China’s Law of the Sea
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Welcome to the China in the World podcast, a series of discussions examining China's foreign policy and shifting engagement with the world. The China in the World podcast is brought to you by Carnegie China and hosted by me, Paul Hanley.

Welcome back to the Carnegie China China in the World podcast for our 202nd episode. We published our 200th episode earlier this month, which was a terrific compilation of interview clips that I've conducted over the last 10 years of the China in the World podcast with Carnegie scholars across the globe. And so I'd encourage you to take a listen to that.

- For this episode, I'm really delighted to welcome my Carnegie colleague, Dr. Isaac Carden, who is a senior fellow in the Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And we'll have an opportunity today to discuss his new book, "China's Law of the Sea: The New Rules of Maritime Order," as well as other topics related to China international law and maritime issues. But before I dive into the interview with Isaac,

Let me first give you an introduction to his background. As I mentioned, he's a senior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment's Asia program. Formally, he was an assistant professor at the U.S. Naval War College and the China Maritime Studies Institute, where he researched China's maritime affairs. He also taught U.S. naval officers and national security professionals about PRC foreign and security policy.

Isaac's scholarship over the years has centered on China's development of maritime power with research on China's maritime disputes and law of the sea issues, global port development, and PLA overseas basing. His writings have appeared in International Security, Security Studies, Foreign Affairs, National War College Review, and other scholarly and policy publications. And as I mentioned, today we have an opportunity to talk to Isaac

about his book, China's Law of the Sea: The New Rules of Maritime Order, which came out earlier this year, published by Yale. And it looks and analyzes the extent to which China is making the rules in the region and global orders. So first, Isaac, thanks very much for joining the China in the World podcast. Thank you, Paul. Really glad to join the show and to have joined the illustrious China scholars at Carnegie.

Well, on that note, let's start there. Welcome to the endowment as well. I mean, you've been here, didn't just join yesterday, obviously, but you are relatively new. And before we delve into the book, it would be terrific, I think,

For our listeners, Maureen, I've given them some background on your history and your research over the years, but maybe more in your own words, kind of your path to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

what your broader research agenda at the Carnegie Endowment will focus on. And as you and I have talked about many times already, Carnegie Endowment really provides a strong platform, a unique platform in a sense to reach a wide range of experts and stakeholders.

including important policymakers. How are you thinking about leveraging all that Carnegie brings to bear and building your research agenda, kind of setting the goals for your research? Can you kind of give us a preview, give the listeners a preview of what to expect to see over time from your research and your broad agenda?

- Sure, happy to project out into the future some of the things that I'm hoping to continue developing now in Carnegie. And I think you put your finger on one of the key

drivers there, which is reaching this broader audience, in particular, the defense and foreign policy makers in the US as well as elsewhere, who are now increasingly focused on some of the particularly security challenges posed by the People's Republic of China. And I'd like to think I'm gonna stay in my lane, which has been China maritime affairs.

And that is deliberately not China Naval affairs. I have a lot of colleagues from my days working at the Naval War College and continuing to work with Navy colleagues who really understand that PLA Navy organization and that I learn a lot from all the time. I'm trying to put that into context. And I think there's a lot of demand for that now. What I would describe the agenda being is trying to unpack and understand China's maritime power.

And one of the key directions that I'm trying to go with that is looking out beyond the disputes, the sovereignty and jurisdictional disputes that the book is about, and that we'll talk today, but really kind of use that as a stepping stone to look at how China is approaching

The maritime commons in particular, the deep seabed and the high seas and the polar regions are the ones that are kind of lined up for me to inquire into. And I've already begun that process here in D.C. So I'm pretty excited to kind of build outward from that research agenda and start to connect some of the near seas and far seas issues that I've worked on as well. You know, what connects China's ports overseas and its naval ports

its single naval base and efforts at basing to the mainland and to the claims to sovereignty are these global commons, these long sea lines of communication that are really motivating Chinese leaders and particularly Chinese defense enterprise to think about how to provide for their security. And so I think

As I said, I think there's a lot of interest in the subject and I'm trying to figure out how to make it accessible and relevant to defense and foreign policymakers. - That sounds terrific. That's an extremely rich agenda and a huge amount of interest and growing interest, not only in the United States, as you said, but I can tell you out here, I'm in Singapore, as you know,

You know, we have our partnership in Beijing with Tsinghua University. And, you know, we'll obviously, as colleagues, be able to find opportunities to engage with Chinese experts and scholars who work on these issues. And in a sense, it's a little bit of unexplored territory there, I think, by China.

a lot of scholars. And so that'll be exciting and interesting. And then I think you know, Carnegie China has recently recruited a number of terrific non-resident scholars in Southeast Asia. And a lot of interest on the set of issues you've just described.

