories as illustrated by artifacts, language, lineage and genetic affinities, the evidence of trade and travel.” 

Unless one subscribes to the notion of Chinese exceptionalism, imperial China’s “historical claims” are as valid as those of other kingdoms and empires in Southeast and South Asia. 

China laying claim to the Mongol and Manchu empires’ colonial possessions would be equivalent to India laying claim to Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Malaysia (Srivijaya), Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka on the grounds that they were all parts of either the Maurya, Chola, or the Moghul and the British Indian empires.
China’s claims in the South China Sea are also a major shift from its longstanding geopolitical orientation to continental power. 

In claiming a strong maritime tradition, China makes much of the early-fifteenth-century expeditions of Zheng He to the Indian Ocean and Africa. 

But, as Bowring points out, “Chinese were actually latecomers to navigation beyond coastal waters. For centuries, the masters of the oceans were the Malayo-Polynesian peoples who colonized much of the world, from Taiwan to New Zealand and Hawaii to the south and east, and to Madagascar in the west. Bronze vessels were being traded with Palawan, just south of Scarborough, at the time of Confucius. When Chinese Buddhist pilgrims like Faxian went to Sri Lanka and India in the fifth century, they went in ships owned and operated by Malay peoples. Ships from what is now the Philippines traded with Funan, a state in what is now southern Vietnam, a thousand years before the Yuan dynasty.”

And finally, China’s so-called “historic claims” to the South China Sea are actually not “centuries old.” 

They only go back to 1947, when Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government drew the so-called “eleven-dash line” on Chinese maps of the South China Sea, enclosing the Spratly Islands and other chains that the ruling Kuomintang party declared were now under Chinese sovereignty. 

Chiang himself, saying he saw German fascism as a model for China, was fascinated by the Nazi concept of an expanded Lebensraum (“living space”) for the Chinese nation. 

He did not have the opportunity to be expansionist himself because the Japanese put him on the defensive, but cartographers of the nationalist regime drew the U-shape of eleven dashes in an attempt to enlarge China’s “living space” in the South China Sea. 

First map with the so-called “eleven-dash line” fabricated in 1947 by the Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government. 

Following the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the civil war in 1949, the People’s Republic of China adopted this cartographic coup, revising Chiang’s notion into a “nine-dash line” after erasing two dashes in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1953.

Since the end of the Second World War, China has been redrawing its maps, redefining borders, manufacturing historical evidence, using force to create new territorial realities, renaming islands, and seeking to impose its version of history on the waters of the region. 

The passage of domestic legislation in 1992, “Law on the Territorial Waters and Their Contiguous Areas,” which claimed four-fifths of the South China Sea, was followed by armed skirmishes with the Philippines and Vietnamese navies throughout the 1990s. 

More recently, the dispatch of large numbers of Chinese fishing boats and maritime surveillance vessels to the disputed waters in what is tantamount to a “people’s war on the high seas” has further heightened tensions. 

To quote commentator Sujit Dutta, “China’s unmitigated irredentism [is] based on the theory that the periphery must be occupied in order to secure the core. [This] is an essentially imperial notion that was internalized by the Chinese nationalists—both Kuomintang and Communist. The current regime’s attempts to reach its imagined geographical frontiers often with little historical basis have had and continue to have highly destabilizing strategic consequences.”
One reason Southeast Asians find it difficult to accept Chinese territorial claims is that they carry with them an assertion of Han racial superiority over other Asian races and empires. 

Says Jay Batongbacal of the University of the Philippines law school: “Intuitively, acceptance of the nine-dash line is a corresponding denial of the very identity and history of the ancestors of the Vietnamese, Filipinos, and Malays; it is practically a modern revival of China’s denigration of non-Chinese as ‘barbarians’ not entitled to equal respect and dignity as peoples.”
Empires and kingdoms never exercised sovereignty. 

If historical claims had any validity then Mongolia could claim all of Asia simply because it once conquered the lands of the continent. 

There is absolutely no historical basis to support either of the dash-line claims, especially considering that the territories of Chinese empires were never as carefully delimited as nation-states, but rather existed as zones of influence tapering away from a civilized center. 

This is the position contemporary China took starting in the 1960s, while negotiating its land boundaries with several of its neighboring countries. 

