A LINE WITH NINE DASHES
If it was the sinking of the Cheonan that prompted a lot of soul-searching in Northeast Asia about China, then the moment of clarity in Southeast Asia came from a more mundane source: the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf.
In 2009, this largely obscure UN body set a deadline for countries in the region to deliver submissions of their claims in the South China Sea and its myriad of disputed rocks, islets, and coral reefs. The South China Sea has a large and complicated list of claimants. China, Taiwan, and Vietnam claim most of the area and its islands, but the Philippines, Brunei, and Malaysia also claim part. The UN Law of the Sea Treaty provides a framework of international legislation to adjudicate such disputes, a process of case law and precise legal language which is designed to take the heat out of emotionally charged arguments. In the case of the South China Sea, however, the result was the exact opposite. After Vietnam and Malaysia submitted a joint written claim to the panel, China was incensed. Beijing released its own note, which stated: “China has indisputable sovereignty over the islands of the South China Sea and the adjacent waters.” Alongside this diplomatic note verbale, Beijing attached a map of the area, in which China’s claims are demarcated by a line made up of nine dashes.
The “nine-dash line” map was not new: it was first drawn by Chinese cartographers in the 1920s and was adopted as a semi-official map in 1947 under the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, before the Communists had even taken power. But this was the first time it had been used as part of an official Chinese claim in an international forum. And for many in Southeast Asia, it was a symbol of a certain kind of new Chinese arrogance. Shaped like a large U, the “nine-dash line” starts from China’s southwest coast, snakes down adjacent to Vietnam’s coastline, curves round along the littorals of Malaysia and Brunei, and then returns to the Chinese mainland after skirting close to the Philippines’ coastline. In effect, it marks out almost the entire area of the South China Sea, except a narrow strip beside the coast of the other countries in the region. China says the map is a reflection of its “historical rights” that come from having controlled the different islands for centuries. The Chinese sometimes say the map’s U-shape resembles a “cow’s tongue”; one acquaintance describes it, slightly less flatteringly, as “a distended testicle.”
“We will never seek hegemony,” declares China’s latest defense White Paper—a stock phrase that is one of the mottoes of official Chinese policy. But in many other Asian capitals, where claims to such “historical rights” inevitably remind them of the subservient position that they were placed in during previous eras of Chinese power, the sheer, jaw-dropping breadth of the Chinese map felt a lot like a push for hegemony. “We maybe should not have been so surprised,” a Thai diplomat confided about the introduction of the Chinese map with the “nine-dash line.” “But to see with your own eyes that they were actually trying to claim pretty much everything—well, it was quite a jolt.”
One legacy of five hundred years of Western naval ascendancy in Asia is the names that are commonly used for many of the island features in the South China Sea—there is Mischief Reef, Macclesfield Bank, Woody Island, and Scarborough Shoal. The sixty or so rocks in the South China Sea are mostly divided into two groups: the Paracel Islands in the northern section of the sea and the Spratlys farther to the south. For decades, the disputes over who owns the land features were a somewhat obscure sideshow, even if China and South Vietnam did briefly fight over some of the islands in 1974, when China took control of the Paracels, and again in 1988. But over the last five years, they have rapidly become a perfect storm of modern geopolitics. The South China Sea has been the place where American and Southeast Asian concerns about China’s military buildup have started to overlap. For the U.S., China’s claims set off alarm bells about the long-term threat to the U.S. maritime order. But for the Asian claimants, the dispute also brings together oil, fish, and potent nationalism.
For what might appear a few insignificant specks of land, the economic stakes over the disputed South China Sea islands are enormous. In China, the South China Sea is sometimes referred to as a “maritime Daqing”—the oilfield in the northeast of China which was discovered in the 1950s, a lifeline to the Maoist economy in an era of economic isolation, as well as a staple of Communist propaganda about hardworking self-reliance. Chinese estimates suggest there could be as much as 213 billion barrels of oil in the South China Sea, not far short of Saudi Arabia’s reserves. Another Chinese estimate suggests there is enough natural gas to meet demand for four hundred years, at current levels of consumption. (Some private estimates are much less optimistic, partly because much of the oil is incredibly hard to recover, indicating reserves closer to 2.5 billion barrels.) If a potential oil boom were not enough, the seas are also rich in fish, making them increasingly attractive to fleets in China and Vietnam, which have seen the stocks in their more traditional catchment areas near the coasts decline through overfishing, pushing them ever farther afield, into contested waters. China is the biggest consumer (and exporter) of seafood in the world, and seafood provides half of the protein intake in the average Vietnamese diet. For both countries, fishing is an industry whose importance is hugely underappreciated.
