Beijingâ??s claims to nearly all of the South China Sea are now embossed in new Chinese passports and official maps. Chinese leaders and foreign ministry spokespersons insist with increasing truculence that the islands, rocks, and reefs have been Chinaâ??s â??territory since ancient times.â? 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 â??historically basedâ? claims, which are precisely the type Beijing periodically asserts. On September 4, 2012, Chinaâ??s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, told then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that there is â??plenty of historical and jurisprudence evidence to show that China has sovereignty over the islands in the South China Sea and the adjacent waters.â?
As far as the â??jurisprudence evidenceâ? is concerned, the vast majority of international legal experts have concluded that Chinaâ??s claim to historic title over the South China Sea, implying full sovereign authority and consent for other states to transit, is invalid and illegal. The historical evidence, if anything, is even less persuasive. There are several contradictions in Chinaâ??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 Chinaâ??s attempts to expand its maritime frontiers by claiming islands and reefs far from its shores, Jia Qingguo, professor at Beijing Universityâ??s School of International Studies, argues that China is merely following the example set by the West. â??The United States has Guam in Asia which is very far away from the U.S. and the French have islands in the South Pacific, so it is nothing new,â? Jia told AFP recently.
An in-depth analysis of the â??historical evidenceâ? underlying Chinaâ??s claims shows that history is, in fact, not on Chinaâ??s side. If anything, Beijingâ??s claim to the Spratlys on the basis of history runs aground on the fact that the regionâ??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, Chinaâ??s claim that its land boundaries were historically never defined and delimited stands in sharp contrast with the stance that Chinaâ??s maritime boundaries were always clearly defined and delimited. Herein lies a basic contradiction (ji ben mao dun) 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 Chinaâ??s territorial and maritime disputes with neighboring countries. Put simply, sovereignty is a post-imperial notion ascribed to nation-states, not ancient empires.
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