(Mohan Malik is a professor in Asian security at Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, in Honolulu. The views expressed are his own. His most recent book is China and India: Great Power Rivals. This article was published in World Affairs, May/June 2013 issue.)
Subi Reef located near Pagasa Island (taken over by China during their creeping invasions)
The Spratly Islands—not so long ago known primarily as a rich fishing ground—have turned into an international flashpoint as Chinese leaders insist with increasing truculence that the islands, rocks, and reefs have been, in the words of Premier Wen Jiabao, “China’s historical territory since ancient times.” 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 “historically based” claims, which are precisely the type Beijing periodically asserts. On September 4, 2012, China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, told US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that there is “plenty of historical and jurisprudence evidence to show that China has sovereignty over the islands in the South China Sea and the adjacent waters.”
China’s claim to the Spratlys on the basis of history runs aground on the fact that the region’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, China’s claim that its land boundaries were historically never defined and delimited stands in sharp contrast with the stance that China’s maritime boundaries were always clearly defined and delimited. Herein lies a basic contradiction 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 China’s territorial and maritime disputes with neighboring countries. Put simply, sovereignty is a post-imperial notion ascribed to nation-states, not ancient empires.
China’s present borders largely reflect the frontiers established during the spectacular episode of eighteenth-century Qing (Manchu) expansionism, which over time hardened into fixed national boundaries following the imposition of the Westphalian nation-state system over Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Official Chinese history today often distorts this complex history, however, claiming that Mongols, Tibetans, Manchus, and Hans were all Chinese, when in fact the Great Wall was built by the Chinese dynasties to keep out the northern Mongol and Manchu tribes that repeatedly overran Han China; the wall actually represented the Han Chinese empire’s outer security perimeter. While most historians see the onslaught of the Mongol hordes led by Genghis Khan in the early 1200s as an apocalyptic event that threatened the very survival of ancient civilizations in India, Persia, and other nations (China chief among them), the Chinese have consciously promoted the myth that he was actually “Chinese,” and therefore all areas that the Mongols (the Yuan dynasty) had once occupied or conquered (such as Tibet and much of Central and Inner Asia) belong to China. China’s claims on Taiwan and in the South China Sea are also based on the grounds that both were parts of the Manchu empire. (Actually, in the Manchu or Qing dynasty maps, it is Hainan Island, not the Paracel and Spratly Islands, that is depicted as China’s southern-most border.) In this version of history, any territory conquered by “Chinese” in the past remains immutably so, no matter when the conquest may have occurred.
Below were ancient Chinese maps showing Paracels, Maclessfiels,
and Spratlys were not part of China.
and Spratlys were not part of China.
Such
writing and rewriting of history from a nationalistic perspective to promote
national unity and regime legitimacy has been accorded the highest priority by
China’s rulers, both Nationalists and Communists. The Chinese Communist Party
leadership consciously conducts itself as the heir to China’s imperial legacy,
often employing the symbolism and rhetoric of empire. From primary-school
textbooks to television historical dramas, the state-controlled information
system has force-fed generations of Chinese a diet of imperial China’s
grandeur. As the Australian Sinologist Geremie Barmé points out, “For decades
Chinese education and propaganda have emphasized the role of history in the
fate of the Chinese nation-state . . . While Marxism-Leninism and Mao Thought
have been abandoned in all but name, the role of history in China’s future
remains steadfast.” So much so that history has been refined as an instrument
of statecraft (also known as “cartographic aggression”) by state-controlled
research institutions, media, and education bodies.
China
uses folklore, myths, and legends, as well as history, to bolster greater
territorial and maritime claims. Chinese textbooks preach the notion of the Middle
Kingdom as being the oldest and most advanced civilization that was at the very
center of the universe, surrounded by lesser, partially Sinicized states in
East and Southeast Asia that must constantly bow and pay their respects.
China’s version of history often deliberately blurs the distinction between
what was no more than hegemonic influence, tributary relationships, suzerainty,
and actual control. Subscribing to the notion that those who have mastered the
past control their present and chart their own futures, Beijing has always
placed a very high value on “the history card” (often a revisionist
interpretation of history) in its diplomatic efforts to achieve foreign policy
objectives, especially to extract territorial and diplomatic concessions from
other countries. Almost every contiguous state has, at one time or another,
felt the force of Chinese arms—Mongolia, Tibet, Burma, Korea, Russia, India,
Vietnam, the Philippines, and Taiwan—and been a subject of China’s revisionist
history. As Martin Jacques notes in When China Rules the World, “Imperial
Sinocentrism shapes and underpins modern Chinese nationalism.”
