Editorial: 80 Percent of Zero - China’s Phantom South China Sea Claims

USS Lassen (Image: Wiki Commons)

By Steven Stashwick

After the U.S. FONOPs, how long can China get away with “enforcing” claims it hasn’t made?

Baudelaire said the devil’s best trick was convincing us he did not exist. China’s best trick might be convincing us its claims over the South China Sea do exist. Official rhetoric about its “indisputable sovereignty over the South China Sea islands” certainly sounds like a definitive Chinese position. And, of course, China occupies many islands in the area, its Coast Guard chases off foreign fishing vessels, and massive Chinese land reclamation projects provide new, persistent regional presence. But with the notable exception of the Paracel islands between Hainan Island and Vietnam, China has made no valid legal claim over the South China Sea. Instead, China’s official ambiguity appears carefully calibrated to produce international media coverage that proselytizes far more expansive claims than really exist. That popular narrative (like the perennial “fact” that it claims 80 percent of the South China Sea) helps China legitimate its increasingly assertive activity in the region without having to expand its legal positions in kind. Without those formal legal stakes, China has so far skillfully avoided painting itself into a strategic corner over the South China Sea with no need to militarily defend claims it has not actually made.

But the limits of this strategy are showing. The extraordinary media coverage leading up to the USS Lassen’s Freedom of Navigation (FON) operation through the Spratly islands in October of last year focused unprecedented front-page attention on the territorial, legal, and strategic issues in the South China Sea. That public pressure strained China’s ability to respond in a way that balanced the constraints of its official legal positions with its need to maintain the popular global impressions it has cultivated and placate the expectations of its own nationalists. While its rhetoric sounds steadfast, China clearly does not want to risk even low-level antagonism with the U.S. military over its South China Sea claims.

In the wake of the Lassen transit, coverage featured contradictory posturing over whether the transit was conducted as innocent passage (the U.S. secretary of defense only recently clarified that while it was not explicitly innocent passage, the transit was consistent with innocent passage’s requirements) to analysis based on incorrect geographic features, and even early confusion over which features theLassen actually transited (Subi Reef but not Mischief Reef). But whatever the particulars, it was generally agreed that the Lassen’s transit was intended as a “challenge to China’s territorial claims” since China “claims most of the South China Sea” as its own.

Except that it does not, technically.

Read the full story at The Diplomat