Sea no evil

A meme spread across Chinese social media on July 12 after a U.N. tribunal rejected Chinese claims to the South China Sea: An illustration of China in the pattern of its red flag with a U-shaped dashed line protruding underneath it to delineate its territory. “China: We can’t lose even one dot” it read in stylized brushstrokes, rallying the nationalistic fervor of the Chinese people.

Citizens called for boycotts of mangoes from the Philippines and gleefully vowed to take back what they said was rightfully theirs. Rather than censoring only articles that defied China’s official stance on the South China Sea, Chinese censors also busily scrubbed ultra-nationalistic posts calling for China to take up arms and fight its enemies, namely the United States and the Philippines. Even house church Christians who had defied the government’s orders to bring their spiritual lives under Beijing’s control expressed support of China’s sovereignty over the South China Sea and its islands. “God bless China, may it be peaceful, prosperous, and strong!” wrote one Christian, along with the ubiquitous meme of China.

Chinese citizens believe The Hague’s Permanent Court of Arbitration unfairly ruled that China had “no legal claims” to the resource-rich and globally important South China Sea, through which a third of the world’s trade passes. Yet Southeast Asian countries feel bullied by their giant neighbor as it busily constructs artificial islands and patrols the waters, spraying water cannons at those who sail near. The South China Sea makes up only 1 percent of the world’s oceans, yet it’s the new battleground for world power, as China continues expanding its control in the Asia-Pacific, an area where the United States has played a vital role since the end of World War II.

Swivel the globe around to China, and you’ll see most of its borders are landlocked except for its eastern and southeastern coast, which curves along the blue of the Pacific Ocean. This coast is critically important to China, as it provides economic and military access to the rest of the world: China’s enormous wealth is contained largely in its coastal provinces, in big cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. It’s also where China is building up a blue water navy that could rival the major powers of the world. In May 2015, China released a white paper announcing its shift from the land to the sea: “Great importance has to be attached to managing the seas and oceans and protecting maritime rights and interests.”

Those interests are located right below China’s Hainan Island: the South China Sea. The sea starts up north by Taiwan and the southern coast of China, hugs the curved coast of Vietnam on the west and the Philippines on the east, stretches past Malaysia and Brunei on the south, and ends in the Gulf of Thailand. Each year $5 trillion in trade flows through the sea, making it the second-most-used sea lane in the world. At the southern end is the Strait of Malacca, the main shipping channel connecting the Pacific Ocean to the Indian Ocean, which a quarter of the world’s oil passes through. The seas are also rich with natural resources—oil and natural gas reserves as well as diverse marine life—but more importantly, whichever country controls the seas controls the region, acting as the gatekeeper to all who sail through or fly over.

“[Chinese President] Xi Jinping wants to recreate the Chinese dream, which is to have dynastic control of East Asia,” said Bill Stanton, director of the Center for Asia Policy at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. To prove it, he lists China’s expansion projects: The Silk Road Economic Belt initiative, which aims to connect China with the rest of Eurasia through increased trade and infrastructure. The so-called String of Pearls theory that China is building a network of commercial and military facilities in the Indian Ocean region. And of course, its claims on the South China Sea. Stanton says China wants to control the Western Pacific Rim and “to move the U.S. out even though the U.S. has pacified the region and is responsible, for the most part, for the peace and prosperity that China enjoys.”

Fear of China’s growing power led to President Barack Obama’s 2011 Asia pivot, where he urged a “rebalancing” of U.S. interests to East Asia. He proposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free-trade agreement with 12 Pacific Rim countries that does not include China. However, Congress has yet to pass the TPP, and both major presidential candidates oppose it. China’s neighbors have also clamored for a stronger U.S. presence as China encroaches closer to their shores: The Philippines invited the U.S. Navy back to the naval base at Subic Bay after a 20-year absence, and Vietnam began allowing U.S. port visits. In order to support its allies, Obama struck bilateral deals with Australia, the Philippines, and Vietnam—lifting the decades-old arms embargo to the chagrin of activists who hoped sanctions would improve human rights conditions.

“In the South China Sea, the U.S. is not a claimant in current disputes, but we will stand with our partners in upholding key principles like freedom of navigation,” Obama said in his May trip to Hanoi, Vietnam. The United States conducted three freedom of navigation exercises through the South China Sea, and China responded by scrambling fighter jets and following the ships. In a reference to China, Obama added, “Big nations should not bully smaller ones.”