Charmaine Willoughby out of Manila, University of De La Salle, has put together a research program for Carnegie China. She's a new non-resident scholar with us, looking specifically at maritime issues, maritime security issues, and look forward to an opportunity for you to meet her. And then there's a huge amount of interest, as you can imagine, from countries in the region where I currently sit. So I look forward to expanding collaborations in that context.

You mentioned your lane, you're gonna focus on China maritime affairs and that brings us nicely to your book, your terrific book I might add, which is sitting right next to me here on the desk. And before we dive into the substance, maybe I'll just ask a little bit about how long have you been working on this and where did you develop the original concept for it? When did that come about?

and give us just a bit of a preview, the title China's Law of the Sea. What do you mean by that? Why that title?

Well, thanks for the kind words about the book and about all the terrific opportunities I'll have to engage with Carnegie scholars in the region and really trying to expand beyond the sovereignty and maritime disputes that are the focus of the book. But basically, I...

turned on was turned on to that subject by being in the right place at the right time. I think is usually the only way that I ever accomplished anything, frankly, but I was studying language. I think we can all relate to that. Exactly. I was studying

Chinese in Taipei at the time. I was at Shifang Dao Taiwan Normal University. And while I was doing language, I was also serving as an RA for a politics professor there who had incidentally studied

studied a lot of international law of the sea. And this happened to be in May, June, July 2009. And those who have read this book or who follow South China Sea issues will know May 7th and 8th is when China published its famous

nine dash line map for the first time. And so when I showed up in Taipei and was looking for an RA gig and wanted to study Chinese foreign policy issues, I happened to just be in the right place at the right time. And my first task was just trying to understand what that map is, its provenance, its origins, what was intended by this very, very cryptic

note that accompanied China's submission of the map to this obscure UN body called the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. And it's all been downhill from there, I guess you could say. It's almost 14 years, I ended up really developing

a keen interest, especially in maritime disputes during a stint at the National Defense University in Washington. He's working for Phil Saunders and had really a set of terrific opportunities to engage with particularly people from the region, Chinese as well as Vietnamese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and started to get just a real insatiable desire to understand

the history and the contemporary politics of these issues better and that it ended up being a dissertation and the dissertation, nobody knows a dissertation exists until it becomes a book. And so this is that long and sometimes arduous struggle, but I think

It's been a really fruitful subject of inquiry, and as I said, it's now the platform for... I basically spent a lot of time in China, including in places like Hainan, which is sort of at the epicenter of these disputes, trying to understand how it was that Chinese officialdom, as well as international law, its international law community, rather, understood what

what China's relationship was to this law of the sea regime, not just the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea Treaty, but the broader enterprise of international law. And I view this as a modest entry into this broader field of trying to understand China's

influence on international order and particularly on international law. And so when I say China's law of the sea, it is trying to pack in a lot of that richness and a lot of detail that we can get into a little bit of, which is what is it that China is intending to do when it says we are following the

which is importantly what they say they're doing in all of these practices. They're saying we are implementing what we understand and what we interpret to be

the international law and the international norms that are relevant to this. And so the book is really about understanding how it is that China's come to this particular set of maritime rights and interests and its conception on them, and maybe most importantly, it's very empirical. I'm trying to ask about specific rules of international law and really identify specific Chinese practices

over time and understand whether or not they're putting out there on the water surface, in particular, something that's recognizable as a new rule.

So you talk in the book about China's attempts to build a new regional maritime order, shape international norms and maritime litigation using, of course, their own interpretations of international law and their own domestic law as well. I often recall an official interaction with Chinese officials talking about maritime issues, often asserting Chinese domestic law as well.

Can you give just a brief sort of general overview of some of the patterns and some of the practices that you highlight in your book as they try to do this, to build this new regional maritime order and shape the international norms in maritime litigation?

