Beijing hardly bothers with a legal rationale for seizing a U.S. drone
On Tuesday, China handed back the craft, a day after a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman insisted that the sailors were simply gathering unattended property, as one might “pick something up from the street.”
Why Does China Care So Much About Uninhabited Islands?
I think there are different parts of the Chinese state and Communist Party that have different motives, but they all sort of work together toward the same end. The state-owned oil companies are interested in the oil and the fishing companies and coastal provinces are interested in maximizing their fish catch.
.. Then there are various strategic imperatives. I think they are concerned about the security of the coastal cities and would like a kind of buffer zone around them. They’re concerned about the safety of supply routes. And I think another very important factor is the likelihood that the Chinese nuclear submarines might want to hide in the South China Sea, so their Navy wants a “bastion” to keep out potential adversaries and their anti-submarine warfare equipment.
.. A survey conducted in 2013 found that 83 percent of people in China see South China Sea disputes as a continuation of the “Century of Humiliation” (1840-1949), even though none of the South China Sea countries contesting China’s claims were transgressors during that period.
.. There’s this whole genre of maps of “national humiliation” that were published in the 1920s and 1930s to show the population how much land had been stolen by Japan, France, Britain, and other countries. Some of these maps included great lines that went huge distances—as far as Iran and Afghanistan and the whole of Southeast Asia.
My thought is that during the rest of the 20th century, with land boundaries, there were powers that pushed back, so China was obliged to make agreements with those countries and settle the land disputes. But on the sea boundaries, there was no pressure to reach a deal and no one pushing back constantly. The dream that these little islands are rightfully China’s was never challenged.
.. China has already regained control of Hong Kong and Macau, and if one starts to see it put the Spratlys in the same category as Taiwan, then we have a problem, because there’s a real mismatch between the Chinese sense of entitlement and the historical evidence of a shared sea. Its never been an exclusively Chinese sea or exclusively anybody’s sea. It’s always been a shared sea, and that’s really what I’ve tried to argue.
.. I see these rather hawkish statements as a return to that kind of “public diplomacy” that we saw two to three years ago when you had pundits on TV and uniformed political commissars from the army saying blood-curdling things about “killing the chicken to scare the monkey” or “when those oil fields are towers of flame, who will be sorry?” and “the South China Sea will resound to the sound of cannon shots.” All of these bellicose statements were coming out, but they seem to be clearly intended to intimidate and give the impression that China is prepared to use force, when I don’t think it was ever intending to actually do that. It was a way of trying to scare people.
.. And I think people often think of this as a rational fight over resources, but I think one has to insert the whole Chinese view of history in there. If their view of history is that “this is all ours,” then UNCLOS is no longer a neutral tool to arbitrate disputes, but is a political weapon wielded against China, and that’s clearly how they’re approaching the Hague tribunal arbitration at the moment in terms of what they’re saying about it. So I think everyone has to understand the Chinese perspective, but at the same time critique it from a position of evidence and assert over and over again that China has never been the exclusive owner of the South China Sea, regardless of what it says in Chinese textbooks. It’s always been a shared space.