China’s oversized claim to 90 percent of the South China Sea and its islands is based on a 1947 map drawn by the then-ruling Republic of China (ROC) after Japan’s defeat in World War II. While it originally depicted an 11-dash line, Chinese Communist Party leaders removed two dashes by the Gulf of Tonkin after coming into power to create the “nine-dash line.” The Chinese claim their fishermen have explored and fished in the area since the second century B.C., pointing to historical texts that mention the Paracel and Spratly Islands. Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam also lay claim to the islands in the South China Sea.

Yet in 1996, Chinese leaders signed the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which grants each country rights to 12 miles off of its shores, as well as a 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) where it can explore and use its marine resources. China’s nine-dash line violates this agreement by cutting into the EEZ of surrounding countries such as the Philippines and Vietnam. A 2012 standoff between the Philippines and China over the disputed Scarborough Shoal ended with Chinese vessels blocking Filipino fishermen from nearing the area. In 2013, the Philippines asked the Permanent Court of Arbitration to settle the issue. China refused to participate in the arbitration process.

In the meantime, friction between China and its neighbors increased as China built seven artificial islands on rocky reefs in the Spratly and Paracel Islands to stake its claim. Through the process of dredging—digging up sand from the ocean floor and dumping it on top of pre-existing reefs—China created 3,200 acres of islands that include radar facilities, surface-to-air missiles, airstrips, and ports. Mischief Island, China’s most expansive man-made island, is less than 150 miles from Philippines’ Palawan Island.

As experts expected a decision in the Philippines’ favor, China ramped up its criticism of the “law-abusing tribunal,” claiming it was “obviously American-backed and -supported.” (The United States is not a signatory of the UNCLOS.) In the week leading up to the decision’s announcement, China flexed its muscles with military exercises in the South China Sea. Finally on July 12, the tribunal rejected all of China’s claims: The country, it said, had no legal basis “to claim historic rights to resources within the sea areas falling within the ‘nine-dash line.’” None of the land features—including the artificial islands—met the requirements needed to be considered an island that could “sustain human habitation or economic life,” so they did not generate the 200-mile EEZ. The tribunal then stated that China violated the Philippines’ sovereign rights by interfering with fishing and oil exploration, creating artificial islands in the Philippines’ EEZ, and preventing their fisherman from accessing the area.

As expected, China refused to accept the decision. The next morning, red Chinese flags and bold headlines of “Don’t accept, don’t acknowledge” adorned the front page of newspapers around the country. One newspaper in Henan province depicted the South China Sea arbitration as a crumpled-up piece of trash. Online, citizens flew into a nationalistic frenzy.

YET THE government’s censorship of civilian calls to military action reveals China’s determination to avoid conflict. Stanton believes that starting a conflict with the Philippines and its allies—most notably the United States—would not be in China’s best interest as China has its own domestic issues to deal with—slowing economic growth, a severe wealth gap, pollution, and a graying population due to the one-child policy. Furthermore, with mainland Chinese making up 80 percent of U.S. investment visa applicants, Chinese officials themselves have much to lose in a fight with the United States. “I think everyone will continue to posture, continue to warn, but it’s certainly not in China’s interest to create new problems for itself,” Stanton said.

Other countries such as the Philippines and the United States expressed a similar desire to keep the peace, yet Manila has only so much power to keep its newly emboldened fishermen from straying toward the Scarborough Shoal, where Chinese coast guards patrol. Stratfor’s East Asia analyst Thomas Vien believes these local fisherman could escalate the dispute.

As China continues to express outrage over the ruling, Chinese Christian lawyer Zhang Kai pointed out a double standard within the Chinese government. Zhang was imprisoned for six months in 2014 on charges of “endangering state secrets” and “gathering a crowd to disturb public order” after defending pastors whose churches had their crosses demolished by government officials. He argued that the officials’ action of tearing down crosses was illegal and contrary to the country’s own constitution.

In a WeChat post he noted, “After strongly supporting the Chinese government’s position on the South China Sea, we also need to persistently carry forth the spirit of ‘Don’t accept, don’t participate, don’t recognize, don’t implement’ for any unlawful ruling.”