Sure. So, you know, the patterns and practices I'm looking for, I define in terms of the international law of the sea. And I will presume a fairly high level of literacy in what I'm sure is a sophisticated audience. But I'll just unpack a little bit what I mean by that. I'm trying to see what China is doing on questions of

Navigation, that was one of the original stimuli for me to really get into. What is it that they say the rule is? You have a whole chapter on that in the book, I might add, right? I mean, that's one chapter five of the book on navigation rules.

Exactly. And I think that, you know, those concrete examples are probably the best way to understand the method of getting after these practices. So my question there and what I was doing, wandering around China and Hainan and all over a long period of time, starting really in 2012, doing dedicated research on this, is trying to understand what is it that China is trying to prescribe as the rule when they say the U.S. Navy is

is violating international norms or some other vague and indeterminate way of objecting to our actions. Is there underlying that some Chinese view on here's what that rule should be, or maybe more broadly, here's what the process is of determining who's in the right in this case should be.

And one of the kind of interesting, maybe non-findings of the study is going in there with specific questions about what are the ways in which China wants to regulate, for example, marine scientific research in the EEZ.

You find as you get down into the weeds, as you look not just at national legislation, but also at administrative regulations and departmental rules and provincial level notices and regulations is that it's actually quite inconsistent and non uniform.

From an international legal standpoint, and this is true not across the board, but in most cases, and I'll talk about the small handful of cases where it's not. And I think what it reflects most fundamentally when we think about these practices is that China is not a rule of law country.

And that's something that maybe is obvious on its face, but it took me a little while to understand what the implications of that for, say, what does it mean when China ratifies an international treaty that purports to create binding obligations that need to be a part of China's domestic code if China's domestic law and regulation is not

fixed in that way, if it's not willing to, for example, feed some of the control over sensitive political issues that the Chinese Communist Party central leadership expects and in fact demands increasingly on these issues.

It's just very difficult for us to expect, or I think it's inappropriate for us to expect China to practice international law in the ways that, say, Europeans or Americans might expect to see it done. So plenty more to say on that, but I think the key observation there is there's really – it's been a moving target, and there's not nearly the type of –

rigorous attention to uniform, consistent practice that certainly an American international lawyer would expect to see if they were trying to make new rules as it were. Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. And as I said up front, you know, the Chinese will talk about international rules and laws, but they'll always put as primacy, you know, their own domestic laws, right? And I think in a sense, that's what

That's what you're saying. And if there's conflict there, then their domestic laws or national legislation sort of in all cases, would you say then just kind of overrides the international? So it's actually interesting, and this has been one of the discussions that I've been really eager to engage in all along, is comparing this specific law of the sea domain to other areas of international legal practice. And I think

One thing that I can say with some confidence is that

It's quite varied across different domains. You look at international trade law, and at least for a period of time, people were very enthusiastic about this idea that, well, China can be brought into these sort of binding third-party legal institutions. And we see a lot of variation in that practice. Let's not talk about that too much other than to say there are different issue areas and there are different ways that international law can come to roost or can actually take effect in China.

But on that class of issues where there is a central political concern, that's going to override any of the legal machinery every day of the week. I like the idea of thinking about China as having legal institutions but not a legal system.

It is a political legal system. It is a political administrative system that uses law quite deliberately and effectively. It's a Leninist system in that regard. Lenin famously thought about using law like a conductor uses his baton to kind of direct the orchestra and hear a false note. It's the best governance technology out there. Nobody's come up with a better idea.

particularly for a huge bureaucracy like China, of how to get things done. But it's just not a constraint in the way that it is in the U.S., the way that functions or comes to roost is

Any international treaty obligation that we have becomes a cause of action in the domestic court. A court has to interpret those rules. And in fact, some would argue that there's supposed to be a supremacy clause and that if we've ratified a treaty and there's a real honest international law, then that should

our domestic law needs to accommodate that. Otherwise, we need to abrogate our treaty obligations. - Right, right, right. The two should not exist. - I will defer, and I'm sure my international lawyer friends will argue with me on that. But the basic point and the comparative point that's important, and I'm certainly not an expert on American law, is that there is no such mechanism in China, even leading Chinese jurists will have written as much,

the party very explicitly affirms its position on top of the legal institutions. And so they're not really that systematic. What they are are available under the right circumstances, but in issues that implicate sovereignty, which I think is what this entire class of issues are involving China's maritime disputes, the political intensity of that is such that

No international legal obligation is going to trump the central party's interest in upholding China's sovereignty and this now connected concept of China's maritime rights and interests that flow from that sovereignty. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And your book, in addition to navigation rules, you get into resource rules, geographic rules, dispute resolution rules, etc.

