Investigating China's 'historic' claims in the South China Sea
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Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu. Every episode I'll be talking to journalists, experts and long-time China watchers about the latest in Chinese politics, society and more. There'll be a smattering of history to catch you up on the background knowledge and some context as well. How do the Chinese see these issues? The South China Sea has been an area of regular clashes and heightened tensions, especially under the leadership of Xi Jinping.

It seems that every few months, Chinese naval or coast guard ships clash or almost clash with vessels from Southeast Asian nations like Vietnam and the Philippines. Only last week, a Chinese ship clashed with a Filipino coast guard in the Spratly Islands, with both sides levelling angry accusations at each other. The area is full of disputed claims, making it fertile waters for accidental escalation.

China says its claims to the region, encompassed by the so-called Nine-Dash Line, are historic. That islands such as the Spratlys and the Paracels in the South China Sea are as integral to the Chinese empire historically as Hong Kong or Taiwan have been. But how sound is that claim? This episode will be digging into the origins of the Nine-Dash Line, and finds them not so much in ancient imperial days. The chaotic formation of China's claims in the South China Sea is researched and detailed in Bill Hayton's book, The Invention of China.

Chinese Whispers listeners may remember him from when he came on to talk about the book more fully a few years ago. Bill is an Asia expert holding the role of Associate Fellow at Chatham House, and I'm delighted that he joins me now. Bill, welcome to Chinese Whispers. Thank you for having me. Now, Bill, I think we have to start in the century of humiliation. So we're talking about territorial claims that are beginning to be discussed, staked out, protected in the early 1900s. What was the historical context of China at the time?

Yeah, so I guess if we start just at the beginning of the 20th century, you had the Boxer Rising, rebellion, resistance to the foreigners movement, which had seen attacks on foreigners, followed by the invasion of the Eight Nation Army, and Beijing being occupied, and lots of sort of anger among the general Chinese population. And this movement

of national humiliation starts to be used. And it particularly emerges in the southern coast cities. And you have to remember that, of course, it wasn't just sitting here in Britain, we always think about Britain and China, but it was particularly Japan and China, but also French and other forces that were kind of grabbing little bits of China, treaty ports, other territorial concessions.

And this anger was very strong and there were a series of incidents in the 1900s and one of them involved a Japanese ship that was smuggling weapons into rebels and it was confiscated and in the process of

that incident this idea of national humiliation kind of bursts out into public and you see things like women having brooches with remember national humiliation and this language gets used and so it

But also it's a time of ferment politically inside what's still then the Qing Empire. You've got sort of nationalists standing up to say the only way we as a country can advance is to get rid of the Qing Empire, the Qing Dynasty. The Qing are then sort of forced to respond by sort of saying we can stand up to the foreigners and we can wave flags and this sort of thing. So you've got a kind of real ferment there.

And you've got also several failed attempts at revolution going on in the 1900s. And so, yeah, it's a really sort of dangerous, febrile atmosphere, particularly in southern China. Yeah. And as you say, that influence, the physical presence of the foreigners is also corresponded by this influx of new ideas, new disciplines. Am I being fair in saying like this idea of needing to

demarcate your own borders is one of those ideas that almost China hadn't really quite thought about before. Yeah, because the Qing state didn't really have a map with a firm line around it. And there was, even as late as the 1930s, and we'll get onto that, there was no fixed idea about where China's borders exactly should be. In the 1900s, you had

had, for example, Han nationalists who wanted to draw a line around the old Ming Empire and say, right, this is pure Han and we'll just have this bit. And then there were others who said, well, don't be silly, then they will lose Tibet and Xinjiang and Manchuria and Mongolia, all the rest of it. So we need a different definition of what the empire is. So there was a political argument about where the borders were. But even at any one of those levels, the

the attempt to actually draw a fixed line would have been still quite difficult and contentious. And certainly when it came to the sea, you know, China is fringed with thousands of tiny little islands. And so for centuries, the focus of whoever was in power was on controlling that territory.

maritime border but mainly in terms of things like piracy or trade or smuggling that kind of thing it wasn't really about projecting far into the sea so Qing or other rulers were concerned about people and what they did and you know for a long time it was you know theoretically illegal for people to to leave the Qing empire because people did to trade but they weren't really kind of focused on maritime boundaries so much as as control I guess of the coastal areas.

