China’s Line in the Sea

China’s Line in the Sea

Beijing concocts a dubious legal defense of its naval aggression.

From the Wall Street Journal

The Philippines has consistently stood up to Chinese bullying in the South China Sea, including by filing a maritime-rights case with United Nations arbitrators. China has now published an official response inadvertently confirming that its behavior is as legally dubious as it is aggressive.

The Philippines initiated arbitration nearly two years ago, after Chinese coast guard and civilian vessels drove Filipino fishermen from Scarborough Shoal, a reef 120 miles off the main Philippine island of Luzon. At the time China was also moving to drill for oil off the coast of Vietnam and sending ships to cut acoustic cables from Vietnamese and U.S. vessels in international waters. All of which followed Beijing’s 2009 publication of a map asserting “indisputable sovereignty” over almost the entire South China Sea, as illustrated by a nine-dash line in the shape of a U.

So Manila sought arbitration under the U.N. Law of the Sea Convention, to which China and its neighbors are parties. Beijing responded by disinviting Philippine President Benigno Aquino from a trade fair and laying siege to another Philippine-held shoal. It also refused to participate in the arbitration, denying its authority and insisting that Manila had broken promises to handle disputes through bilateral negotiations.

Then China’s response paper appeared Sunday, days before arbitrators’ Dec. 15 deadline for Beijing to make its case. The document insists that it doesn’t represent “acceptance of or participation in this arbitration,” but clearly Beijing wants to influence the result.

The crux of Beijing’s argument is that the Law of the Sea tribunal “manifestly has no jurisdiction” because this dispute concerns “territorial sovereignty over several maritime features in the South China Sea, which is beyond the scope of the Convention.” Not quite. It’s correct that the U.N. Convention doesn’t divvy up sovereignty, but that’s not what Manila is seeking.

Manila wants confirmation of its fishing and other commercial rights within its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which the Convention defines as extending 200 miles off a country’s coast, past the 12 miles of territorial waters over which it has full sovereign control. By asserting Chinese sovereignty over Scarborough Shoal and keeping Philippine boats away, Beijing tramples on Manila’s EEZ rights. Adjudicating such issues is precisely what the Convention was set up for.

This isn’t China’s only howler. “It should be particularly emphasized,” says the position paper, “that China always respects the freedom of navigation and overflight enjoyed by all States in the South China Sea in accordance with international law.” That’s some claim given Beijing’s harassment of its neighbors’ ships and planes, and the near misses it has engineered with the USS Cowpens and other U.S. assets operating in international waters and airspace.

China continues to rest its case on inconsistent and weak historical claims, ignoring basic questions raised by scholars and diplomats. Beijing links today’s dashed-line map to one published by China’s Nationalist government in 1948. Officials have never specified the geographic coordinates of the dashes or explained why their maps over the years have had different sets of dashes with different sizes and locations.

While insisting that “China was the first to discover, name, explore and exploit the resources of the South China Sea Islands and the first to continuously exercise sovereign powers over them,” Beijing’s new paper says nothing about the Indians, Malays and others who also sailed there. Nor does it address why, as the BBC’s Bill Hayton documents in a recent book, Chinese officials took three years to notice that France had occupied some of the Spratly Islands in 1933, at which point they had to ask U.S. diplomats for a map of the area.

In the five years since publishing its dashed-line map, China hasn’t clarified such basic matters as whether it claims sovereignty over all the sea’s waters and resources or merely its land features. It prefers strategic ambiguity combined with threatening rhetoric and military coercion.

Which is what makes the Philippines’s U.N. arbitration significant but inadequate. Beijing clearly fears international censure, or it wouldn’t pressure Manila to drop the case or publish a surprise paper to influence the tribunal. Confirming the lawlessness of Beijing’s claims could encourage other players like Malaysia and Indonesia to stand up against China’s threat to open navigation and commerce.

But Chinese aggression won’t be stopped by any U.N. tribunal. While arbitrators consider the evidence, Beijing will continue expanding its military, squeezing territory held by its neighbors, and building entirely new islands through unprecedented landfills. Chinese radar, satellite equipment, anti-aircraft guns and docks have all appeared on artificial South China Sea islets in recent years. Tiny Johnson South Reef could soon grow to host China’s first airstrip in the combustible Spratly Islands.

Such militarization of the South China Sea threatens shipping routes that are important to all the world’s major economies. Checking China’s more aggressive ambitions will require more pressure than China’s neighbors and the United States have mustered. The Philippine arbitration case is a start that is worth endorsing and expanding.