It's a really rich set of content. I'd encourage folks to take a look at it if they haven't already done so. And appreciate, Isaac, your sort of broad description of it. It's quite meaty and really worth a read. What I'd like to do, if I could,

is just take your knowledge based on your research here and what you've put together in this book, but look at some of the specific issues that we hear about and read about.

in the region and get a sense of how you see these issues. And if there's things from your book that apply, please let us know. The first is, of course, what we've seen most recently with regard to these Chinese Coast Guard ships firing water cannons at Philippine vessels that are trying to resupply

Filipino troops stationed on Second Thomas Shoal in the Spratlys, which is in the Philippines, EEZ, the Exclusive Economic Zone. And these maritime disputes are longstanding, but China does appear to be becoming more aggressive in asserting its claims in recent years. And given your background, your expertise, I'd be very interested to know what you think

explains this? What are some of the drivers to what we're seeing take place in this specific area? Watching the unfolding events now at Second Thomas Shaw, I think I can offer some preliminary judgments of how

What you could learn by reading this, I think you call it a media book. I might call it. Somewhat dense and academic on the law of the sea issues, not to scare anyone away, but I'm trying to get into the into the details of what are the rules. But 1 of those.

rules, and in fact, the whole kind of set of those rules really bear directly on this. And it is these navigational rules, but it's also the boundary rules, or what I call geographic rules. One thing we can say for sure is that China

is attempting to enforce what it views as something like a sovereignty claim over the features in the Spratlys. What I mean by features, it's a term of art from the law of the sea. It's just about anything that's on a

that can be above water at high tide and low tide or things that are below the surface of the water and are part of the seabed. And that's what we're looking at in the case of Second Thomas Shoal. So it's actually, it's a little, it's unfortunate that it's such a,

arcane field that there are often statements from governments that are not exactly on the money of what it is that makes it their jurisdiction or not. The really key point here for the Philippines is that this is a part of their continental shelf, is the best way to think about it. - Part of the Philippines. - Yeah, it's a seamount, it's now above water and high tide because of what you could think of as an artificial construction on it, the grounding of a ship.

But suffice it to say, China...

treats this area in its own inconsistent and non-uniform way as being related to, if not the actual object of Chinese sovereignty. And so what I would say is the first explanation for why now is that China just has greater capacity now to do this in an effective way than it used to. And I think what we see across the board is that China's resourced this Coast Guard fleet, which is the force that we see on the scene now, and has built

permanent facilities in the Spratlys that allow them to sustain operations continuously. And I think that just gives them a lot more confidence that operationally, they might really be able to prevent a Filipino resupply in a relatively un-escalatory way and do it in such a way in particular that the United States doesn't feel like it's appropriate for us to intervene and that the Philippines feels like, you

you know, it's been, it has been strung out to dry in a way that it doesn't have sufficient capability itself to contend with this, you know, persistent and huge scale Chinese presence and that it will ultimately, you know, surrender this Marine garrison on second time of show. I would say that's the, that's sort of the long term Chinese goal there. I don't think this particular action is supposed to necessarily

bring that specific event about. If we were to talk to our colleagues in China now, Paul, I expect they would say, "We are reacting to the Philippines wanting to not just resupply the people there, the Marines who need food and water, but to reinforce the structure there."