Yeah, and it wasn't as if China obviously has the history of Zheng He going in the Ming Dynasty, sailing as far as Africa, we think. But in the hundreds of years leading up to the end of the Qing Dynasty, it wasn't as if China had become some kind of naval power. Absolutely not. So you had that sort of 30 years at the beginning of the 15th century with Zheng He going into the Indian Ocean. And he wasn't the only one. There were quite a few admirals who led voyages afterwards.

And that was much more about the Ming, the new Ming dynasty wanting to sort of get recognition from its neighbours. And then once they had settled and got control, then the urge to go and explore just disappeared really. And then you had, obviously, you had...

pressures coming over land from Mongolia and Manchuria and so the focus turned much more towards the land and of course it's not until the sort of mid-19th century sort of 1840s 1850s that then the Europeans starts kicking down the door and then the focus becomes more maritime again.

Yeah, exactly. So they were forced to think about this maritime question as well. And the particular trigger, or at least one particular trigger that you write about in your book is this Japanese businessman who tries to make the most of these kind of islands. Tell us about him.

Well, you have to understand the economic importance of bird poo at this point. So guano was a major, major commodity in the late 19th, early 20th centuries before the invention of certain chemical processes. It was a fertiliser, a very valuable fertiliser.

And the islands of the South China Sea were covered in it. And there's one island in particular called Pratas, which is about halfway between Hong Kong and Taiwan, which obviously people who navigated the sea knew about because it was a dangerous place. It was often where shipwrecks were.

And this Japanese entrepreneur, Nishizawa Yoshiji, decided to see if he could make a fortune by just landing there and trying to excavate as much guano as possible.

And there was an awful lot of kind of back and forth. The Americans, I think, were worried about whether the Japanese were sort of going to stake a territorial claim and there were concerns about smuggling and this sort of thing. And it seems the Americans possibly were the first ones to tip off the Qing court that he was there and various investigations were made. But it wasn't until actually about two years later that it suddenly bursts out into the public domain in early 1909.

And all of a sudden you get protests in the streets. And it all kind of goes, because he's Japanese, of course, it links to this idea of, you know, the Japanese attacks and humiliation and territory being taken. And so in an effort to go and show that the Qing dynasty is, you know, flying the flag, defending the country, they send ships to Pratas Island, known in Chinese as Dongsha or Eastern Sands.

And the Yessi discovered the Yessi is there and a boycott movement is launched against Japanese products in southern China. And the Japanese government want the whole problem to go away. They want the boycott to end and they don't really care, frankly, about who owns Pratas. And so they say to the Chinese government, if you can prove that this island is yours, then we will recognize your claim.

And the Qing authorities go away and they look through old gazetteers and maps. And eventually they find something and they go, look, here is a Chinese map from the 18th century. And it shows that we knew about this island. And the Japanese will say, fine, fine, we recognize it. But they only recognize it on the grounds that the Qing government pays Nishizawa compensation for losing his property.

you know, what he's been doing and which they do. And then the irony, of course, is that they don't have the technology to mine the guano. So then they hire him again to go and mine the guano. And this has a really sad ending because they were sort of there mining the guano and

right up until the revolution of 1911-12. And it seems people forgot about them and they didn't bring them food. The Chinese miners. Yes, yes. As far as I know, you know, they died on the island. I haven't been able to confirm that, but it seems that that may have been what happened. Yeah. So in that story, there's so much going on because, I mean, you mentioned it just now that the Americans wanted China to assert its maritime interests in Pratas. Yes.

to protect its new colony of the Philippines because it didn't want Japan to be spreading across the Indo-Pacific at that point. A theme that's going to run all the way throughout this episode, I think, is just the malleability and the arbitrariness of these claims that whatever is politically convenient for any party is people are just kind of shamelessly asserting it. Yes, and what's convenient for a country now sometimes becomes quite a problem for them later on. So in 1909, exactly at this point,

There's a debate in French ruling circles about whether the French should assert a claim to the Paracel Islands, which are the opposite direction from Hong Kong. But because of the sort of ferment in China, they decide that that would be a bad idea. It would just sort of stoke up anti-French feelings. So they don't stake a claim in 1909.

