China's Territorial Disputes (2 page)

While the end of the Cold War may have led to a new era of security cooperation and economic inter-dependence between the major powers of the world, territorial disputes among countries of the same region remain an important source of tension and adversarial relations, which can easily erupt into armed conflicts. By the end of 1995, more than sixty territorial disputes were going on between states.
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Scholars of conflict management have identified over 280 international crises between 1946 and 1988, and in close to 50 per cent of the cases, territorial issues were a direct cause of the crises.
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Almost all of these territorial crises were located outside Europe or North America, and most of them have yet to be resolved, although they may be currently dormant until challenges are activated or reactivated by claimant countries. Indeed, three of these outstanding territorial issues involve disputes over territorial sovereignty of several islands or island groups claimed by China and several of its neighbors, and a land border dispute between China and India. John Vasquez has noted that contiguous states are more likely to fight with each other over territory than non-contiguous states, which means that states which border more countries will be more dispute-prone than those with fewer borders.
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The People’s Republic of China has had land and ocean borders with anywhere from fifteen to twenty-one states during its existence, more than most. Unsurprisingly, control over its borders and a demonstrated capacity to ensure territorial integrity are crucial pillars for the internal legitimacy and external status of a sovereign country. As Alastair Iain Johnston discovered, China was more likely to resort to force when disputes involve territory and occur in periods where the perceived gap between ascribed and desired international status is large or growing.
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This observation points to the centrality of territorial integrity and international status in the dispute management behavior of modern Chinese foreign policy.

The People’s Republic of China today has a land boundary of more than

20,000 kilometers and a coastline of about 18,000 kilometers that covers more than 3 million square kilometers of territorial waters rich in resources. A number of islands and tracts of land that China considers its frontier territories are still the subject of international disputes. The dispute over the islands in the Ussuri and Amur boundary rivers between China and the Soviet Union, now Russia, has been largely settled, with the exception of one island, over which neither side recognizes the other’s sovereignty rights, but Russia now has administrative control. However, the dispute over the Tiaoyutai/Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea among China, Taiwan and Japan has been recurring over the years with no solution in sight. The on-and-off negotiation process by China and India to fix a legal boundary between them along their mountainous common border has so far failed, but the many rounds of talks have led to the establishment of confidence-building measures and the near-dissipation of border tension in the last decade and a half. As to the Spratly and other islands in the South China Sea, which are contested in whole or in part by China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei, negotiations to ascertain sovereignty over them have yet to be started.

To uncritical observers, these tiny specks of largely uninhabited and essentially useless isles or peaks are occasional but minor irritants to peace and goodwill between China and its neighbors. However, to some nationalistic propagandists in China and the neighboring countries with which it has these disputes, these same places are “sacred territory,” symbols of their countries’ national honor and territorial integrity, the claims over which must always be upheld and never alienated. Aside from being symbols of national prestige in this era of nation-state reification, the insular character of the claims has set them apart as iconographic identities in the minds and maps of citizens who use them to define the frontier, margin or boundary of their “imagined communities,” if one wishes to use the term. Like mountainous passes and plateaus along China’s land borders, many of the islands in question are too barren or too distant to have much economic value in themselves. However, of themselves they are of great value, for in these times of technological advancement coinciding with increasing resource scarcity, their possession may determine national maritime boundaries over waters in which fishing may take place and under which offshore oil deposits may be found and exploited. When the United Nations Third Convention of the Law of the Sea came into force in 1982, it added to the urgency of ascertaining sovereignty claims and drawing accurate boundaries around these islands by permitting countries to extend their national sovereignty over the territorial sea, exclusive economic zone, and continental shelf of an island. However, sovereignty claims over islands are subjected to the provision that “rocks that cannot sustain permanent human inhabitation or economic life shall have no exclusive economic zone or continental shelf.”
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Unfortunately. what actually constitutes “permanent human inhabitation or economic life” can be subjected to different interpretations; hence the desire of countries with maritime claims to demonstrate sovereignty and assert control over as extensive a zone of islands and waters as is physically possible.

In the last four decades, China has emerged as an important fishing and maritime nation, and has therefore taken an unsurprisingly strong interest in all matters relating to the law of the sea. Since 1958, when the government of the People’s Republic of China issued the “Declaration Concerning China’s Territorial Sea,” it has declared a twelve-mile territorial sea and affirmed China’s sovereignty over certain islands, including Taiwan.
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In 1992, China passed a maritime law establishing its 200-mile exclusive economic zones over the Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea and the South China Sea. However, the “eastern sea” has not always evoked such interest in the Chinese, for in the past, sea power or maritime exploration were irrelevant to the need to maintain or protect a vast land empire, from which its people overwhelmingly drew their economic sustenance. The main threat to the survival, stability and prosperity of the Chinese agrarian empire for the past millennia has always been from the mounted nomadic marauders of the north and northwest beyond the Great Wall. Records of Chinese trading vessels in the China Seas date back to the third and fourth centuries, and occasional maritime expeditions were made under official auspices, the most famous of which were those made during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) under Admiral Zheng He. Still the waters remained basically the haunt of pirates and bootleggers, especially Japanese ones, who always had a better appreciation of the economic potential and security offered by the sea. By the sixteenth century, the Europeans had begun their domination of the islands off China’s coast, to which the Chinese government offered no effective response. It was under such ironic, though not surprising, circumstances, that after two thousand years of tenaciously guarding their northern and northwestern land frontiers, the Chinese were finally brought to their knees and forced to sign a series of humiliating treaties impeaching on their national independence, by cannons fired from the decks of British and other European vessels.