If the
idea of national sovereignty goes back to seventeenth-century Europe and the
system that originated with the Treaty of Westphalia, the idea of maritime
sovereignty is largely a mid-twentieth-century American concoction China has
seized upon to extend its maritime frontiers. As Jacques notes, “The idea of
maritime sovereignty is a relatively recent invention, dating from 1945 when the
United States declared that it intended to exercise sovereignty over its
territorial waters.” In fact, the UN’s Law of the Sea agreement represented the
most prominent international effort to apply the land-based notion of
sovereignty to the maritime domain worldwide—although, importantly, it rejects
the idea of justification by historical right. Thus although Beijing claims
around eighty percent of the South China Sea as its “historic waters” (and is
now seeking to elevate this claim to a “core interest” akin with its claims on
Taiwan and Tibet), China has, historically speaking, about as much right to
claim the South China Sea as Mexico has to claim the Gulf of Mexico for its
exclusive use, or Iran the Persian Gulf, or India the Indian Ocean.
Ancient
empires either won control over territories through aggression, annexation, or
assimilation or lost them to rivals who possessed superior firepower or
statecraft. Territorial expansion and contraction was the norm, determined by
the strength or weakness of a kingdom or empire. The very idea of “sacred
lands” is ahistorical because control of territory was based on who grabbed or
stole what last from whom. The frontiers of the Qin, Han, Tang, Song, and Ming
dynasties waxed and waned throughout history. A strong and powerful imperial
China, much like czarist Russia, was expansionist in Inner Asia and Indochina
as opportunity arose and strength allowed. The gradual expansion over the
centuries under the non-Chinese Mongol and Manchu dynasties extended imperial China’s
control over Tibet and parts of Central Asia (now Xinjiang), Taiwan, and
Southeast Asia. Modern China is, in fact, an “empire-state” masquerading as a
nation-state.
If
China’s claims are justified on the basis of history, then so are the
historical claims of Vietnamese and Filipinos based on their histories.
Students of Asian history know, for instance, that Malay peoples related to
today’s Filipinos have a better claim to Taiwan than Beijing does. Taiwan was
originally settled by people of Malay-Polynesian descent—ancestors of the
present-day aborigine groups—who populated the low-lying coastal plains. In the
words of noted Asia-watcher Philip Bowring, writing last year in the South
China Morning Post, “The fact that China has a long record of written history
does not invalidate other nations’ histories as illustrated by artifacts,
language, lineage and genetic affinities, the evidence of trade and travel.”
Unless one subscribes to the notion of Chinese exceptionalism, imperial China’s
“historical claims” are as valid as those of other kingdoms and empires in
Southeast and South Asia. China laying claim to the Mongol and Manchu empires’
colonial possessions would be equivalent to India laying claim to Afghanistan,
Bangladesh, Burma, Malaysia (Srivijaya), Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka on the
grounds that they were all parts of either the Maurya, Chola, or the Moghul and
the British Indian empires.
China’s
claims in the South China Sea are also a major shift from its longstanding
geopolitical orientation to continental power. In claiming a strong maritime
tradition, China makes much of the early-fifteenth-century expeditions of Zheng
He to the Indian Ocean and Africa. But, as Bowring points out, “Chinese were
actually latecomers to navigation beyond coastal waters. For centuries, the
masters of the oceans were the Malayo-Polynesian peoples who colonized much of
the world, from Taiwan to New Zealand and Hawaii to the south and east, and to
Madagascar in the west. Bronze vessels were being traded with Palawan, just
south of Scarborough, at the time of Confucius. When Chinese Buddhist pilgrims
like Faxian went to Sri Lanka and India in the fifth century, they went in
ships owned and operated by Malay peoples. Ships from what is now the
Philippines traded with Funan, a state in what is now southern Vietnam, a
thousand years before the Yuan dynasty.”
And
finally, China’s so-called “historic claims” to the South China Sea are
actually not “centuries old.” They only go back to 1947, when Chiang Kai-shek’s
nationalist government drew the so-called “eleven-dash line” on Chinese maps of
the South China Sea, enclosing the Spratly Islands and other chains that the
ruling Kuomintang party declared were now under Chinese sovereignty. Chiang
himself, saying he saw German fascism as a model for China, was fascinated by
the Nazi concept of an expanded Lebensraum (“living space”) for the Chinese
nation. He did not have the opportunity to be expansionist himself because the
Japanese put him on the defensive, but cartographers of the nationalist regime
drew the U-shape of eleven dashes in an attempt to enlarge China’s “living
space” in the South China Sea. Following the victory of the Chinese Communist
Party in the civil war in 1949, the People’s Republic of China adopted this cartographic
coup, revising Chiang’s notion into a “nine-dash line” after erasing two dashes
in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1953.