But this is not the position it takes today in the cartographic, diplomatic, and low-intensity military skirmishes to define its maritime borders. 

The continued reinterpretation of history to advance contemporary political, territorial, and maritime claims, coupled with the Communist leadership’s ability to turn “nationalistic eruptions” on and off like a tap during moments of tension with the United States, Japan, South Korea, India, Vietnam, and the Philippines, makes it difficult for Beijing to reassure neighbors that its “peaceful rise” is wholly peaceful. 

Since there are six claimants to various atolls, islands, rocks, and oil deposits in the South China Sea, the Spratly Islands disputes are, by definition, multilateral disputes requiring international arbitration. 

But Beijing has insisted that these disputes are bilateral in order to place its opponents between the anvil of its revisionist history and the hammer of its growing military power.

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Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea

Of all the disputants, it is Vietnam that has lost the most ground to China in the South China Sea – the Paracels in 1974 and part of the Spratlys (Johnson South Reef and Fiery Cross Reef) in 1988
By Lucio Blanco Pitlo III and Amruta Karambelkar

Among the claimants and littoral states of the South China Sea (SCS), the Philippines and Vietnam have been the most vocal in expressing their alarm and concern over growing Chinese assertiveness in this strategic and resource-rich regional commons.
Because of their power asymmetry vis-à-vis China, which has the most extensive claims to the SCS, Manila and Hanoi have been supporters of the U.S. pivot to Asia, to balance against Beijing’s growing maritime power projection, while also using diplomatic outreach to cultivate as many supporters as possible.
The Philippines has been bolstering its defense and maritime law enforcement with the help of the U.S. and Japan.
Vietnam is meanwhile relying on its traditional partners – India and Russia – as additional cushions against possible excesses of China’s rise to power in the region.
Both countries are also seeking support from ASEAN.
The SCS dispute took a notable turn when Philippines went to UN arbitration to challenge China’s nine-dashed line.
The claimants had to that point sought to manage the dispute through regional mechanisms and bilateral talks. Not surprisingly, then, Manila’s move has irked Beijing, which has been insistent on not internationalizing the dispute.
While it may be premature to assess Manila’s strategy at this stage, it is interesting to examine the factors that led to parallels, as well as variances, in the strategies taken by Manila and Hanoi via-à-vis China’s increasing assertiveness in the SCS.
Vietnam’s strategies are shaped by its history, economy and geographical proximity with China.
Vietnam’s economy is highly reliant on its trade and investments with China and this dependency limits Vietnam’s actions.
Yet of all the disputants, it is Vietnam that has lost the most ground to China in the SCS – the Paracels in 1974 and part of the Spratlys (Johnson South Reef and Fiery Cross Reef) in 1988.
Hence, Hanoi has many axes to grind against China in the SCS.
Both countries have also contested offshore blocks each has awarded to foreign energy players and have traded accusations of arrests and harassment of their fishermen.
However, alongside these clashes are positive milestones such as the demarcation of their common land boundary, establishment of a joint fishing zone in Tonkin Gulf and more recently the creation of a fishery hotline that could greatly aid in mitigating “incidents” at sea arising from overlapping fishing grounds.
As two socialist countries with a history of competition and cooperation (they were Cold War and Vietnam War allies), many channels, official and semi-official, including Party-to-Party talks, have served as platforms to ensure that tensions are kept at manageable levels and not allowed to affect other aspects of bilateral relations, notably trade and investment.
In fact, just recently, the two countries signed 12 agreements to enhance bilateral cooperation in the areas of trade, infrastructure, energy and maritime affairs, and set up a working group to look into joint exploration in SCS.
This status quo would seem to be an achievement of Chinese diplomacy, mitigating conflict with Vietnam at a time when Beijing is embroiled in another dispute with the Philippines, likewise over the SCS.
When it comes to Vietnam, China would seem to have employed the right strategy at the right time.
Bilateral relations therefore appear unhindered despite the territorial and maritime disputes, giving Vietnam little motivation to do what the Philippines has done, and challenge Beijing’s claims before an international body.
Of course, Vietnam has continued to raise the SCS in ASEAN forums.
It is also trying to improve relations with the U.S., and is consulting with the Philippines on mutual concerns. Although Vietnam has shown some support for Manila’s move to arbitrate, this backing is unlikely to graduate to a united Hanoi-Manila front versus Beijing.