China's been talking a lot about the need to interdict construction materials. And as I said, it's a little preliminary. It's not clear exactly what they did, but this is a really interesting illustration of the, there's an indeterminacy and a vagueness and an inconsistency about everything that China has done in this space. And it reflects a lot of things, but I think in particular, it reflects the fact that there's really not a systematic

way that the law shakes what China's doing here. They're making an opportunistic decision now for a variety of reasons. This seems to be the right moment to show some level or to introduce some level of friction, not the highest level of friction that you could imagine them imposing here. Of course, there are many other things they could bring to bear to prevent a resupply, but I think they're doing it in a way that reflects specifically their views on navigation, and those are that

Under circumstances in which China declares that these are navigational activities in zones that are prohibited, or they're conducting an activity that is not appropriate in Chinese jurisdictional waters, which I think is the general term they would use for this, then they are within their rights. They're within their discretion to sort of make an ad hoc decision about how to deal with it. And so tracking things like the gradually increasing

enhanced rules of engagement for the China Coast Guard as codified in their law and regulations and rules gives you a little insight to this. And you can, again, get into the weeds on this in the book if you're so inclined and get down into the footnotes and you'll see exactly how this is done. And it really...

It has some qualities that I think are quite distinctive, and it's not nearly the kind of legal process that we've been accustomed to observing, maybe looking at international relations in the West. Now, broadening it out a bit, I mean, of course, there's the famous ruling in 2016, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, UNCLOS,

arbitration ruling which rejected China's historical maritime claim over the nine-dash line which you've mentioned before in favor of the of the Philippines in that particular arbitration ruling

Does China reject the institution of unclass and the notion of multilateral arbitration in all cases or only cases where the rulings disfavor China? In other words, is China changing and eroding international norms on wartime law in your view? So let me take that in a couple parts. The first thing to say is,

Thank you for affirming that this was an unclosed UN Convention on the Law of the Sea arbitration. There's been a lot of confusion because the permanent court of arbitration in The Hague was the registry for it and they provided all the sort of front office and clerkship and administrative processes and personnel.

The Philippines brought this case under the law of the sea. The reason that China was found to be subject to it, the reason that the arbitrators found jurisdiction and admissibility in the case is because it was brought properly under, unclosed, and China and the Philippines are both signatories and have both ratified it.

So then the answer on the more kind of fundamental question is, should we read China's rejection of this arbitration as in fact a rejection of the institution of UNCLOS or the notion of what I would call third party binding arbitration or adjudication, third party dispute resolution, legalized dispute resolution, whether they reject that across the board

And unfortunately, the answer is no, it's complicated. China, and we can talk about this, Paul, if you want. It's the kind of elephant in the room any time you talk about the law of the sea in China. China has ratified the law of the sea, as I mentioned. The United States has not. One of the implications of that is that China is vulnerable to, say, arbitral suits that it doesn't like to see. The United States, by virtue of being outside of the treaty agreement,

organization is not. We can't be sued through this mechanism. There are other ways that we might be sued. But what China has done is really wrapped itself in the mantle of being a good, of a responsible stakeholder in the international legal system, as our colleague Evan Feigenbaum might ruefully describe this action, because what they've said is that it's in fact the Philippines

that is illegitimately using or weaponizing this institution of international law because they're in breach of all this litany of international norms that a whole army of Chinese international lawyers has trotted out

over the course of now over a decade of continuous production on all the different ways that basically China says these institutions are much more limited than maybe Americans and European lawyers construe them to be.

than the Philippines or Vietnamese or other regional actors might think they are. What China's saying here is no, we do accept some third party binding arbitration. And I mentioned that WTO case. That's the real signal example that people have looked at. It's a little bit dated now, and I think we should maybe revisit that. But there's no blanket Chinese arbitration

opposition or exception to any of this. What there is and what I think I was able to discover by looking systematically, not just at China's practice in this case of the South China Sea arbitration, which is its only maritime case and doesn't offer a ton of comparative leverage, but looking across all their treaty practice, their bilateral treaties, other multilateral treaties,

China has been scrupulous in excluding anything that could possibly be construed to bear on its sovereignty, its territorial sovereignty, as being eligible for any arbitration or any certainly third-party legalized institutional dispute resolution. That's sort of a categorical ban. And they are appealing to especially regional states with whom they have disputes,

They're appealing to them on the grounds that there should be some alternative set of mechanisms. And so when we hear Chinese diplomats, especially talking about dialogue and consultation, that's actually, this is one of the rare cases. I mentioned that you didn't see a lot of consistent uniform Chinese practice. This is one of those rare cases where we really do see quite a consistent uniform set of Chinese practices.

statements and practices and interests, I would argue, in how to resolve disputes. They will always accept a bilateral political discussion that may not go anywhere, just ask any of the claimants. But they say, "That's your alternative. That's the norm that we want to enforce." And if you look at some of the norms and rules that they're marketing, for example, for the code of conduct, they've circulated- Yeah, the code of conduct. Yeah.

