Of the many signs of China's increasingly assertive foreign policy, none has troubled its neighbours - and the United States - more than its claim to some form of jurisdiction over much of the South China Sea. Yet the People's Republic has never explained exactly what it is claiming or why regarding these strategically important waters, so rich in mineral, fishery and other resources.
Much of the attention of contesting states has revolved about their conflicting claims to sovereignty over two sets of tiny islets that, properly viewed under international law, should not significantly influence maritime delineation. The Paracels (Xisha), in the north of the South China Sea near China and Vietnam, have long been claimed by both. The Spratly Islands (Nansha), in the south near Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Brunei, are even tinier, but have long attracted claims by all those countries, in addition to China.
China claims sovereignty over both sets of islets based on historical linkages to them during the past millennium, although traditionally it did not exercise 'effective occupation and control' over them. The other coastal countries make similar claims.
None of these islets had been inhabited historically, but in the recent half century the competing countries have put military garrisons on many of them. The People's Republic did not take an active interest in these islets until about 1970. By then, most of the features above water at high tide were controlled by others. In 1974, China used force to oust the South Vietnamese government from the Paracels shortly before its collapse, and in 1988, when China began to 'occupy' some of the low tide elevations in the Spratlys, it forced socialist Vietnam from Fiery Cross Reef.
The breadth of China's claim to the sea area is usually attributed to a map published in 1947 by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government, shortly before the communist revolution chased it from the mainland to Taiwan. The map drew 11 dashed lines extending all the way to the southern part of the South China Sea. Later, communist-era maps eliminated the two lines in the Gulf of Tonkin, but the other nine lines have appeared repeatedly in a tongue-like configuration swinging deep through the South China Sea. Last year, China attached a version of this map to its official protest against a joint Malaysia-Vietnam claim to part of the continental shelf in the central-southern part of the area.
It seems that China is putting forward an 'historic' claim to much of the South China Sea, but it has never clarified whether it is claiming these waters as internal waters, territorial sea, exclusive economic zone, extended continental shelf, or some status unique to the region. It has merely published straight baselines for delineating the 12-nautical-mile territorial sea boundary to which the Paracels are entitled, but has never done so for the Spratlys.
Last year, the Philippines filed with the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf a formal claim to shelf areas around those islets in the eastern part of the South China Sea that it claims, and Malaysia and Vietnam filed their unusual joint continental shelf claim. China strongly protested against both actions.