The Westerners brought to China and the rest of East Asia the concept of state sovereignty and hard borders, which were alien to the East Asian concepts of authority and order that it superceded, and created many problems for China and other East Asian countries in the context of their intercourse. Traditionally, as far as the Chinese were concerned, “of everything under heaven, nothing does not belong to their sovereign.”
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As such, the notion that the Chinese sovereign would have to plant flags or enact commemorative plates to assert his right over a piece of land or island, which he would have had no reason to exclude from his rule of “all under heaven,” must have seemed downright ridiculous to him and his subjects. The European “sovereign” state system that evolved after the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) consists of states with formally equal rights struggling to survive and prosper in an anarchic world order. This contrasted greatly with the East Asian state system, which was arranged in the form of a hierarchy loosely ordered around China as the hegemon, at least until its univer-salistic pretensions were finally shattered by the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895), with the defeat of China by Japan. The power and prestige of a strong and united China was such that neighboring countries, as its vassals, were obliged to acknowledge and even pay tribute to it, in a world order patterned after the inherently unequal relationship among members of different gender, generations and ages in an extended family.

However, since its defeat by Japan and the Western powers, China has had to play international politics by the rules set by others, as does Japan, which included recognizing other states, and being recognized by them, as being equally “sovereign” entities in an anarchic world order typically dominated by one (British) or two (US and USSR) superpowers. In a world of state-nations, territories either belong on one side of a fixed boundary to a particular state entity, or else they belong on the other side of the fixed boundary to another “sovereign” state. Where the more familiar principle of overlordship or suzerainty can no longer be applied to resolve, or avoid altogether, issues of territorial claims by East Asian states, concepts like “sovereignty” and “rights” have to be retrofitted and extended several centuries back, and marginally relevant Western case studies quoted as analogies, to demonstrate every possible reference of sighting, exercise of jurisdiction and act of occupation, no matter how implausible, indirect or intermittent, as an automatic claim to the right of ownership over a disputed piece of territory and its uses.

There were many differences between the revolutions and revolutionaries of 1911 and 1949, but the common thread that under-girded both was the inculcation, or attempt at inculcation, of a sense of territorial nationalism as a unifying force to organize and mobilize large numbers of the Chinese population against foreign “imperialists” and their domestic “agents.” The growth of state-based nationalism then became an instrument of central government control, but it also hardened the lines of existing territorial disputes, because the saliency of unresolved sovereignty disputes, active or dormant, even of border areas of inconsequential economic or security importance, came to be infused with the political legitimacy of leaders as defenders of the state as the common property of the masses. The more people there are who believe they have a moral or real stake in the territorial integrity of the state and who have some means of making their opinion felt, the more likely it will be that a multitude of territorial disputes will take on a significance they have not had before, and the more complex and uncertain will be the rules by which such disputes can be resolved. This is as true with China as with the countries with which it has border disputes.

Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong was cognizant of the historical threat posed by imperialists who came from the sea, and advocated building up a strong navy.
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However, the Communist Party rulers of China came to power by fighting first a guerrilla, and then a frontal infantry “people’s war” on land. Given China’s long land boundaries and the direction of historical menace, the Chinese Communist leaders were naturally very concerned about the security of their land defenses, a concern borne out by China’s involvement in border clashes with India and the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Mao and his cohorts thus unsurprisingly regarded the navy as merely a coastal and river defense force, the chief tasks of which were to interdict the invaders’ supply line and provide ground support for ground operations, and priority was given to the development of the army and air force. Given the “continental” orientation of the Maoist defense posture, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) adhered to a coastal defense strategy from 1950 to 1974, although it had developed submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and nuclear-armed bombers since the mid-1960s against a possible Soviet military threat.
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The Chinese naval action against the Republic of (South) Vietnam navy in the Paracel Islands in January 1974 first saw the deployment of PLAN destroyers and fighter jets in battle in the South China Sea, more than 150 miles from Hainan, ushering in a sea-based coastal defense strategy.

With the inauguration of Deng Xiaoping’s coastal development strategy in 1979 based on the “Special Economic Zones” and “Open Cities” of the eastern seaboard, a high level of economic activity is concentrated along the coast. This means that important cities, industrial bases, ports and military bases along the coastal areas would become more vulnerable to sudden attacks by enemies. Although the Chinese leadership had by 1985 ruled out the possibility of world war or an all-out war between China and a superpower, it was concerned that tensions over Taiwan and islands under dispute in the East and South China Seas could erupt into localized but bloody armed confrontations.
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To enable PLAN to blockade Taiwan or seize and hold the disputed islands should the need ever arise, China has been acquiring arms from countries of the former Soviet Union, and developing submarines, perfecting SLBMs, and training rapid deployment forces. By moving from a coastal defense strategy to an offshore defense strategy, navy planners have since the late 1980s been extending the defense patrol parameter to beyond 200 nautical miles from the coast, to the furthest reaches of the East and South China Seas.
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By doing so, the Chinese are telling the world that they are preparing for armed conflict at sea in order to safeguard their maritime territorial and economic interests, and if necessary or desirable, to resolve outstanding islands sovereignty disputes their own way