They have suggested as much in that. It's really, they want countries to agree in their dealings with China, at least. And this is an important question. Does China care how this

how third-party dispute resolution plays out elsewhere. I'm not convinced they do and talk about that, but certainly as far as China's concerned and as far as Chinese sovereignty is concerned, it's just a blanket exclusion. And I think it really is, it's a telling norm for China. I think it really tells you a lot about the nature of their views on international law. It's very Chinese sovereignty-centric, for lack of a better term. Sovereignty disputes take on a

a political nature that make them paramount in the Chinese perspective. And when it comes to sovereignty disputes in the region, Chinese scholars we hear today say that US didn't take sides in regional sovereignty disputes on maritime issues.

but that the U.S. is now doing so as part of an effort to kind of suppress or contain China. For example, the U.S. didn't officially endorse the 2016 UNCLOS arbitration in 2016 when it was announced, but four years later it did.

What's your take there? I mean, how has the US traditionally approached these sovereignty disputes, regional maritime sovereignty disputes? And has the approach by the US changed in recent years? Do the Chinese have a point here?

The U.S. approach has clearly changed in some significant ways, and so has the Chinese, and I think the kind of the tit-for-tat or action-reaction cycle, we don't need to do that whole forensic examination there, other than to say what China has seen is the U.S. express an increasingly significant interest

in the maritime disputes. I would actually argue the United States has really kept its nose clean on the sovereignty side. I don't wanna get too technical on it, but we really don't take a position on the legal status, like the property rights over the territory. And that's, I think, if I'm not mistaken, that's probably something the United States does in any international territorial sovereignty dispute.

But I think we can forgive our Chinese counterparts for detecting that the United States certainly has favored parties in these disputes, and China is not the favored party in any of them. And so the ways that our...

Successive administrations from both parties have characterized the dispute, certainly betray what Chinese would view as a bias. I think maybe the more cynical version is that China's belief is that as the United States pivoted or rebalanced to the region,

in the period beginning 2009, that that both implicitly as well as explicitly emboldened other claimants to have a little bit more backbone and to step up their efforts to enforce their claims, and that the United States has been having its cake and eating it too, saying we keep our hands clean of taking sides in the disputes, but here we are providing political and

and diplomatic and perhaps even some kind of technical and operational support for all these other claimants. And so, you know, I think that

I don't want to go through a whole detailed litany of discussions of what the U.S. has and hasn't done on this case, other than to say we've been much, much more interested. There are a lot more senior U.S. officials who are well briefed on these subjects, who have been deeply involved in a lot of these controversies for many years now. And I'm sure you experienced this in your time in government as well. It's not as though this disappeared overnight. It's just that it's become...

much, much more significant over time as Chinese power has grown as a basic cut at it, particularly its maritime power, and as what I suppose has been described as assertiveness appropriately, as that's increased. And that's been kind of a secular trend. China has greater capacity to do it, has greater motivation to do it, and so we've seen it in practice. Fascinating. I mean, terrific. Appreciate your response. I mean, your knowledge on these issues is so deep. There's so much more I could...

I could ask you, but in the interest of time, why don't I just have one final question for you. And that is, we spend a lot of time looking at the region and worried about what's going on in the Taiwan Strait, worried about potential conflict or war on the Korean Peninsula.

Your focus is really on maritime issues, South China Sea being a big part of that. And I wanted to get a sense how you rate or rank the risk of potential conflict between claimants or other actors in the region over the near to mid term.

So this is definitely stepping outside of the bounds of what I feel I can wrestle down in the book, but I'm happy to engage in a little bit of informed speculation. I guess the first thing that comes to mind when I think about higher probabilities is, well, what have we seen in the past? It certainly doesn't predict everything we'll see in the future, but

It's not a coincidence that China has come to blows with Vietnam in the South China Sea repeatedly and with higher levels of lethality and intensity at various junctures. The levels of friction between their fishing fleets and fisheries law enforcement, between their maritime law enforcement agencies, between their energy firms and research and survey vessels,

is quite alarming. And again, the PRC has used force and seized islands from Vietnam twice in living memory, in 1974 and 1988. And Joe, by the way, the last conflict, like larger scale militarized conflict that China's been involved in is with Vietnam in 1979. So without getting into a long, complex discussion of why that's more likely, suffice it to say

