The South China Sea (10 page)

The Opium Wars were the final flourish of the EIC. By 1874 bankruptcy and rising disgust at its behaviour had led to its forcible nationalisation. But that didn't end the confusion of British commercial and colonial motives in Southeast Asia. In 1842, the adventurer James Brooke had become Rajah of Sarawak and in 1882 the North Borneo Chartered Company took over what is now Sabah. They were identified as ‘British’ territories but only gradually were they formally included in the British Empire.

The French and German imperial projects, on the other hand, were state-led operations from the start. With a pretext provided by the mistreatment of Catholic missionaries, the French Navy shelled the city of Danang in central Vietnam in 1858. The following year French forces seized Saigon and within a decade ‘Cochinchina’ was a colony. Cambodia and Annam became French protectorates soon after but what the French were really after was an independent route – by river or rail – to the potentially huge markets of the Chinese interior. Success required control of the northern province of Tonkin – a prospect that deeply alarmed the court in Beijing. The Chinese government sponsored the Black Flags (who were, depending on one's point of view, either a band of brigands or a semi-autonomous political unit) to stop them. But after the resulting war (from 1884 to 1885) China was obliged to recognise French control of Tonkin and agree to a defined border between it and the Qing realm.

Around the same time, the German Reich was also seeking territory in Asia. In preparation it sought to establish a string of naval bases connecting the homeland with a hoped-for colony in China. Its navy conducted a series of surveys around the Paracel Islands between 1881 and 1884. Germany neither sought nor received permission from China or France for the surveys and neither government seems to have noticed, let
alone issued a protest. (Some Chinese writers claim that a Chinese protest was issued but there appears to be a lack of proof.) The German authorities actually published their survey in 1885 and it became the reference for later English and French maps of the islands, but not, strangely, for the Chinese.
²⁶
In 1897, the mistreatment of European missionaries again provided a pretext for imperial intervention. Within months Germany had seized what became Tsingtao (Qingdao) in northeastern China.

The American imperial project in Asia began with Commodore Perry's exemplary display of gunboat diplomacy in Tokyo harbour in 1853: plenty of gunpowder but no casualties. Rather than resist, as the Qing court had done, the Japanese elite embraced modernisation and, within half a century, were to join in the dismemberment of China. American success in Japan led to greater ambitions. In 1890 the president of the US Naval War College, Alfred Mahan, published
The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783
– analysing Britain's success in creating a global empire. Mahan argued that for the United States to prosper, it needed to secure new markets abroad and protect trade routes to them through a network of naval bases. His argument resonated with a new generation of politicians. The opportunity came eight years later. By the end of the Spanish–American War, the US had truly become a Pacific power, annexing the Philippines, Hawaii and Guam.

All this territory-taking by the colonial powers provided the foundations for the current boundaries in the South China Sea. They created the states and they created the borders between them, from which the maritime frontiers were measured. The Philippines and Indonesia were split by an agreement between Portugal and Spain in 1529, the line between Malaysia and Indonesia was largely fixed by the British and the Dutch in 1842; the Chinese–Vietnamese border was dictated to the Chinese by the French in 1887, the general frontiers of the Philippines were set by the US and Spain in 1898 and the border between the Philippines and Malaysia by the US and Britain in 1930.

This was part of a much wider process of defining and marking the borders between the different colonial states, a process that generated great resentment and resistance. It took the Dutch almost a century to enforce them in Borneo and the other islands. As late as the early twentieth century, they were still dealing with 900 different indigenous political units.
²⁷
But
these are the borders the post-colonial states emerged with and they have become sacred national symbols – despite the grief they continue to cause. Even more deeply rooted now is the way of thinking about these borders. The Westphalian system has become so dominant that its notions of fixed borders and territorial sovereignty are often assumed to have existed for millennia. But in Southeast Asia it goes back little more than a century and extrapolating modern political borders from those that may have existed under the
mandala
system can be both meaningless and dangerous.