Again, Hanoi is constrained in its options for dealing with Beijing, and cannot afford a bold stand, save for fiery rhetoric.
It will continue to express its dissatisfaction with China through the likes of the ASEAN Regional Forum, which serves as an international outlet given the participation of extra regional powers.
Meanwhile, like other ASEAN countries, and especially those with SCS claims, Vietnam will watch closely the outcome of Manila’s arbitration bid and may reshape its strategies accordingly.
Given Manila’s legal challenge, it can be argued that the Chinese leadership may be more willing to compromise with Hanoi just to isolate Manila and prevent the creation of a united front against Beijing’s sweeping SCS claims.
The Philippines’ SCS strategy, meanwhile, is motivated by a perceived Chinese westward push at its expense.
Despite long administering the largest features in the Spratlys, Manila’s military capabilities are limited.
The occupation of Mischief Reef came about two years after the removal of the U.S. bases, and marked the point at which the much talked-about “China threat” became a reality.
Since then, Beijing has intensified its fortifications and naval presence in the area.
As a militarily disadvantaged state, Manila’s fallback rested on its 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty with the U.S..
But warming Sino-U.S. relations, especially on the economic front, may put limits on what Manila can expect from its traditional ally.
The fear that a Sino-U.S. understanding on the SCS, wherein Washington tacitly acquiesces to Beijing consolidating its position in the semi-enclosed sea, may also become an emerging consideration, making it imperative for the Philippines to diversify its security partners to give it more room for independent action. Nonetheless, the U.S. remains important to the Philippines for trade and security, despite the ups and downs in relations.
Manila closed the U.S. bases in Subic and Clark in 1991 but allowed U.S. forces to come back in 1999 through the Visiting Forces Agreement, and has since been a major ally in the war against terrorism.
Manila is a natural partner in Washington’s rebalancing strategy.
The Philippines is also strengthening ties with Japan, which has its own disputes with China, in the East China Sea.
 This power web can help the Philippines absorb retaliatory measures from China, and as such may have emboldened Manila to take a stand against Beijing.
It might therefore be said that power arrangements and alignments dictate the strategies of Vietnam and the Philippines.
Moreover, in contrast to Vietnam, the Philippines does not have a large trade and investment dependency with China, as the U.S. and Japan are still its primary primary trade and aid partners.
True, Sino-Philippine economic ties have been growing, and certainly the Philippines felt the effects of China’s decision to curb banana imports and block tourism.
However, the comparatively low level of economic engagement means that Chinese economic sanctions are not enough to make Manila bend, at least for now.
For instance, the Philippines has been able to offset the loss of the Chinese market for its bananas by exporting to the U.S.
Nevertheless, the rise of China and relative decline of the U.S. will continue to cast a long shadow over the SCS.
Although some ASEAN countries have welcomed the U.S. rebalancing, most have developed deep economic ties with China over the years.
The SCS thus has the potential to become a divisive issue within the regional grouping.
This creates the impression among some Philippine leaders that ASEAN may no longer be a reliable or effective forum for engaging China on the SCS issue.
Countries that have traditional and unresolved disputes with China, like Japan and India, may extend some support to smaller SCS claimants, but their commitment when push comes to shove remains to be seen.
The SCS has strategic, security, economic and political importance for both the Philippines and Vietnam. Both countries see their claimed SCS areas as vital elements of national security, important trade channels, traditional fishing grounds and a source of indigenous offshore energy resources, not to mention as integral components of their territory.
However, particular historical, economic and politico-security considerations have prompted the two countries to develop divergent SCS strategies, especially in terms of dealing with China.

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Relations with South-East Asia: Being there

With the superpower otherwise engaged, China makes hay in South-East Asia

The Economist

HUNDREDS of thousands lined the streets of Vietnam’s capital on October 13th as Li Keqiang, China’s prime minister, arrived for a three-day visit. 

They were not there for him, though. 

It was a state funeral for Vo Nguyen Giap, a legendary general, second only to Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam’s pantheon of national heroes. 

Indeed, many Vietnamese found the timing of Mr Li’s arrival rather offensive and thought that he should have postponed it to avoid intruding on their grief. 

“Disrespectful” and “arrogant” were two adjectives used. 