And basically ever since they've been trying to catch up. Until the end of French colonialism in 1954 in Indochina. And then subsequently the Vietnamese who've taken over this claim. That's the main flaw in their kind of argument is that the French didn't claim the islands in 1909 when China actually did.

Yes, yeah. And again, something else that comes up in just that case study alone is how nationalism from a grassroots level can drive government into action, which is a theme that is still relevant for China today. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and this is strange, is that these islands...

And there are really, when it comes to the South China Sea, there are four sort of groups of islands. There's Pratas that we've spoken about, which is a single island, which is currently occupied by Taiwan, but also claimed by the PRC, by the mainland.

Then you have the Paracel Islands, which are sort of between Hainan Island and Vietnam. And they're claimed both by China and by Vietnam, currently entirely occupied by China. And then you have the Spratly Islands, named after Richard Spratly, an East End boy who discovered them in inverted commas in the mid-19th century. And then the fourth one is Scarborough Shoal, which is over towards the Philippines.

Yeah, but none of these islands are of any great size. I mean, the biggest one is probably about a kilometre long. And some of the smaller ones, I mean, they disappear, literally disappear when it's high tide. You know, there's just a few rocks that stick up when it's low tide.

And yet somehow huge amounts of emotion are invested in these islands and they become a source of belonging and of showing that you care about the country. I've written an article which I haven't yet managed to get around to finishing, which is called The Importance of Humiliation. And it's about when people actually begin to care about these little symbols, these little islands.

And it really is in both China and in Vietnam linked to the idea of feeling humiliated. So you saw this in the 1900s in China with Japan taking an island and China, you know, the Chinese nation collectively, you know, feeling humiliated or at least the intellectuals who felt humiliated telling everybody that they all were humiliated.

You don't get the same feeling in Vietnam until 1974 when China occupies half of the Paracel Islands, which were occupied at that time by Vietnamese. And you get exactly the same language about we are being humiliated by this bigger power. And suddenly it becomes an emotional cause. And I would contrast that, say, with the Philippines or Malaysia, which also claim some of these islands.

where there isn't a sense of national humiliation about these islands. And they are not big patriotic causes. If you have a demonstration in Malaysia about these islands, nobody will turn up. If you have one in the Philippines, 50 people will turn up maybe. But if you tried it in China or Vietnam, you'd get huge crowds turning up, I'm pretty sure. Yeah.

And what's curious as well is when you did your research on so much of this, you found contemporary reports which demonstrated a fair amount of confusion over some of these places. In practice, it's the closest one to the mainland, 260 kilometers I've got down. But Spratly Islands are, you know, much closer to Malaysia, to Philippines. It's more than a thousand kilometers from the Chinese mainland.

There's a lot of confusion over what it is that you're being sensitive about. Yes, absolutely. And I know an awful lot of the problems that we have today come from the confusion that existed in the 1900s all the way through to 1930s and 1940s. And so the claim evolves. I mean, you know, all sides now, but particularly China likes to assert that this claim is logical and is historic and it goes back to ancient times and all the rest of it.

In reality, it was developed in a very haphazard way. One island at a time, really. There was... I mean, we have to remember, in these days, we can sit on a laptop and we can look at satellite photographs. But in the beginning of the century, all you had were...

recollections of ship's captains who sort of said, I saw a reef in a certain place and I took a sextant reading and I think it was in this latitude. And, you know, there was lots of confusion. The same features had different names. Some features, you know, were confused. Some didn't exist. And also, you know, a lot of these...

The mapping was mainly done by Europeans, by British, by French, by Germans. And so there was a degree of confusion about translating this material into Chinese as well. That said, there was this very important institution called the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, which is a kind of hybrid institution. It's sort of Chinese...

but actually managed by foreigners. And that institution was responsible for training quite a few navigators and chart makers and that sort of thing. So that was quite important in the early part of the 20th century.

But yeah, you have this confusion and you have, you know, the Paracel Islands are up quite close to China and then you have the Spratly Islands, which are much further away. But the distinction between them was not properly understood, certainly into the 1940s on the Chinese side.