The main reason for the sensitivity about borders and sovereignty in the region is, of course, the experience of China during the period its ideologues call ‘the century of national humiliation’. The memory of the Qing regime's impotence in the face of industrialised European invasion still motivates China's leadership today. But in contrast to its physical occupations in other parts of the world, nineteenth-century Western imperialism in China wasn't really territorial: the areas of land seized up until 1900 (Hong Kong and the other international concessions) were a tiny fraction of China's territory. Nor was it particularly about lives lost. Around 20,000 people were killed during the ‘Opium Wars’ of 1840 and 1860 for sure, but vastly more – 20 to 30 million – died in the mid-century ‘Taiping Rebellion’. The humiliation was ideological. It combined the sense of violation by ‘others’ with a knowledge that it was internal corruption and decay which had allowed it to happen. By contrast, Japan had adapted to the new world system quite successfully and was ready to challenge the established East Asian order.

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In 1894 and 1895, in a sign of developments to come, Japan seized control of Korea and Taiwan from Qing China. The defeat by Japan was closely followed, in 1901, by the multinational invasion to suppress the ‘Boxer Rebellion’. The Qing Dynasty was in crisis and acutely sensitive to accusations that it could not defend the country's territory. Groups such as the Society to Recover the Nation's Rights, the Society to Commemorate the National Humiliation and the Self-Government Society instigated boycotts of British, American, Japanese and other foreign goods.
²⁸
Which is why, in 1909, a Chinese government decided
to turn the sovereignty of islands in the South China Sea into a question of national pride for the first time. Then, as now, the issue was the fate of almost uninhabitable dots in the sea, far from land. The posturing would result in the drawing of the line that has since become the basis for China's claims in the Sea.

As early as October 1907 rumours had been circulating about a band of Japanese explorers landing upon Pratas Island, a guano-covered coral reef 400 kilometres southwest of (Japanese-occupied) Taiwan and about 260 kilometres from the Chinese mainland.
²⁹
The rumours weren't confirmed until a Chinese ship paid a visit to Pratas in March 1909 and discovered Nishizawa Yoshiji and around hundred colleagues digging up bird droppings. When challenged, Nishizawa declared that he had discovered the island, that it was previously uninhabited and that it now belonged to him. His motive was simple. The droppings were a rich and valuable fertiliser for the paddy fields back home and Nishizawa hoped to make a fortune.

When news reached Canton (Guangzhou), the Self-Government Society launched another boycott of Japanese goods and demanded the government do something. Its outraged middle-class members also collected evidence to try to prove that Pratas belonged to China. The armchair nationalists leafed through old books and interviewed ancient mariners for proof of the island's ties to the mainland. With popular pressure rising, the Chinese decided to make the problem disappear with cold hard cash. The Japanese government was willing to assist. The Chinese boycott was seriously hurting many Japanese companies and Japan could see little value in occupying Pratas.
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The authorities in Tokyo offered to recognise Chinese sovereignty if its claim could be proved.
³¹

On 12 October 1909 the Viceroy of Canton and the Japanese consul in the city agreed the deal. Japan would recognise Chinese sovereignty and Mr Nishizawa would vacate the island in exchange for 130,000 silver dollars in compensation.
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The Cantonese authorities hoped to recoup the money by adopting Mr Nishizawa's business plan. They even hired a couple of his guano-mining experts to advise them. Sadly it all came to nothing. Without a wharf to load large ships, the whole project was uneconomic. By Christmas 1910 it had been abandoned and Pratas was reported to be deserted again.
³³