As tensions have escalated in recent years, China has insisted that the other countries are principally to blame, and it has plenty of evidence to support this claim. Beijing was outraged that Malaysia and Vietnam put forward a joint submission to the UN panel, which the Chinese saw as evidence of other countries’ ganging up against them. Chinese officials complain loudly that China is the only country not to have exploited oil resources in the South China Sea. “There are seven hundred wells already in areas that we believe are ours,” a Chinese official told me. “And yet people accuse us of being assertive.” They point to the buildup of infrastructure on island features controlled by other countries, notably Vietnam in the Spratlys, where it controls twenty-nine of the land features. Beijing is also adamant that Washington’s attempt to involve itself in the dispute has emboldened Vietnam and the Philippines to take a more confrontational stance toward China. Many in China are convinced that the U.S. is conspiring against it in the South China Sea. “China is not the maker of these problems and still less the perpetrator of harm,” says Cui Tiankai, a former vice foreign minister who became ambassador to the U.S. in 2013. “Rather, China is a victim on which harm has been imposed.”
The other claimants tell a very different story. They describe a gradual but decisive increase in China’s naval presence in the region over the last decade, as well as a deliberate buildup of military installations on some of the islands that it controls, part of a creeping process in asserting sovereignty. Satellite images from Woody Island (Yongxing in Chinese) in the Paracels bear this out. The small island is around two hundred miles south of the submarine base on Hainan. It has no indigenous population or natural water supply, but over the last few years it has become a fortified military stronghold. A major port has been built from an area that was dredged. At the same time, the landmass has been extended to build a runway for military planes: the satellite images show a thin strip of land almost twice the length of the island. Another thin strip denotes a mile-long road between the island and a small islet, which is now used as a monitoring center for naval activity in the region. In 2012, Beijing declared the island’s main town, Sansha, to be a formal municipality. There is a local government building, which, with its painted white walls, long neoclassical columns, and a large dome, looks like a small version of the U.S. Capitol. On the day it was declared a municipality, a local agriculture official from Hainan called Xiao Jie was dispatched on a twenty-hour boat trip to become the mayor. “There is no arable land here,” he said of his new job. “The main objective is to protect our nation’s maritime sovereignty.”
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Southeast Asian governments accuse Beijing of adopting a strategy of “talk and take.” Given the chance, Vietnam
and the Philippines can reel off long lists of behaviors by the Chinese they consider to be bullying. The Vietnamese point out that two of the nine lines on the famous Chinese map are in territory which under international law is considered Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone, the two-hundred-mile area beyond a country’s coast that is recognized by international law. In 2007, Beijing pressured Exxon Mobil and several other foreign oil and gas companies into abandoning drilling operations off the Vietnamese coast—an event that some cite as the start in the current period of tensions. In 2011, Chinese government vessels cut the cables of two ships that were conducting oil and gas surveillance for PetroVietnam. Two months earlier, a Philippine vessel doing a seismological study in a disputed area was forced to leave by two Chinese government ships. Every year, the Chinese authorities enforce a fishing moratorium in parts of the South China Sea, which they say is to preserve stocks, but the decision is not taken with other governments. And each year, they arrest dozens of fishermen who break the moratorium.
It is tempting to think of this activity as a calculated, long-term plan to gradually assert control over the region. Yet, like so many incidents in which China’s inner great power has started to be unleashed, there is another side to China’s new assertiveness in the South China Sea, a simmering pressure from below to take more action. China’s approach to the South China Sea has been one of the clearest examples of how competing vested interests are helping to drive parts of foreign policy—the fracturing in power that the Chinese establishment has witnessed. A whole series of different government bureaucracies have overlapping responsibility for elements of the government’s presence in the South China Sea, and sometimes they tussle with one another to make their presence felt. The Chinese are acutely aware of this, labeling the different groups as “the nine dragons,” a reference to the ancient legend of a dragon king whose nine sons can be seen in countless murals “stirring up the sea.”
Some of that pressure has come from local governments. The government of Hainan Island, where the new naval base is, has administrative responsibility for the Spratlys and Paracels, and for the last two decades has been trying to launch high-end tourism on the islands as part of its own development plan. In recent years, it has gradually worn down the resistance of the central authorities to these initiatives. Travel agencies on Hainan offer luxury diving trips to customers in the Paracels, and there is now a sailing contest between Hainan and the Paracels. The big oil companies, which are among the most connected and powerful sections of state-owned industry, have also lobbied hard for the government to push its claims in the region more aggressively. In 2012, CNOOC, one of the big three oil companies, invited foreign oil groups to exploit jointly nine blocks in disputed areas—several of which are in Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone.
