I know the correct answer is: China doesn't care, and isn't concerned with reason when it comes to the nine dash line. It still boggles my mind.
There is no valid Chinese claim on those waters, there is only who has the military power to dictate terms.
In fact ASEAN could not stand together against China in this case is exactly because every country around South China Sea has conflicting claims.
BBC is trying to avoid this as much as possible. Facts are hard, Let's just blame bad China.
In general, there are always two sides to the coin. Where from an American perspective you see Chinese aggression outwards, if you flip the arrows on the map around, you might notice that from a Chinese perspective, the US is aggressively boxing China in.
Since 17th century, a few islands had been controlled by various western countries and more had been marked or renamed.But the pirates, armed merchants and provincial navy of imperial China were still the dominant power in the area for a long time.
Chinese people totally lost control of it after the Sino-French war which changed the geopolitical status drastically: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-French_War
The nine-dash line stems from the eleven-dash line when ROC was the ally of the US after WWII and was accepted as the transferee of those islands from Japanese army who had acquired them from France/Great Britain.
But the ROC were too eager to fight back to the mainland instead of sending naval troops to guard those islands.It just chose one island Taiping as a strong point.
The unattended reefs and islands have been occupied by various countries in all kinds of sneaky/funny ways merely in past 30 years after the US-Vietnam war.
The validity argument makes no sense in this 'occupy and claim to own' game. Every country is a thief and the biggest is Vietnam whose navy had been more powerful than China's with the support from the former USSR during the PRC-USSR conflict.
Maybe the ROC in Taiwan should be the rightful owner according to the arrangement after WWII. But it is too weak to say anything now.
The whole history of the area is a vivid example of military power dictates terms.
Yeah, just like the American invasion of Iraq in 2004. Just because they could, despite it being unlawful at all international levels. But hey, Russia also does it, so there's not really any good example out there of a country that does not seize opportunities.
The US war in Iraq started in March, 2003.
officially it is called "international law"
It seems like China has figured out a way to hack the media (the free media outside of China, I mean -- the government there obviously has root on Chinese TV and newspapers).
Japanese ownership of this territory is basically as settled under international law as anything of this nature can be; the islands have been held by Japan since the 1800s, then controlled by the USA for a time after it defeated Japan in WWII, and eventually returned to Japan along with the return of Okinawa.[1]
But after China's slow and steady media campaign, it has somehow become widely reported as 'disputed territory'. (Which it is in a meaningless and pedantic sense only.)
This island-building is another hack, and maybe a clever one. Killing 70 Vietnamese soldiers in the military action in the 1980s to seize a submerged reef didn't make China look good at all.
But perhaps by building new 'islands' to buttress its aggressive and expansionist claims to the territorial waters of other nations, we may end up seeing the western media in ten years uncritically reporting that "China, which has 9 islands in the disputed waters, insists that it is merely defending its territory..."
Which is very important, because none of the countries whose territories China is going after -- not even Japan -- would do well in a straight up military conflict. The Philippines only hope is American protection. So the way China's aggression is covered in the western media is actually very important.
Interesting times.
[1]: http://csis.org/publication/japan-chair-platform-senkaku-isl...
Every piece of land in the world has been competed for and disputed many times. Sometimes identities such as "Chinese," "Scottish" or "Kurdish" are created or hardened specifically to serve that dispute. Other times they are dissolved by the outcome of the dispute.
I'm not trying to make some grand claim that "It's all an illusion." China is disputing Japan's ownership of these islands. The ownership of these islands is in dispute. We can either have some sort of lawful (or otherwise peaceful) way of resolving these disputes or we can go back to the traditional method of war and intimidation.
Our international legal systems were put in place in politically difficult circumstances to prevent world wars. They have definitions of territorial claims and some shambles of a system for resolving them and (theoretically) enforcing them. But this system (being a shambles) get very little respect. They are ignored by major power, minor powers and sometimes by upstarts (ISIS declared the border between Iraq & Syria dissolved and implemented that declaration).
... They are recorded in “Voyage with a Tail Wind”, published in 1403, a portolano recounting a journey from Fujian province to Ryukyu, the old name for the Okinawa chain of islands. By the following century, in “A Record of an Imperial Envoy’s Visit to the Ryukyu Kingdom”, Chinese names were given to all the islets in the Diaoyu group. Japanese diplomats do not bring it up, but the great Japanese military scholar, Shihei Hayashi, followed convention in giving the islands their Chinese names in his map of 1785, “A General Outline of Three Countries” (see map). He also coloured them in the same pink as China.
http://www.economist.com/news/christmas/21568696-behind-row-...