And even more confusing, there are some small islands just off the coast of Hainan Islands, which are known in English as the Taya Islands or the Chiju, I think, Seven Islands, if I got that right. And the parasols were confused with them. So there was all kinds of confusion going on.

So when the French claimed the Paracel Islands in competition with China, and then subsequently they claimed the Spratly Islands in the 1930s, in the Chinese government there was confusion of exactly which islands the French were claiming. And what made it even more confusing at the time was that actually China had two rival governments in the time you get to the 1930s. So you have the

The central government, which doesn't really have a huge amount of power because China is broken up into these sort of competing fiefs. And you have a government based down in the southwest, which is sort of really attacking the legitimacy of Chiang Kai-shek's government in Beijing. So and the...

government says the Spratlys are ours and the central government is being weak by not claiming them whereas the central government is better informed and says we've never claimed the Spratlys before so we're not going to kind of put in a protest to the French but I think what happens subsequently and of course you've got to remember because you know 1930s into the 1940s it's a terrible time for China you know Japanese attacks you know on top of all the sort of

sort of stuff that's happened before, and then from 37 onwards, really war. And so it's not as if anyone's dealing with any of this stuff in kind of perfect circumstances. So it's no surprises, really, that there's a lot of confusion around. Absolutely. But the picture starts to be cleared up, or at least the Chinese position starts to be firmed up, particularly with the influence of a cartographer called Bai Meichu. Bill, tell us about Bai Meichu. Bai Meichu. I'd love to have met him, really.

Because he's fascinating because his biography really tells us quite a lot, I think, about the early 20th century in China because he was a Manchu, ethnic Manchu. And before 1911, or maybe slightly before, he would have expected as a Manchu to have a good chance of getting into the state administration and becoming a scholar official, something like that.

But when the imperial exams are abolished in 1904, I think, then that kind of career route kind of disappears for him. And then when the revolution comes and the Manchu regime is thrown out of power in 1911, 1912, you know...

that his idea of an easy life, I guess, as an official also goes. And so horror of horrors, he has to earn a living. And even worse, he becomes a teacher in a girls' school. How awful that must have been. But he makes connections. And he's a self-taught geographer. And I think he is...

is kind of taken up by this sort of nationalistic feeling. And he becomes one of the founders of the China Geographical Society and is very committed to the idea of educating the public about the nation, telling people about the shape of the country and everything and encouraging them to love the country. Things which we now sort of take for granted, which weren't necessarily kind of popular emotions at the time. And

One of the things he does is draw maps of national humiliation. We're back to this phrase again, national humiliation. And there are many, many maps of national humiliation that are published by different commercial publishers at this time. And their purpose is to show the Chinese public how...

has been humiliated historically by foreigners, how lands have been grabbed by other people. But everybody's doing it in their own way. And so some, you know, kind of, you know, just say, well, kind of, you know, Hong Kong and, you know, the Shandong Peninsula, one of the treaty ports. But then others say, no, no, historically, you know, China went, you know, we had all these tributaries that went as far as Afghanistan and Iran and places and down to Borneo. These places should also be considered historically part of China. And so some of these maps, you

you know, kind of show these huge areas of Asia, you know, kind of former Chinese territories, if you like, which have been lost with the sort of implication that they should be regained somehow. So this is very much something, you know, a kind of a language, I guess, of the 1920s and 30s, you know, the maps of national humiliation showing people this lost territory. And Bai Mei-Chu is one of these people.

And so he develops his own ideas about where China's boundaries should be, rightful boundaries should be.

But I have to kind of pause in there and bring in the official government bit at that point, because I mentioned earlier that the French claimed the Spratly Islands in 1933. And this triggers a whole lot of confusion inside the Chinese government. Is this the Spratly Islands? Is this the Paracel Islands? Were these the same islands that we claimed back in 1909? Wave islands.

So, you know, literally they sort of, you know, send telegrams to their embassies in the Philippines and then the Chinese ambassador in the Philippines has to go and ask the Americans for a map. And the Americans say, no, no, these are the Spratlys and those are the Paracels. And then eventually the message gets back to Beijing. Don't worry, these are not the same islands we claimed in 1909. Stand easy. But because...