But the anxieties about China's maritime border persisted and the Governor of Guangdong, Zhang Yen Jun, felt that wielding a sword would be more effective than just a pen and turned his attention to the Paracel Islands, several hundred kilometres to the southwest. At this time, official Chinese maps (whether national, regional or local) showed Hainan Island as the southernmost point of Chinese territory. This had been the case on maps published in 1760, 1784, 1866 and 1897.
³⁴
While the negotiations over Pratas unfolded, Governor Zhang despatched a boat to the Paracels in May 1909 – and then two more the following month. Chinese accounts talk of a flotilla spending three weeks cruising around, making surveys and firing off the occasional salvo of cannon to claim the islands for China. However, the French owner of a shipping company plying routes across the sea, P.A. Lapicque, gave a different version in a book published 20 years later.
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He says the expedition (which was guided by two Germans from the massive trading firm Carlowitz and Company) spent two weeks at anchor off Hainan waiting for good weather and then sped to the Paracels on 6 June before returning to Canton the following day. This visit is now the basis for China's claim to sovereignty over the islands. In the aftermath of the expedition a new map of Guangdong was published showing, for the first time on any Chinese map, the Paracel Islands as part of the province.
³⁶

That was one of the final acts under the dying Qing dynasty: it was finally overthrown in 1911. The first map the new republican government produced, in its 1912
Almanac
, showed no borders at all. The new national leadership was avowedly ‘modern’ – it aspired to become part of the international system – but as the geographer William Callahan has pointed out, it couldn't resolve the contradiction between China's new identity as a nation-state and its old one as the centre of a
mandala
-based series of hierarchical relationships. The first constitution of the Republic of China illustrated this perfectly when it asserted that ‘The
sovereign territory
of the Republic of China continues to be the same as the
domain
of the former Empire.’ This simple equation of the old ‘domain’ with the new ‘sovereign territory’ is fundamental to the current disagreement over ‘borders’ in the South China Sea.
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This was the situation when a private cartographer, Hu Jinjie, set to work drafting a new guide to China's historic territory. When it was eventually published in December 1914 the
New Geographical Atlas of the Republic
of China
contained the first Chinese map to include a line drawn across the South China Sea demonstrating which islands rightfully belonged to the mainland. Hu entitled the map the ‘Chinese territorial map before the Qianglong–Jiaqing period’.
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In other words, the line represented the extent of Chinese state ‘control’ before 1736 and, significantly, the only islands within the line were Pratas and the Paracels.
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It went no further south than 15° N. Throughout the turbulent ‘warlord era’ of the 1920s and into the early 1930s this was the line published on Chinese maps. It took 20 years and another international crisis out at sea for the line to assume the location that China asserts today.

The sense of national violation grew even stronger on 9 May 1915 when the republican government was forced to accept new Japanese demands to cede territory and other rights.
⁴⁰
The National Teachers’ Association declared 9 May to be ‘National Humiliation Commemoration Day’. In 1916 the Central Cartographic Society in Shanghai published a ‘Map of National Humiliation’ showing the territories lost to foreigners. Interestingly, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tonkin were prominently marked but no mention was made of anywhere else in the South China Sea. For much of the following decade China was consumed by civil war between competing factions and warlords but after the Kuomintang took power in 1927, they used ‘national humiliation’ as a unifying idea to bring the country together. It even made ‘National Humiliation Commemoration Day’ an official holiday.

On 13 April 1930, the French warship
Malicieuse
dropped anchor off Spratly Island, hundreds of kilometres to the south of Pratas and the Paracels, and fired a 21-gun salute. The only witnesses to this display of imperial pomp were four marooned and starving fishermen unaware that they were witnessing the opening salvo in a still-unfinished battle for control of their fishing grounds. The
Malicieuse
had been sent by the French governor of Cochinchina following reports that the Japanese government was about to grab the island, 500 kilometres from his coast.
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The French government publicised its occupation but, strangely, failed to formally annex it until the British government asked for a copy of the annexation document three years later. The Chinese government had failed to notice the 1930 occupation but when the annexation was announced on 26 July 1933, claiming Spratly Island and five others – Amboyna Cay, Itu Aba, North Danger
Reef (Les Deux Iles), Loaita and Thitu – its reaction was explosive, but also somewhat confused.