Since
the end of the Second World War, China has been redrawing its maps, redefining
borders, manufacturing historical evidence, using force to create new
territorial realities, renaming islands, and seeking to impose its version of
history on the waters of the region. The passage of domestic legislation in
1992, “Law on the Territorial Waters and Their Contiguous Areas,” which claimed
four-fifths of the South China Sea, was followed by armed skirmishes with the
Philippines and Vietnamese navies throughout the 1990s. More recently, the
dispatch of large numbers of Chinese fishing boats and maritime surveillance
vessels to the disputed waters in what is tantamount to a “people’s war on the
high seas” has further heightened tensions. To quote commentator Sujit Dutta,
“China’s unmitigated irredentism [is] based on the . . . theory that the
periphery must be occupied in order to secure the core. [This] is an
essentially imperial notion that was internalized by the Chinese
nationalists—both Kuomintang and Communist. The [current] regime’s attempts to
reach its imagined geographical frontiers often with little historical basis
have had and continue to have highly destabilizing strategic consequences.”
One
reason Southeast Asians find it difficult to accept Chinese territorial claims
is that they carry with them an assertion of Han racial superiority over other
Asian races and empires. Says Jay Batongbacal of the University of the
Philippines law school: “Intuitively, acceptance of the nine-dash line is a
corresponding denial of the very identity and history of the ancestors of the
Vietnamese, Filipinos, and Malays; it is practically a modern revival of
China’s denigration of non-Chinese as ‘barbarians’ not entitled to equal
respect and dignity as peoples.”
Empires
and kingdoms never exercised sovereignty. If historical claims had any validity
then Mongolia could claim all of Asia simply because it once conquered the
lands of the continent. There is absolutely no historical basis to support
either of the dash-line claims, especially considering that the territories of
Chinese empires were never as carefully delimited as nation-states, but rather
existed as zones of influence tapering away from a civilized center. This is
the position contemporary China took starting in the 1960s, while negotiating
its land boundaries with several of its neighboring countries. But this is not
the position it takes today in the cartographic, diplomatic, and low-intensity
military skirmishes to define its maritime borders. The continued reinterpretation
of history to advance contemporary political, territorial, and maritime claims,
coupled with the Communist leadership’s ability to turn “nationalistic
eruptions” on and off like a tap during moments of tension with the United
States, Japan, South Korea, India, Vietnam, and the Philippines, makes it
difficult for Beijing to reassure neighbors that its “peaceful rise” is wholly
peaceful. Since there are six claimants to various atolls, islands, rocks, and
oil deposits in the South China Sea, the Spratly Islands disputes are, by
definition, multilateral disputes requiring international arbitration. But
Beijing has insisted that these disputes are bilateral in order to place its
opponents between the anvil of its revisionist history and the hammer of its
growing military power.
Mohan Malik is a professor in
Asian security at Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, in Honolulu. The
views expressed are his own. His most recent book is China and India: Great
Power Rivals. He wishes to thank Drs. Justin Nankivell, Carlyle Thayer, Denny
Roy, and David Fouse for their comments on this article.
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/historical-fiction-china%E2%80%99s-south-china-sea-claims
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
PH Justice Carpio debunks China’s historical claim
of South China Sea
By Ellen Tordesillas, Contributor
Using China’s very own ancient maps, Justice Antonio T. Carpio debunked the Asian superpower's ownership claims of almost the whole of South China Sea based on “historical facts.”
In lecture at De La Salle University "Historical Facts, Historical Lies and Historical Rights in the West Philippine Sea," Carpio took up China’s invitation to look at the “historical facts” by examining not only Chinese ancient maps but also maps of Philippine authorities and other nationalities.
Carpio said “All these ancient maps show that since the first Chinese maps appeared,the southern most territory of China has always been Hainan Island, with its ancient names being Zhuya, then Qiongya, and thereafter Qiongzhou. “
“Hainan Island was for centuries a part of Guangdong Province until 1988 when it became a separate province,” he added.