Because of this confusion, the nationalist government says, OK, we need a committee to decide exactly where our borders are. And they set up the Inspection Committee for Land and Water Maps, whose job it is to kind of regularise it and say, OK, when the foreigners talk about these places, these are the Chinese names. This is what we claim and all the rest of it. And so literally the very first...

set of Chinese names for a lot of these islands are translations or transliterations of the names which are used on mainly British maps because I think the committee looked at a lot of British maps and other maps and so when you look at them and this is really how I first got into this sort of new history of the South China Sea I sat down with a guy who was a Chinese PhD student with my wife and he said

This is amazing. You said, when you look at these Chinese names, they're just the same as the British. So, for example, you know, Scarborough Shoal was transliterated as Sigobalol, you know, or Luconia Shoal, which is named after a ship. The Luconia was Locangniat. They were simply transliterations.

My favourite is in the Spratly Islands. In the English names, half of them are named after managers of the English East India Company, Patel, Roberts, Duncan. And one of them was named after a guy called William Taylor Money, who was a manager of the East India Company's Navy.

And when the Chinese translators saw that, they went, money, ah, Jinyindao. So even today, the Chinese name for this island is Jinyindao, Money Island, but it's actually named after William Taylor Money, British imperialist. So they produced a list of names, and then they came across some very strange English nautical terms. So shoal, which is from an old English word that means shallow and bank.

And they just translated them all with the Chinese word tan, which is a sandbank, which could either be above water or below water. And so a feature like the James Shoal, which is very close to Borneo, sort of 1,500 kilometers from China, acquires a Chinese name of Zhengmu Tan. So Zhengmu being the transliteration of James, Tan being Shoal.

And then they publish their list and it's out there as a sort of public document, I suppose. And then Bai Meichu, our geography professor, comes along and he looks at this list that the committee has drawn up. He also looks at some English maps, which I think are sort of, you know, that mark these features on it in the South China Sea with sort of dotted lines, which, you know, we would look at as being sort of, you know, unscripted.

know underwater features but he seems to think that they're above water features because they've got this word tan attached to them and then he draws this map and he goes right the way around the south china sea including all the way down as far as the zengmu town the james shoal and then the chan wei tan which is vanguard bank and haima tan which is seahorse shoal and you can see on the on the english maps these features are marked and then he take draws his own map and he draws this big red line around it and he says this is china's rightful territory and

And really, you know, unfortunately, you know, all the kind of, you know, disputes and conflict that we see in the South China Sea today ultimately stem from the fact that this guy drew this line around these three non-existent islands in an atlas that he published in 1936. What is he basing it on? It seems like quite a stretch to say, you know, this is what the government has mapped out before to China.

and therefore this is all China's? Well, I think he was doing it... I mean, he didn't voyage to these places, so he didn't know exactly what he was looking at. He was basing it on an idea, I think, partly that in the past, various sort of principalities and kingdoms in Southeast Asia had sent tribute to Beijing. So there was a sort of idea that these places perhaps were in a Chinese sphere of influence kind of in centuries past. That was probably part of his thinking.

There was this sense, you know, that what we saw in 1933 and the confusion over which islands China claimed, what the French were up to, a sort of sense, well, if the French can claim it, then why can't we? We have to protect our land. And then you add in all the control, you know, the misunderstandings about the translations and all the rest of it. So I think for him, it was about...

asserting a clear and confident claim to help his countrymen feel Chinese and feel that this land was what he thought was land belonged to them and I don't think he thought he was doing anything that didn't make sense I kind of think he interpreted the map in his own way he interpreted this committee's list in his own way and he produced his atlas which I imagine sold quite well

But as you say, he was just a private individual. He wasn't a government official. However...

Two of his pupils go on to become geography professors in their own right. Interestingly, they spend the 1930s, one of them studies in Nazi Germany, another one studies in Japan, and then they come back to China. But then after the Second World War in 1946, these two are seconded into the Chinese government because at that point the Chinese government is actually trying to draw up its official idea of exactly which islands it's going to claim. So it's at that point that

that Bai Meichu's ideas of this line get taken into the Chinese government's official worldview, if you like. So that's the first time in 1947 that map contains dashes. And that's the origin of China's dash policy, as it were, around the South China Sea. And it's quite a far stretch from what happened 12 years earlier with the 1935 map, because now you're claiming all of this stuff. You're not just mapping it.