“Typical” was another.
Unperturbed, Mr Li (pictured above, left) was able to portray his meeting with his Vietnamese counterpart, Nguyen Tan Dung (above, right), as a “breakthrough”. 

It capped a fortnight of high-level Chinese diplomacy in South-East Asia, intended to repair ties frayed in recent years by China’s extensive and disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea.
Xi Jinping, China’s president and leader of the Communist Party, visited Indonesia, Malaysia and the summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum (APEC). 

Mr Li attended a summit in Brunei with leaders of the ten-member Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and went on to Thailand. 

That Barack Obama was due at both APEC and ASEAN, but withdrew because of the budget stand-off in Washington, gave the Chinese leaders’ tours even more prominence.
Vietnam is the ASEAN country where suspicion of China is strongest. 

After centuries of animosity and a brief, bloody war in 1979, a territorial dispute still simmers, the most extensive of the four China has with ASEAN members in the South China Sea (the others being Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines). 

Not only do both China and Vietnam claim the Spratly Islands to the south, but Vietnam regards itself as having been illegitimately evicted from the Paracel islands to the north, when China seized them in 1974 from the dying regime of the former South Vietnam. 

Confrontations over fishing and oil and gas exploration are frequent.
Yet in June, during a visit to China by Vietnam’s president, Truong Tan Sang, the two countries signed a new “strategic partnership”. 

China is Vietnam’s largest trading partner—not even counting a flourishing illegal trade over the border—as it is for ASEAN as a whole. 

Mr Li’s breakthrough was to go further in parking the territorial dispute so that it does not get in the way of other business. 

He even agreed to a “maritime co-operation” work group.
In China, this helped smother unpleasant memories of 2010, when, at a meeting in Hanoi, Hillary Clinton, America’s secretary of state at the time, waded into the South China Sea dispute, declaring an American “national interest” in it. 

China blames American interference for emboldening Vietnam and the Philippines to stand up to it over the sea. 

Now China Daily, an official newspaper, has quoted a Chinese analyst: “Hanoi has already realised that it is unrealistic to count on Washington to give public support to its claims on some islands.”
That analysis is a stretch. 

But Mr Li’s tour, like Mr Xi’s, was a reminder of how big a regional power China has become, and of how absent Mr Obama was. 

Everywhere they displayed their economic clout. 

In Thailand, for example, Mr Li delighted the government by offering help in two areas of self-inflicted economic harm, by agreeing to buy more rice and rubber. 

Mr Xi had already floated the idea of a Chinese-led “Asian infrastructure bank” to help meet one of the region’s most pressing needs. 

In Brunei, Mr Li had earlier proposed a new treaty with ASEAN, to realise his vision of a “diamond decade” in its relations with China.

Not that alluring
If this was a charm offensive, however, one ASEAN country still gets the offence without the charm. 

China is incensed that the Philippines is challenging its ill-explained, expansive claim in the South China Sea at the international tribunal of the United Nations’ law of the sea. 

It suits China to try to isolate the Philippines. 

Vietnamese scholars, however, say their government is fully aware of this—and has not ruled out joining the Philippines’ legal action.
A few weeks of diplomatic activity have not changed the fundamental reality—that South-East Asia looks to China as its main trading partner and America as the prime guarantor of its security. 

They have, however, heightened a perception that power in the region is shifting. 

A commentary in the Jakarta Post, an English-language newspaper in Indonesia, argued bluntly that “it is China, not the United States, who is the leader of the Asia-Pacific region in the 21st century.” 

Pointing to Mr Obama’s no-show and the government shutdown, it concluded that his “much touted ‘pivot’ to Asia feels more like a pirouette with an overemphasis on military engagement.”
The Chinese press is happy to foster the impression of a power shift, taking the argument beyond South-East Asia.

Its official news agency, Xinhua, published a commentary calling for a “de-Americanised world”.

It argued that, with the possibility of a sovereign default by the superpower, “such alarming days when the destinies of others are in the hands of a hypocritical nation have to be terminated.”
That notion attracts some sympathy in South-East Asia but few would want an American-led international order to give way to one dominated by China. 

Some Vietnamese officials thought the criticism of the timing of Mr Li’s visit to Hanoi was unfair. 

