Asia's Cauldron (27 page)

To wit, in 1754, the king of Java, well beyond the southern extremity of the South China Sea, requested that his lands be formally incorporated into those of China and its population entered into the Qing dynasty registers. But the Qing emperor, Qianlong, replied that this was not necessary, because—“at least in his eyes”—the lands and people of Java were “already within the compass of Our enlightened government.”
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Thus, from a Chinese historical vantage point, Beijing's dominance of the South China Sea and even the Java Sea is altogether natural.

Aristotle writes, in a manner that recalls Shakespeare, that conflicts arise “not over small things but from small things.”
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Claims and incidents,
however petty they may seem to outsiders, if they are tied to the vital interests of those in positions of authority, can lead to war. The fact that archives from China's twelfth-century Sung dynasty and from Vietnam's seventeenth-century Nguyen dynasty refer to the Spratlys augments both China's and Vietnam's claims to those barren islands, the great majority of which lack freshwater: claims that on some future morrow the two nations may be willing to violently enforce. “War is normal,” intones America's preeminent academic realist, the late Kenneth N. Waltz of Columbia University. And interdependence, which is synonymous with globalization, can mean more war, Waltz goes on, because highly similar people whose affairs are closely intertwined will occasionally fall into conflict. Moreover, “in the state of nature, there is no such thing as an unjust war.”
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The South China Sea reflects a state of nature in that legal claims are in contradiction with each other and thus provide little basis for cooperation, even as calculations of power, tied partly to the movement of warships, provide the foundation for how the various states interact. This does not mean that war will break out in the South China Sea, or even that it is likely to break out. But it does mean that war there remains a possibility against which all regional powers must always be on guard.

Alleviating the state of nature requires a new security order. A message of both Machiavelli's
Prince
and
Discourses on Livy
is that the founding of a new order is the most difficult thing in politics.
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Indeed, the old order of American military unipolarity in the waters of the Western Pacific is slowly fading. Meanwhile, the United States demands a new order built on international legal norms that its warships will continue to enforce, even as Washington has not signed the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. But rather than an international order dominated by American warships, China now demands a regional order that it, as the dominant indigenous power, will do the most to maintain. Because Chinese naval power is rising, the situation is in serious flux.

Truly, the map of the South China Sea is a classic document of geopolitics, in that geopolitics constitutes the influence of geography upon human divisions.
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It is a relatively shallow sea where the impediments to energy exploration are more political than technological. But the fact that it is a cartographic symbol of conflict does not prevent it from being captivating. This map clarifies a space dense with ships and shipping lanes: sixty thousand vessels each year pass through the Strait of Malacca, including tankers holding more than thirteen billion barrels of petroleum.
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The fetching names of many of the places in dispute are derived from the names of vessels wrecked on the islets, reefs, and shoals in question. With all of its
features
—islands and rocks, many of which disappear under high tide—and all of its broken and unbroken lines denoting various kinds of claims of sovereignty, the map is dizzying in its complexity. The Spratlys alone constitute 150 features, only forty-eight of which are above water all of the time.
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And it is true that the claims are so numerous and so often overlapping with other claims that the idea of a solution pales beside the more realistic hope of just managing the status quo to the benefit of all, so that all can pursue oil and natural gas exploration in the face of absolute rises in population that may help drive energy prices upward. But that will be difficult. For example, the Philippines' Malampaya and Camago natural gas and condensate fields are in Chinese-claimed waters. Vietnam and China have overlapping claims to undeveloped energy blocks off the Vietnamese coast. China has announced that a potential new source of natural gas—frozen methane—was discovered on the seabed near the Paracels, in an area that China disputes with Vietnam. The claims just go on like this.
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Of course, the importance of hydrocarbons in the South China Sea should not be overestimated. South China Sea reserves are unlikely to affect the continuing divergence between demand and domestic production in China: nor would they allow Taiwan to become a net exporter. Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines will remain energy importers no matter how much oil and natural gas they are able to extract from the seabed. Brunei, for that matter, is already a large net exporter of oil. So in terms of the larger dynamics of energy in the
region, little is likely to change. The South China Sea will grow in importance less because of the hydrocarbon resources it holds than because of the increased amounts of imported oil and natural gas passing through its sea lanes.
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But it isn't just oil and natural gas that matter. South China Sea fish stocks may account for as much as one tenth of the global landed catch.
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Chinese fishing boats operating in disputed waters are accompanied by vessels from China's Bureau of Fisheries Administration, in order to assert Chinese jurisdiction in the South China Sea.
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Nevertheless, despite all of these complications and provocations, the legal situation of these waters can be simplified, at least somewhat: stare at the map long enough and some basic facts stand out.

The heart of the drama revolves around historic claims to three archipelagoes: the Pratas in the north, the Paracels in the northwest, and the Spratlys in the southeast. The Pratas are claimed by China but controlled by Taiwan. In any case, there is little argument that these are Chinese islands. China and Taiwan actually agree to a significant extent on the South China Sea, except that China does not consider Taiwan a party to the claims because in Beijing's eyes Taiwan is not a state: so the argument has really to do less with the South China Sea than with the future of de facto Taiwanese independence vis-à-vis China.

The Vietnamese have a strong claim to the Paracels, but the western part of this archipelago has been occupied by China since Beijing took control of it from a failing Saigon government in 1974, near the end of the Vietnam War. The Chinese and Vietnamese have, in fact, solved their disputes in the Gulf of Tonkin: a tribute partly to solidarity between the two countries' communist parties and their pragmatism. But the dispute over the Paracels and other places makes the contest between China and Vietnam the centerpiece of the South China Sea conflict zone.

