Subject
Russian-Chinese naval cooperation.
Significance
When Chinese and Russian naval vessels came together for joint exercises last month, international worries about the wargames' location in the South China Sea were heightened by the simulated capture of islands, given Beijing's broad territorial claims to waters in the region.
Impacts
While Moscow may sympathise with Beijing on the South China Sea dispute, it will avoid angering other states.
Military cooperation reflects a shared anti-US stance but little commonality on regional security.
China sees the Russian navy as its most important foreign partner.
This article examines five of the most important legal issues arising from Chinese reclamation and construction in disputed areas of the South China Sea. First, does the construction have any impact on competing territorial claims in the South China Sea? Second, does the construction affect rights to maritime zones? This involves consideration of the differing legal significance of islands, rocks, low tide elevations and artificial islands, the relevance of land reclamation and construction in this context, and the resulting implications for maritime zones including territorial seas, eezs and safety zones. Third, are there other legal consequences arising from the Chinese activity (for example, on environmental grounds)? Fourth, does the construction bolster any potential ability of China to impose an Air Defence Identification Zone in the South China Sea? Fifth, what is the significance – legally and practically – of the award in the South China Sea Arbitration?
On December 15, 2016, China seized an American unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) in the South China Sea. The drone had been launched by an American naval vessel, the USNSBowditch. According to press reports, “[t]he American crew was in the process of retrieving the device when a small boat dispatched from the Chinese vessel took it as the American sailors looked on.” China has made extensive—and contested—maritime and territorial claims in the South China Sea, including within an area delimited by the “nine-dash line.” The incident occurred outside of this area, and none of the Chinese government's statements related to the seizure suggest any assertion of Chinese jurisdiction over the waters where the drone was seized. After an exchange of diplomatic statements, China returned the drone to the U.S. Navy.
This study offers an explanation for Beijing’s seemingly self-defeating approach to the South China Sea that distances China ever more from the regional and international communities which it wants to lead and join while drawing in the foreign military presence that it seeks to keep at a distance. Combining recent research on the role of emotions and on hierarchy in international politics, this article shows how the powerful narrative of national ‘humiliation’ and ‘rejuvenation’ has informed Chinese maritime politics. As the South China Sea became incorporated in the linear timeline of China’s 5000 year civilizational history, the US’ and its allies’ push-back against Beijing’s territorial claims deepened China’s ideational isolation. The ensuing state of solipsism increases the risk of violent confrontations.
This chapter analyzes each ASEAN member state’s territorial claims and disputes both in and outside of the South China Sea as well as its current position regarding ASEAN efforts to negotiate multilaterally with China over rival South China Sea claims. It highlights the broad support for freedom of navigation within ASEAN as well as the stated desire of each government to pursue a peaceful resolution based on the Code of Conduct with China that the ASEAN members agreed to develop in Phnom Penh in 2002. The chapter makes clear that, despite the many overlapping and competing maritime territorial claims among ASEAN member states, these states have managed to cooperate to resolve disputes outside of the South China Sea and, unlike China, since the signing of the DOC have largely refrained from taking provocative actions related to contested claims within the region. The chapter further notes the important differences in the dynamics between, and preferences of, China and the rival ASEAN claimants in the South China Sea when compared to the cases of successful dispute resolution discussed in the chapter; the most obvious difference is the asymmetry in the balance of power between China and the other claimants.
Today, seven nations have maritime or island claims in the disputed South China Sea. This article historicizes the claims of one of the dispute's participants, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. It argues that cartographic representations of its territory have their origin in the period of French rule, and locates a key moment in the formation of an Indochinese—and later Vietnamese—space encompassing the South China Sea in a series of four maps that represented research carried out by the colonial Institute of Oceanography. By recreating the biographies of these maps, the article reveals their origin in a contingent interplay of multiple factors, including global scientific networks, economic development, imperial defense, and personal research agendas. The article suggests that attention to the biographies of maps could be an effective means of deconstructing and denaturalizing many of the territorial claims that drive the dispute in the South China Sea today.
The main purpose of this paper is to examine historically issues of territorial claims over the South China Sea. As it is known that at present there are at least six countries claiming part or all of South China Sea territory. In this case China is the most ambitious country to control all areas in the South China Sea. This has led to political and military tensions in the region. It is strange that the South China Sea waters has actually been a shipping thoroughfare for the last two millennia. Therefore, this historical study will contribute to an understanding of the issues that could provoke international conflict.
This article offers a new account of the development of China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. It argues that a collective Chinese belief in a “historic claim” to the reefs and rocks therein emerged in distinct episodes during the first half of the twentieth century, partly in response to perceived threats to the country’s sovereignty but mainly as attempts to shore up declining nationalist legitimacy. It situates the claim within efforts by Chinese intellectual and state elites to construct a national “geobody” in the first decades of the twentieth century. It argues that this was not a process of documenting a preexisting claim but of imagining and asserting one through the mobilization of both emotion and archival documents. Moreover, this account emphasizes the importance of the acquisition of knowledge from foreign sources and the confusion that entailed. The legacy of this confused claim-making shapes South China Sea geopolitics today.
Emotions, international hierarchy, and the problem of solipsism in Sino-US South China Sea politics