Like any large country that tastes power and prosperity for a couple decades, China got rich with money from exports and drunk with power, and like any other country including the U.S. it will not end well. Too bad i makes life miserable for their neighbors too.
I think there is a fundamental cultural difference in the way the west and China views the dispute. To the west if you found a piece of land and lived there for 100 years, it's yours - that's how the US was founded after all. But to China it's just the latest in a series of conflicts with Japan going back hundreds of years.
Some say the genocide of the natives also helped a lot. These kind of logic just can't be applied to the problems in Asia, where the territory disputes trace back to hundreds of years ago. It's not a west vs east thing.
You, uh, do realize that every piece of land in the US was found first by people who were already living there?
I'm curious about why you don't think Japan would do well in a straight-up military conflict.
One is that there is always a higher level China could escalate to. I mean, in the end game they have nukes and Japan doesn't. But even if it didn't get to that level, China is a totalitarian regime with a history of brutally suppressing dissent, and I also assume that China would be willing to lose a lot more lives to make gains.
Japan is a high-functioning democracy, and has been one of the most peaceful advanced economies of the world since losing the war. Before that, yeah, they were a definite bad actor on the world stage. But they haven't committed any military aggression toward any country in more than 65 years.
It is my personal opinion that there is almost no way that the people of Japan (where I live, though I am American) would support a war against China. Even if China just up and landed an occupying force on Japan's Senkaku islands.
In a democracy, that public support really matters. In a totalitarian regime, not so much.
I don't personally know that much about the military stuff -- how much would Japan's superior equipment matter in an actual conflict -- so I'd be interested to hear more knowledgeable people chime in. But in Japan, a war with China would be politically untenable unless China like, invaded Tokyo, or something. Which is highly unlikely.
As with the Philippines, I think the USA is the main deterrent to Chinese aggression. And these days it's a pretty shaky deterrent.
The scariest scenario in Asia right now is: China attacks Japan (e.g. invades the Senkakus, or even accidentally kills some Japanese soldier in one of China's frequent reckless acts of attempted intimidation, like flying dangerously close), the Japan retaliates, the China escalates, then USA intervenes, and somehow USA and China end up in direct armed conflict.
But even there, China and USA have directly fought each other in a war (Korean war) and nobody pulled out their nukes (though China didn't have them yet iirc). The USSR and USA were always invading somebody or other. The nuclear Armageddon scenario is probably a lot less likely than feared--whereas I think the possibility of a nevertheless-vey-bad war in Asia is broadly underestimated.
Perhaps something like:
"then controlled by the USA for a time after Japan surrendered to the Allies in WWII"
... would make your comment sound a little less ignorant.
I'm starting to see it more and more.
It reminds me of when "Multimedia CD-ROMs" first appeared circa mid-1990s, where flashy interfaces were ranked much higher than useability.
Please stop it. Give me a webpage with text, and images that I can enlarge when clicked. Thank you.
It says it was built with Shorthand - http://shorthand.com/ . Anyone know of an open-source equivalent?
Thanks to Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has spent a lot of treasure. The population doesn't have the desire for more war. Now Russia and China are seeing how far they can push. I hope I'm wrong, but I feel like we're seeing the beginnings of things that lead to a major war between Russia & China on one side, and the US on the other.
The Fermi paradox is a reminder that we are living in very dangerous times right now.
If you think that's scary, consider the all too plausible possibility of a shooting war between Russia and China over what is currently south-east Russia.
[0] http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2013/02/blood-and-treasure...
Indeed.
> but could we stop using "treasure" outside the context of forgetful pirates and sunken ships and such? When talking about Iraq and Afghanistan it's just an overly fancy way to say "money".
No, its an accurate way to say "treasure" -- or, if you have some need to avoid pirate-related associations in your head, "wealth". Money is, of course, one form that treasure takes, and also money values are used for "keeping score" of all forms of treasure, but what is actually at issue is the treasure--wealth, material assets of all kinds--expended, not just money (sure, those assets were generally purchased for money at some time in the past, but often that was before the war started and not specific to it -- what was consumed by the war was the concrete assets, not the money.)