Yes, exactly. So there was maps produced in 1935, 1936 by this committee, but they didn't include a line saying we claim this. And actually the arguments continued from 1946, 47, even a bit into 1948 as to exactly which islands should be claimed.

And at the end of the day, it sort of came down to a sort of, you know, a bureaucratic decision by a committee, you know. I did enjoy the government official who was saying, you know, the Spratlys are so far from China, maybe we shouldn't claim that one. Maybe they're closer to some other country. And there was actually, I think the guy you mentioned, I think was the guy, because in December 1946, an expedition was sent to the Spratlys to go and stick the Chinese flag in the ground. And I think it was the commander of that expedition who went there.

an awfully long way away. I don't even know. Yeah, you know, how much bother he could have saved. Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, I think everything that we've talked about makes contextual sense in the sense that, you know, this is a country in the early 1900s who has gone through so much foreign transgressions into its own national interests that you've got the budding of this national interest

self-awareness, as it were. I also think it's interesting, briefly, we haven't really talked about this, but just I wonder if it's with people becoming more literate, with the printing press, it almost has a French Revolution feel about it, that the public are having a stake in what the politics of the day are.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, newspapers, I think, are absolutely key to this and spreading the information. And they're fuelling this nationalism as well. Because in 1909, when we talked about the first upsurge relating to Prattis Island and the Paris Alliance, it's really only the southern Chinese ports, you know, Hong Kong and Guizhou.

Guangzhou and those kind of areas. But 1933, it's much wider. It's sort of, you know, all cities kind of reading newspapers. And I guess by then you've had, you know, 25 years of nationalist self-education by then. And of course, you know, by the 30s, you've got, you know, the Kuomintang are in power and you've got the sort of, you know, the nationalist government, which is deliberately using, you

things like the Maps of National Humiliation to build national feeling against the Japanese. So you're going to be quite extravagant about your claims. Yes. Because why not? You're being ambitious here. Yeah, I mean, and they weren't alone, you know, kind of in that period. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that? Well, I mean, I've already sort of talked a little bit about what the French were up to because the French, the colonial power in Indochina, what's now Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. And of course, the British were a colonial power in northern Europe.

you know, what's now Malaysia and Brunei and Singapore and the rest of Malaysia. And of course, the Americans were in effect the colonial power in the Philippines. So you have this sort of sense, I think, that China was facing colonial powers who were kind of just expanding. The British are the first outside power, if you like, to claim any of the South China Sea islands, you'll be pleased to know. So 1870, a rather half-hearted claim was made to... How historical were those claims?

Well, basically, they were historical in the sense that a couple of businessmen thought, let's make some money from the guano. And then they persuaded the British consul in Labuan, which is a little island off Brunei, to let them go and plant the British flag. It all ends terribly badly with a fight between the British managers and their Chinese migrant labourers.

And then nothing really gets happened. But the British don't actually formally drop their claim. They just allow it to kind of dissipate. And then the French start to get in on the act...

But everyone has these sort of high hopes that these islands are going to be the key to something. They're going to provide resources. But they're not really that significant. But it gets more tense towards the end of the 1930s as British and French planners get worried about Japanese militarism and expanding into the region. And there's some...

entertaining two-way discussions between Britain and France, you know, whether, you know, and the British archives are great. They kind of say things like, you know, we don't want the Japanese to take them. We're not sure about the French. We don't want to spend any money on it ourselves, you know, so kind of, you know, it's the French, and so be it. But then they get worried that the French are going to be neutral. And so actually at that point, the British start to lean in favor of a Chinese claim because they think they'll be able to kind of, you know, influence the Chinese much more than the French.

But anyway, the French, initially they're not particularly interested in the islands. But then you get this interesting colonial dynamic that the settlers in Indochina want to claim the islands, whereas the government in Paris doesn't want to claim the islands, doesn't want to upset the Chinese, doesn't want to kind of cause unnecessary upset in the region.