Carpio said that after the Philippines filed in January 2013 its arbitration case against China before an international tribunal, invoking UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea ) to protect the Exclusive Economic Zone of the Philippines, China stressed “historical facts” as another basis for its maritime claims in the South China Sea.
Carpio said Chinese diplomats now declare that they will not give one inch of territory that their ancestors bequeathed to them.
He quoted General Fang Fenghui, Chief of Staff of the People’s Liberation Army, during his recent visit to the United States saying, “territory passed down by previous Chinese generations to the present one will not be forgotten or sacrificed.”
In lecture at De La Salle University "Historical Facts, Historical Lies and Historical Rights in the West Philippine Sea," Carpio took up China’s invitation to look at the “historical facts” by examining not only Chinese ancient maps but also maps of Philippine authorities and other nationalities.
Carpio said “All these ancient maps show that since the first Chinese maps appeared,the southern most territory of China has always been Hainan Island, with its ancient names being Zhuya, then Qiongya, and thereafter Qiongzhou. “
“Hainan Island was for centuries a part of Guangdong Province until 1988 when it became a separate province,” he added.
Carpio said that after the Philippines filed in January 2013 its arbitration case against China before an international tribunal, invoking UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea ) to protect the Exclusive Economic Zone of the Philippines, China stressed “historical facts” as another basis for its maritime claims in the South China Sea.
Carpio said Chinese diplomats now declare that they will not give one inch of territory that their ancestors bequeathed to them.
He quoted General Fang Fenghui, Chief of Staff of the People’s Liberation Army, during his recent visit to the United States saying, “territory passed down by previous Chinese generations to the present one will not be forgotten or sacrificed.”
Carpio said “Historical facts, even if true, relating to discovery and exploration in the Age of Discovery (early 15th century until the 17th century) or even earlier, have no bearing whatsoever in the resolution of maritime disputes under UNCLOS. Neither Spain nor Portugal can ever revive their 15th century claims to ownership of all the oceans and seas of our planet, despite the 1481 Papal Bull confirming the division of the then undiscovered world between Spain and Portugal. The sea voyages of the Chinese Imperial Admiral Zheng He, from 1405-1433, can never be the basis of any claim to the South China Sea. Neither can historical names serve as basis for claiming the oceans and seas. The South China Sea was not even named by the Chinese but by European navigators and cartographers. The Song and Ming Dynasties called the South China Sea the “Giao Chi Sea,” and the Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China as well as the People’s Republic of China call it the “South Sea” without the word “China.” India cannot claim the Indian Ocean, and Mexico cannot claim the Gulf of Mexico, in the same way that the Philippines cannot claim thePhilippine Sea, just because historically these bodies of water have been named after these countries.”
Carpio said in the early 17th century, Hugo Grotius, the founder of international law, wrote that “the oceans and seas of our planet belonged to all mankind, and no nation could claim ownership to the oceans and seas.“
This revolutionary idea of Hugo Grotius later became the foundation of the law of the sea under international law.
To download Carpio’s complete speech please go to :
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/18010607/The%20Historical%20Facts%20in%20the%20WPS.pdf
https://ph.news.yahoo.com/blogs/the-inbox/ph-justice-carpio-debunks-china-historical-claims-south-140906288.html?.tsrc=warhol
Carpio said in the early 17th century, Hugo Grotius, the founder of international law, wrote that “the oceans and seas of our planet belonged to all mankind, and no nation could claim ownership to the oceans and seas.“
This revolutionary idea of Hugo Grotius later became the foundation of the law of the sea under international law.
To download Carpio’s complete speech please go to :
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/18010607/The%20Historical%20Facts%20in%20the%20WPS.pdf
https://ph.news.yahoo.com/blogs/the-inbox/ph-justice-carpio-debunks-china-historical-claims-south-140906288.html?.tsrc=warhol
YouTube Videos of Kalayaan Islands Group / Spratly
China Get out of Ayungin Shoal
Please read also the below related postings :
Ang Islang Kinamkam ng Tsina
http://roilogolez.blogspot.com/2013/08/south-china-sea-ang-islang-kinamkam-ng.html
Geopolitics of Scarborough Shoal
http://www.irasec.com/ouvrage34,
BRP Sierra Madre at Ayungin Shoal
http://jibraelangel2blog.blogspot.com/2014/04/ayungin-shoal-philippines-last-line-of.html
China's aggresion in Scarborough Shoal http://jibraelangel2blog.blogspot.com/2012/05/rally-against-chinas-aggresion-in.html
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