They've got a long track record of being willing to use force against one another. Vietnam is quite willing to accept risk and has demonstrated its willingness to take on difficult odds and larger opponents. And I think that carries out into this domain.

what China would call, they've been provocative in various ways. So I've seen various moments over the last several years where you could just see that spiraling. And I think you would expect that to be a lower or more contained, what we might think of as a short, sharp, vocal war. The

Vietnam is not, of course, a U.S. treaty ally. As we said, the United States doesn't take any positions on the ultimate underlying sovereignty of any of these features. And it's very difficult, I would say, for me to see the United States Armed Forces intervening or being involved in a purely China-Vietnam scenario. So I think that alone gives it a higher

We've seen it. There's scope for it. The risk probably from Beijing's standpoint is somewhat lower than, for example, engaging in that type of a kinetic lethal clash with a treaty ally. I'll add on to this.

The book and my research focus is definitely emphatically not just the South China Sea. That happens to be the one where there's an immediate crisis, and it's the place where there have been the most of those crises. I mentioned the actual use of force with respect to Vietnam. We haven't seen that in the other domains. But I do think the Diaoyu Senkaku, which is to say that the islands disputed between China and Japan,

Excuse me. Yes, in the East China Sea. But you know where they also are is right next to Taiwan. And so you think about the ways that, and this is a sort of broader comment, what are the contingencies under which we could see some of these major regional conflicts that everybody has been anxious about? What is the pathway to those conflicts?

And I, for one, don't find it plausible in the least to think China is just all of a sudden snap to and launch a major amphibious assault across the strait. You imagine there's going to be some contingency, some other circumstances that precipitate a broader crisis and create the conditions under which that's possible.

And if you see how forward-leaning China has been in the territorial seas around what they call the Diaoyu and what the Japanese call the Senkaku, you'll see that there's quite a lot of scope for these very capable navies and coast guards. It's primarily coast guards that are now involved in the territorial seas.

But I think there's quite a lot of scope for that, especially in this context now where Japan has articulated and I think not just said, but acted in ways that demonstrate a much, much more significant willingness to participate in the Taiwan discussion and perhaps in various types of Taiwan contingencies. That's something that China does not

look at favorably, they probably view that as a trend that needs to be checked. If we follow one of the leaders in our field, Tom Christensen, and thinking about some of Chinese uses of force historically,

I view that as a case that's more likely than it used to be, as Japan shows more interest and accepts more risk, I suppose, with respect to Taiwan contingencies. We should remember that, and I guess just the last comment on this, these secondary theaters or these other seemingly smaller events seem to be the ones that have precipitated the big structural changes in the region.

You will know well, Paul, and your listeners too, the United States didn't interpose itself in the Taiwan Strait until there was another crisis in the region in 1950 with the North Korean invasion of South Korea. That precipitated this much wider regionalized conflict. And I think we do have all the ducks lined up, unfortunately, for there to be sort of daisy-chained relationships between conflicts in one domain and another.

The Taiwan Strait is what connects the South and the East China Seas. This is all one continuous body of water. There's no real definition of where one starts and ends. And so I think for...

Unfortunately, for the possibility or the various types of pathways to conflict for the region, there are lots of ways that you could see things escalating and maybe a subject for another time, Paul. Not a lot of ways that I think we can express collective confidence that the US and China would be capable of tamping it down. That's something that we are working hard on trying to remedy.

Well, Isaac, thank you so much for your time joining us at the China in the World podcast and talking about your book, China's Law of the Sea, the New Rules of Maritime Order, and also sharing with us your broader research agenda at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And I know my colleagues and I

at Carnegie China. Look forward to quite a bit of collaboration over the next several years and seeing you out in the region, hopefully starting in October in Beijing. So thank you again for joining the China in the World podcast and look forward to having you back on some point here in the near future. Really my pleasure, Paul. Thanks so much for having me.

Thank you for listening to the China in the World podcast. For more episodes and research, please go to carnegiechina.org. This episode was produced by Nathaniel Schur with assistance from Creighton Arrington, Lin Kaijiao, and Nicole Weinraub. The music was composed by Spencer Barnett.