But eventually the colonialists in Indochina set the agenda and they eventually persuade Paris to claim the islands and they claim the Spratlys. They announce a claim on Bastille Day in 1933. And actually when France withdraws from Indochina in 1956, the French still try to hang on to their Spratly Island claim and it's one of the first tests of the independent South Vietnam at that point is to push the French out of their claim.

But really, all of their claims boil down to who's... And so it's a very, very partial history. And when anybody asks me, how could you resolve this? I think actually...

It would be fairly simple in many cases. I mean, I say that blithely, somebody sitting several thousand miles away, because we do have fairly good records now of which country stuck which flag in which island. And if we could persuade everybody to just say, OK, you claimed that one in this year and you put, you know, or your colonial predecessor put the flag in that one in that year. And if you could just agree to kind of hang on to what you have and don't try and take anybody else's away from them, you've got the basis for a compromise there.

But at the moment, it's very difficult to persuade any of these claimants to compromise, you know, to recognise other people's claims. And kind of, you know, what are they afraid of? I guess they're afraid of a sort of popular backlash, you know, that, you know, you're letting down the country. But I mean, I would confidently assert, you know, with some exceptions, that the pattern of occupations that we have now, who sits in which island, is pretty much the only one there's ever been. It's not like at some point in the past, you know,

China occupied all of these islands or Vietnam or the Philippines or whatever and somehow they've lost them. It's always been a very partial and a fragmented tale. I think it kind of calls into question how flimsy, as it were, clumsiness

claims to territory can be. There are obviously parts of a country, especially on land, that obviously has always been a part of a particular... But even as I say that now, states change, don't they? So what is continuous about the PRC compared to the Ming dynasty or compared to the Yuan dynasty?

or any other country compared to their precursors in that same geographical land span. It just goes to show, you know, obviously history matters a lot in the Chinese context. When you talk to Chinese people about this, what we're talking about here is pretty controversial because they think that their claims are so, so historical. But even so, even if you can prove who planted the flag first, that doesn't necessarily say to me, inherently, you do just own that land. Yeah.

This might be a controversial group. Well, no, you're right. Anti-borders work argument. Yes, but I mean, we just have the kind of tools that we've kind of inherited from international law. I mean, all of it, in one sense, of course, is rubbish. But it's kind of what we have. There's a guy at the University of Toronto called Chris Chung who wrote a really good PhD thesis about this first decade in the 20th century. And he contrasts

The Qing dynasty's view of what he calls subject-based government, what he means is they were concerned about their own subjects, the actual people, the humans, versus the Western view, which was about the land. And so from the Qing perspective, what mattered to them was governing the fishermen, going backwards and forwards.

And then as they encounter Western international law, they're saying, well, our fishermen used to go and fish there, so therefore they must be ours. And the Westerners are going back and saying, no, no, no, that's not how it works. You've got to stick a flag in it. Do you remember the Eddie Izzard sketch? Yes, but have you got a flag? Just sail around the world and stick a flag in. I claim India for Britain. And they go, you can't claim us, we live here. 500 million of us. Do you have a flag?

And we've administered them. We've put a lighthouse there or we've, you know, da-da-da-da-da. But, I mean, these are two rival ways of sorting things out. It just so happened that Westerners had better guns, frankly, you know, at that point. That's what made the difference. And that's now, in effect, you know, the way that we resolve territorial disputes because even though it's not really about guns, it's the sort of those rules of international law have been settled. So, you know, you see, I mean, recently...

in the last 10, 20 years. Indonesia and Malaysia have resolved a border dispute about an island with this. Singapore, Malaysia, ones in the Caribbean, in the Black Sea, using these kind of rules.

And so basically they work because governments agree that that's how you resolve disputes this way. But I just don't think China is ready to accept outside arbitration and potentially losing in its view, which is sort of strange because I think that the main –

thing that holds up its relations with Southeast Asian countries is this, you know, what's happening in the South China Sea. And if he could sort of somehow stand back and see the bigger picture, he would say, well, I'm not really that bothered about these tiny little islands, you know, kind of, you know, in the interests of regional, you know, good relations, you know, we can let the Vietnamese have that one and the Philippines have that one and we'll all go home. But I think the problem, you know, is partly is that

And, you know, the Navy and the Coast Guard and lots of other people are, you know, doing quite well out of, you know, the South China Sea disputes. And it's, you know, I think in many cases, this is the tail wagging the dog. Yeah. And also, why should it have to listen to arbitration when it has the equivalent of big guns now, which is, again, it's guns, but also it's more money, it's more power. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's a great power and great powers don't do that thing, you know, sort of thing.