Then there are the Spratlys, which have been claimed by the Philippines only since the 1950s, within a polygon-shaped line known as the Kalayaan Island Group. Nearby is Reed Bank, completely submerged, but vociferously claimed by the Filipinos, who are confident
of large deposits of oil and gas in the area. Unlike the Vietnamese claims to the Paracels, which the Chinese privately respect and worry about, the Chinese don't respect Philippine designs on the Spratlys. Whereas Vietnam is a tough and battle-hardened warrior state, the Philippines, to repeat, constitutes a semi-failed entity with weak institutions and an extremely weak military—and the Chinese know all this. Even so, China has to keep its aggression against the Philippines in check because the Philippines is a treaty ally of the United States.

Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei all, too, claim features in the Spratlys, though Malaysia only issued its maps in 1979. Up until 2009, the drama was all about who owned the islands. Then Vietnam and Malaysia made a joint submission to international bodies basing their claims beyond their exclusive economic zones, or EEZs, which according to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea extended two hundred miles straight out from their coasts. For the Law of the Sea treaty is actually about land, not water, since your claim under the treaty is based on the location of your coastline. The land dominates the sea—that is the Law of the Sea's underlying principle. Your coastline gets you two hundred miles into the ocean plus extra if there is a continental shelf involved, but a claim based on ownership of an island gets you only twelve miles out. Brunei, for example, with a coastline on northwestern Borneo less than fifty miles long, claims Louisa Reef and Rifleman Bank almost midway across the South China Sea in the direction of Vietnam. Vietnam and Malaysia also made claims based on the Law of the Sea and guess what: China was cut out of the Spratlys, which come within Vietnam's and Malaysia's EEZs; not to mention the EEZs of the Philippines and Brunei. The Law of the Sea only gets China to the Pratas and the Paracels, not to the Spratlys, where the largest energy deposits are thought to be. And as far as the Paracels are concerned, China could be doomed there to a twilight struggle with a truculent Vietnam, which may have the stronger legal claim.

In other words, once the Law of the Sea came into play, China's cow's tongue—or historic nine-dashed line—suddenly had little legal meaning or rationale. Because of the geographical configuration of
the littoral states, everyone else's EEZs get them possession of shallow archipelagic areas near coasts thought to contain energy deposits, whereas China's EEZ extending southward from its coastline gets it comparatively little beyond deep blue water, with exceptions including Pratas Island, Macclesfield Bank, and Scarborough Shoal.

Well, the Chinese say that they have authentic historic claims, while the Law of the Sea only came into being in 1982, and is therefore only part of the story. (Though China ratified the Law of the Sea treaty in 1996, it does not really adhere to it; whereas the United States adheres to it, but hasn't ratified it.) In 2009, Chinese officials put out for the first time a map with the nine-dashed line and began interfering with other countries' survey ships. In 2011, the Chinese made a submission to the United Nations actually making a claim of a full two hundred nautical miles around each of the Spratly Islands.
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Suddenly, such claims, coupled with China's ongoing military expansion, made everyone fearful of rising Chinese power.

The United States got involved ostensibly because it sought to protect a legal, rules-based order enshrining freedom of navigation, which the nine-dashed line appeared to threaten. In fact, the real problem that the Americans have had with China was its expanding submarine base at Hainan Island in the northwestern corner of the South China Sea, which is home to both the latest diesel-electric submarines as well as nuclear ballistic missile subs. Largely because of that base, and because China's deployment of more and more submarines threatened American power projection in the region, the United States pushed back in the guise of strengthening ties to the smaller littoral countries, offering to mediate these nettlesome maritime disputes in 2010. In 2011, the United States announced a “pivot” to the Pacific from the Middle East.
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The American fear wasn't about China's naval acquisitions per se, or about China questioning the legal order per se, but about the combination of the two.

Stepping back a bit, one legal expert in the region told me that it is possible to cut all kinds of deals to ease these disputes, if not completely solve them. For example, China could be granted extensive fishing privileges in the deep-water middle of the South China Sea, in
exchange for some leeway on the nine-dashed line and thus on the EEZ claims. The real problem is that all sides, with the partial exception of Malaysia, are guilty of playing domestic politics with their claims. And by energizing the nationalistic elements in each country, reaching a compromise becomes more difficult. If you left the South China Sea issue to the experts and to the elites in the region, the various disputes would have a better chance of being solved than if you involved large populations in a democratic process, compromised as they are by their emotions. Again Aristotle: “law is intellect without appetite.”
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Because the masses have “appetite,” peace is more likely to reign if they are left out of the equation.

But even with the law, even if China makes its peace with the Law of the Sea convention, and even if the United States were to sign the convention, peace must ultimately be maintained by a balance of power.

It would be healthier for the American-Chinese relationship—the most important bilateral relationship in the world—if Asian states themselves helped balance against rising Chinese military power, rather than relying overwhelmingly on the United States. The most obvious mechanism for that is a strengthened Association of Southeast Asian Nations. ASEAN is ascending. To be sure, ASEAN is not at the level of integration of the European Union (EU), which is united by a common form of government—democracy—giving it a philosophical, and hence political, raison d'être. Moreover, China maintains the ability to exploit divisions within ASEAN. Nevertheless, ASEAN—its democracies and quasi-democracies both—has been over the course of the decades gradually pulling together because of the challenge of a rising China, and also because the individual member states themselves have been evolving into more capable bureaucratic instruments in their own right, able to project power for the first time in their histories. ASEAN's 600 million people produce a combined gross domestic product of $1.7 trillion, greater than that of India (which in less than two decades will be the world's most populous nation).
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