More and more Chinese scholars are questioning Beijing’s claim to the entire South China Sea. Through monographs, university forums, and Chinese-language blogs they warn of China’s loss of repute should the territorial assertion prove baseless. At the very least academics are asking for formal review of the claim’s legality and historicity.
China’s controlled press hardly reports such dissent to Beijing’s official line. But growingly open-minded Chinese journalists admit the loudening internal debate. Division began in 2009, when Beijing unveiled a Nine-Dash Map of the sea, two Chinese editors confide. It spread through Internet exchanges among Chinese oceanographers, historians, cartographers, and lawyers, and with counterparts abroad. At issue are the authenticity of the “ancient map†and its conflict with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. China and disputants Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei are signatories to the treaty.
Discord has reached a point that Beijing needed to publish, as foil, a purported “scholarly perspective†of its sea claim. This was announced recently in Global Times, the English adjunct of the Chinese Communist Party organ, People’s Daily. The item conceded that Beijing has been losing in the world debate.
The book is in English, by Wu Shicun, president of the state think-tank National Institute for South China Sea Studies. Global Times took pains to describe it as “not propaganda.†But in saying that the book adds to the “many voices†and takes the “Chinese viewpoint,†it betrays the Beijing apparat stance.
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In a recent talk Supreme Court Senior Justice Antonio Carpio showed the ridiculousness of Beijing’s claim:
• Annexing the Philippines’ Scarborough Shoal in the Nine-Dash Map, Beijing’s embassy in Manila called it Huangyan Island. Huangyan supposedly is the same Nanhai Island that 13th-century Chinese astronomer-engineer-mathematician Guo Shoujing visited in 1279. Kublai Khan, first emperor of the Yuan Dynasty, had ordered a resurvey of the Sung Dynasty calendar. An official foreign ministry document, “China’s Sovereignty over Xisha and Zhongsa Islands Is Indisputable,†issued Jan. 1980, declared Nanhai Island to be in Xisha. And Xisha is none other than the Paracel Archipelago off the coast of Vietnam, 380 nautical miles from Scarborough. Nanhai’s location in Xisha was reiterated the following month in the official Beijing Review.
• Methodical and meticulous, Guo Shoujing erected in Henan province 27 massive 12.6-meter-high brick observatory pillars. From there he measured each day the exact duration of one year. He could not have mistaken Huangyan/Nanhai in Xisha for a shoal far away. More so, that an island has vegetation, while a shoal is a mere protrusion of rocks at low tide. He could not have landed to stake a claim on any of Scarborough’s six rocks that point up only two meters above water.
• Beijing asserts that its “southernmost border†in the Nine-Dash Map is James Shoal, which it calls Zengmu Tan, 50 miles off Sarawak, Malaysia. Twenty-two meters undersea, it is the only national border in the world that is completely submerged. British journalist Bill Hayton uncovered Beijing’s basis for the claim: pseudo-cartography. In 1933, as anti-imperialist nationalism engulfed China, the hapless government formed an Inspection Committee for Land and Water Maps. Mission: to pinpoint the extent of China’s territory, for a semblance of government toughness. The members possessed no scientific, only propaganda skills. They got an old British Admiralty map of the South China Sea, renamed all the islets, shoals, reefs, and banks in Chinese, and promptly called it the Nine Dash Map — including 20 obvious mistakes in drawing and size. Some translations were literal, like North Danger Reef became Beixian (“bei†for north, “xian†for danger). Others bared the translators’ unfamiliarity with seamarks, like “shoal,†or shallow portions of the sea where, as British sailors describe, waters “shoal up,†therefore they must steer clear. Never actually visiting the South China Sea, the landlubber-committeemen mistook “shoal†for sandbar or beach, and so thought James Shoal to be an island, or “tan.†Hence, the translation Zengmu Tan. Only Chinese jingoists would not shudder to hear Beijing’s preposterous basis to now claim even Okinawa from Japan.
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Justice Carpio proceeded to debunk the legality of Beijing’s claim, based on the UNCLOS:
• The pact extinguished all supposed “historic claims,†much more unfounded ones like Beijing’s;
• The pact limits members’ “reservations†in signing only to those enumerated therein, and “historic right†that Beijing invokes is not among those.
• Only an island can be used as base point from which to start drawing a country’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ). “Island†means capable of human habitation and economic self-sustenance. Scarborough, 123 miles from Luzon, 580 miles from China’s Hainan province, clearly is no island. So Beijing cannot use it as base point.
• Beijing cannot use Itu Aba, its largest occupied isle in the Spratlys, as base point either to calculate its EEZ. Itu Aba’s military troops need periodic resupply.
• The UNCLOS states that a country’s base point island must be “proportionate†to the neighbor’s counterpart, in this case Itu Aba for China and Palawan for the Philippines. Itu Aba is less than 38 hectares, with a kilometer facing Palawan. Palawan is 1,489,655 hectares, with 650 kilometers facing Itu Aba. No equidistant EEZ may be drawn in between.
Interestingly, Beijing uses the “proportionality†argument against Japan’s EEZ claim that starts with the 430-hectare Uotsurishima isle. Uninhabited Uotsurishima is in the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. What’s good for the Peking goose should be good for the gander.
Global Times laments that China is made to look like a bully in its sea claim. But then, Beijing uses military might against small neighbors. It signed the UNCLOS as sign of mutual respect, yet steps on neighbors’ legal rights to EEZs.
No other international law exists to supersede the UNCLOS. It is the result of 300 years of maritime arbitration and diplomacy. Gone are the days of near-sighted, egocentric sea claims, as the ancient Romans did in calling the Mediterranean “Mare Nostrum (Our Sea).†Too bad, a handful of communists in Beijing is giving a bad name to the billion Chinese the world over.
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