In just the same way as when the International Court of Justice ruled against the United States for mining the harbours in Nicaragua, you know, the US said, you know... Yeah, rules don't apply to... You and whose army? Yeah, absolutely. Well, this is the thing, isn't it? I mean, I'm quite cynical about this. I think a lot of great powers disregard international rules when it suits them. In the UK, we've been talking about, you know,

all sorts of international rules in the Brexit context that we want to disregard. But let's go back to 1947 because it says that map has 11 dashes. Today's Chinese map of the South China Sea has nine dashes. Where did the other two dashes go? They disappeared sometime in the 1950s. It's not

been shown exactly how this worked but obviously in 1949 you have the communist victory in China and 1954 you have in effect the communist victory in Vietnam the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and then the Geneva Peace Conference and the French agree to withdraw so the communists are sort of taking power in northern Vietnam but Vietnam is going to be partitioned between a sort of communist north and a capitalist south

And at some point in the late 1950s, the Chinese Communist Party and the Vietnamese Communist Party

agree not to have these two lines in the Gulf of Tonkin in the northern part of the South China Sea. I'm not entirely sure why. I think there was some, I mean, there was at this point, because you'd had the conflict against the French going on, I think that prior to them, there'd been some sort of tactical agreements that, you know, the Chinese would control this island and that would sort of, you know, allow the Vietnamese to use it for smuggling weapons, perhaps that kind of thing.

But anyway, so by the time the maps start to be published after the 1950s, those two dashes have gone and it becomes the nine-dash line. And that cedes a certain amount of the sea to Vietnam.

Yes, I mean, we'll have to be careful when we talk about, so, you know, there are territorial disputes about land features, and then there are maritime disputes about the resources in the sea. So countries only own the sea up to 12 nautical miles, whatever, 25 kilometers from their coasts.

And then they own the resources in the sea for a greater distance. And actually, Vietnam and China didn't actually agree to divide up the Gulf of Tonkin until 2000, only 24 years ago. And it was quite a difficult problem. But they've kind of divided it up to a particular point. And then you get into the main part of the South China Sea. And of course, they haven't agreed to that division.

So that's why you still see fishing boats clashing and coast guards clashing about things like who has the right to fish or to drill for oil and gas and that kind of thing.

And that leads to the curious phenomenon as well, where the Republic of China on Taiwan claims more of the South China Sea because it has the 11 dashes still from the 1957 map. Yes, in the same way that the ROC still claims, you know, has Mongolia kind of as part of China. And the ROC's capital is technically Nanjing in the mainland. But yes, the ROC actually claims more than the PRC does, which I think is fascinating.

I mean, what's weird is that, you know, we have this nine dash line or U-shaped line in the South China Sea. And China has never been absolutely explicit about what this line means. You know, for some, you know, it says it just indicates which features, which land features we are claiming.

But then you look at, for example, when they have done surveys for oil and gas or when they've interfered with, say, Vietnamese or Indonesian fishing boats and they...

Go right up to the edge of this U-shaped line and then turn around and go back in the direction. And it seems that at least some in the Chinese government regard this as some kind of maritime boundary, that they have the rights to all of the fish or oil and gas or whatever within that U-shaped line. And that's really what's at the heart of the main problems now with China and its neighbours.

And it's all coming from an ambitious map done by a Confucian scholar born a bit too late. Yes, yes. Who definitely laid his mark on the world, maybe not in the way that he intended. Bill Hayton, thank you so much for joining Chinese Whispers. It's great. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to this episode of Chinese Whispers. I hope you enjoyed it. If you're listening to this podcast on the Best of the Spectator channel, remember that Chinese Whispers has its own channel as well. If you just search Chinese Whispers, wherever you get your podcasts from, you will always get the latest episode first there.

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