Even among the Chinese government departments which enforce activities in the region, there are competing interests. The Bureau of Fisheries Administration is responsible for policing fishing in Chinese waters, but China Marine Surveillance also conducts law-enforcement activities in the region. Like any good bureaucracy, they are both keen to show their worth in order to boost their budgets, which have grown rapidly in recent years. They even have a phrase to justify their sometimes vague and overlapping roles: “Grab what you can on the sea and then afterwards divide responsibility between the agencies.” The Agriculture Ministry, which is responsible for the fisheries bureau, operates a reward system for individuals who have been “tough and brave in defending China’s sovereignty”: officials get a bonus for evicting a large number of foreign boats from waters that China claims as its own. With dozens of armed vessels and aircraft at their disposal, these agencies have also played a role in pushing the boundaries of China’s sovereignty claims. While sending the navy could be seen as a highly provocative move, these law-enforcement vessels can stake China’s claim in a less confrontational fashion.
There are two other factors behind the deep sense of unease in Southeast Asia. It is not only the extent of China’s claim that has rattled the region, but also the ambiguity of it. No one quite knows what they are dealing with. Even though the “nine-dash line” map has been in circulation for several decades, China has never actually defined the territory that is included in its map. At times, Foreign Ministry officials have attempted to calm nerves by indicating that China claims only the islands and land features within the line. Such a claim would still involve a series of difficult disputes but is much less expansive than claiming the entire area on the map. Yet, at other times, Chinese officials and analysts have indicated that their historic “title” to the South China Sea gives them exclusive rights to everything inside the line. Others have suggested that the area is part of China’s “sovereign waters.” Peng Guangqian, a hawkish major general in the PLA, has described the waters inside the “nine-dash line” as “China’s… ‘blue-colored land’ ” and as a region “owned” by China. CNOOC’s attempt to sell oil leases within disputed waters and the fishing bans imposed by China indicate an official position that is very different from the one outlined by the Foreign Ministry. Such ambiguity could mean several things. It could suggest that there is flexibility in China’s position, which could be exploited in negotiations. But it could also mean that China is trying to have it both ways, its diplomats sticking to a narrower claim while its actual behavior pushes for a much more expansive version.
There is also a question of size. In dealing with China, the other countries feel less like sovereign equals and more as if they are trapped next to a large elephant that could swat them aside. That very size difference makes Chinese moves seem much more threatening to its neighbors than Beijing realizes. The Southeast Asian claimants want a multilateral discussion of the different claims, believing that only this will allow them to talk as equals. Fearing the others will gang up on it, China insists that each country should deal with it on a one-on-one basis. For the smaller countries, Beijing’s insistence on bilateral negotiations feels like a form of bullying. “China’s attitude,” says a senior politician from one Southeast Asian nation, “is, ‘It does not matter what the precise nature of our ultimate claim is; if we say it is ours, then that means it is ours.’ ”
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To be fair to the Chinese, the regional backlash against its behavior in the South China Sea appears to have been given a gentle push by some clever American spin. If there is one area where Washington still holds a decisive advantage over Beijing, it is in the dark arts of the background media briefing. In March 2009, Jeff Bader, the Asia director at the National Security Council, and James Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state, traveled to Beijing for a series of meetings with their Chinese counterparts. The South China Sea was one of the topics that featured heavily in the meetings. A few weeks later, the New York Times ran a story saying that China now referred to the South China Sea as a “core interest.”
In diplomacy, small phrases can carry immense power. In the code language of Chinese diplomacy, these two words are enormously important. The other “core interests” are Taiwan and Tibet, issues on which the party will move mountains to prevail. To describe the South China Sea in such terms would indeed represent a substantial escalation, a sign that China saw absolutely no room for compromise or negotiation. The Chinese officials had in fact been in an uncompromising mood during the meetings, delivering several lectures on their rights in the South China Sea. Yet Bader and Steinberg insist that the explosive “core interests” formula was never actually used in their meetings. Hillary Clinton later said that Dai Bingguo, the leading Chinese foreign-policy official, used the phrase with her at a U.S.-China summit two months after Bader and Steinberg’s meetings, although this, too, is disputed, both by Dai’s underlings and by some of the American delegation. (“Hillary appears to have refreshed her memory,” as one American official acidly puts it.) Whatever the origin of the phrase, however, China had been snookered. The government could not confirm the statement without provoking outrage in Southeast Asi
a. But neither could it officially deny the story, for fear that it would be accused by nationalists at home of being weak. Instead, Beijing suffered in silence.
If the “core interest” story was spin, it was the sort of exaggeration that was instantly believed around the region, because it seemed to tally with the reality of Chinese behavior. Washington’s rhetoric since 2010 has sometimes leaned on clumsy slogans along the lines of “America is back” in Asia, but the real story was the open door that was waiting for Washington in a region where anxiety about China was soaring. In the Philippines, for instance, there had been popular rejoicing when the U.S. Navy was forced out of its base in Subic Bay in 1992, and leaders like Gloria Arroyo welcomed China as a “big brother.” But U.S. warships are now returning with ever-greater frequency, and the country’s new president, Benito Aquino, declared in 2012: “We need to take a united stand against the recent aggressive actions from China.”
The Contest of the Century Page 11