After all, he was there in time to offer condolences at a time of national grief. 

But it is not just in Vietnam that many are prepared to think the worst of Chinese motives.

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San Francisco Treaty and the South China Sea

By Masahiro Matsumura

OSAKA – Territorial and maritime disputes among China and several Southeast Asian countries are roiling the South China Sea region with little prospect of resolution anytime soon.
The current uneasy status quo may be tenable so long as the parties embrace serious confidence-building measures through multilateral forums while maintaining effective deterrence vis-a-vis China and a commitment not to use offensive force.
Naturally China is eager to exclude interference by extraregional great powers, particularly the United States, preferring bilateral negotiations with weaker regional claimants that it can more easily dominate. 

Extraregional powers, however, cite the United Nations Convention on the Law of Sea — specifically, the freedom of navigation and the right of innocent passage — to justify their involvement.
Given that the South China Sea disputes stem from overlapping claims to “exclusive economic zones” — not open ocean — the U.N. convention is not entirely relevant.
But another international agreement does provide some guidance for settling these disputes: the San Francisco Peace Treaty, which entered into force in 1952 and officially ended World War II in the Asia-Pacific region.
Under the treaty, Japan renounced its sovereignty claims over the Spratly and the Paracel Islands but did not reassign them to any single country. 

As a result, these islands remain legally under the collective custody of the treaty’s 48 other parties — including two claimants to the islands, the Philippines and Vietnam.
China — then in the third year of Mao Zedong’s rule — was not even invited to participate in the peace conference. 

Although Mao’s communists had clearly won the civil war and secured control of China, the conference organizers disagreed about which government — Mao’s People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing or Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China (ROC) in Taipei — truly represented China. 

As a result, the PRC denies that it is legally bound by the treaty.
But the treaty applies to the PRC indirectly through the ROC-Japan bilateral peace treaty of 1952, which was signed just hours before the San Francisco Treaty and reaffirmed its terms — especially Japan’s renunciation of Taiwan.

Indeed, the San Francisco Treaty required that the ROC-Japan treaty be consistent with it, thereby preventing Japan from assigning in its treaty with the ROC any additional right or title to any country other than the parties to the San Francisco Treaty.

As a result, Japan is unable to recognize Taiwan as part of PRC sovereign territory.
To be sure, the San Francisco Treaty, per se, is not legally binding for the PRC. 

But for Japan, the PRC has clearly succeeded the ROC in Taiwan, as demonstrated by the 1972 Japan-PRC Joint Communique, on the basis of the bilateral Treaty of Peace and Friendship that was concluded six years later. 

When Japan shifted its diplomatic recognition from the ROC to the PRC, it recognized the latter as the “sole legal government of China.”
Given that Japan was not recognizing China as a new state — international recognition of the Chinese state had existed without interruption since the ROC government emerged in 1912 — the PRC effectively accepted the rights and obligations of the previous government.
Moreover, Japan did not recognize Taiwan as part of China on the grounds that doing so would infringe on its obligations under the San Francisco Treaty. 

While Japan fully “understood” and “respected” the PRC’s declaration that Taiwan was an “inalienable” part of its territory, it did not recognize the claim in accordance with international law. 

The two countries simply agreed to disagree over Taiwan’s legal status.

In other words, Japan renounced Taiwan without reassigning it.
To date, China has been silent about the implications of the San Francisco Treaty with regard to its claims in the South China Sea. 

This may simply reflect a dearth of international legal expertise in this field or the state of China’s segmented, stove-piped policy communities.
It could also stem from concerns that using the treaty’s legal reasoning, which conflicts with China’s stance on Taiwan, to resolve today’s territorial disputes would undermine its credibility and position.
If left unchecked, China may use the South China Sea disputes to gain effective hegemony over weaker claimants. 

All parties to the disputes, including China, can cite geographic and historical connections to the islands to back their claims, but none of them has solid legal title under the San Francisco Treaty.
The U.S. and other extra-regional powers should take advantage of this fact, invoking their latent collective custody of the Spratly and the Paracel Islands in accordance with the San Francisco Treaty, and internationalize separate bilateral diplomatic processes between China and regional claimants.
The treaty’s parties could even hold a conference to deliberate on the matter. 

Given that it would exclude China, such a discussion alone would be a game changer.

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