The South China Sea (2 page)

Maritime insurance premiums go through the roof, container ship sailings are cancelled, flights are re-routed, semiconductor supply lines are disrupted and just-in-time logistical networks begin to break down. Fishermen stop fishing, markets go empty, urban workers go hungry, activists get angrier, oil prices sky-rocket, politicians shout louder, warnings get direr: all to no avail. The Chinese make their first landing on Parola, the northernmost of the Spratly Islands, hundreds of kilometres west of Scarborough Shoal. The tiny Filipino garrison can put up only token resistance. But 3 kilometres away, the Vietnamese forces occupying Dao Song Tu Tay are better armed and regard this move as a mortal threat. With artillery and shore-based missiles they target the Chinese fleet. Both sides call in air support.

The fighting spreads to all the other islands in the Spratlys – landings are made on reefs and sandbars across a wide area of ocean. Washington repeats its threats about its vital national interest in the freedom of the seas. It moves carrier groups into the region; token vessels from other countries join them in a show of international resolve. Confrontations between Chinese and American vessels become increasingly tense: there are collisions at sea and submarines play cat and mouse beneath the waves. Japanese warships are ordered to escort oil tankers. In the post-Fukushima era the country's electricity industry needs a tanker to arrive every six hours to keep the power flowing. The Indian government offers help to its strategic partner Vietnam, upping the ante even higher. And then someone in Delhi decides that this would be the perfect moment to regain some lost territory in the Himalayas …

It's only a scenario and even as I write this good people are working on ways to prevent it ever unfolding. But there are also forces pushing
Asia in the opposite direction. Economic competition, superpower logic and populist nationalism are increasing the chances of conflict. The South China Sea is the first place where Chinese ambition has come face to face with American strategic resolve. Dozens of other players, from medium-sized countries to pint-sized politicians, are seeking to gain some advantage from the unfolding confrontation. Interests are being assessed and alliances formed and reformed: strategic partnerships, mutual defence treaties – a web of commitments binding the world to the future of this region. What happens if someone shoots an archduke?

* * * * * *

To understand the importance of the South China Sea to the wider world, fly from Singapore's Changi Airport on a clear day and, as you rise up, look down at the water below. Hundreds of vessels, from the smallest of fishing smacks to the very largest of crude carriers, fill the waterway: tugs, trawlers, container ships, car transporters and bulk freighters shifting the stuff of modern life. Oil heading east fuels the giant economies at the other end of the South China Sea: Taiwan, South Korea, China and Japan. To the west flows the combined output of the workshops of the world: hardware and software, headwear and footwear. The best guesses suggest that more than half the world's maritime trade goes through the Straits of Malacca, along with half the world's liquefied natural gas and one-third of its crude oil. If the ships stopped moving, it wouldn't be long before the lights in some parts of the world started going out.

The South China Sea is both the fulcrum of world trade and a crucible of conflict. There were battles in 1974 and 1988 and there have been dozens of less violent confrontations since. The United States has been involved since the beginning and India has begun to take an interest. The region deserves our attention and yet, outside a small circle of academics, paid experts and other obsessives, it is very poorly understood. Many of the accepted truths about the disputes, repeated in most media coverage, are either untrue or unproven. The Sea is not particularly rich in oil and gas resources, the military bases on the disputed islands are not particularly ‘strategic’ since almost all could be destroyed with a single missile strike, the territorial disputes involve six countries, not five, since Indonesia is
affected although it pretends it isn't and the ‘historic claims’ of the disputants are actually very modern.

Many of the key writings on the South China Sea – at least in English – can trace their original references back to two Western academic works: a 1976 paper by the German historian Dieter Heinzig, entitled ‘Disputed Islands in the South China Sea’, and a 1982 book by the American geographer Marwyn Samuels,
Contest for the South China Sea
. They were pioneering and impressive pieces of work, bringing much needed insight to the subject. But the histories that both books recounted relied in large part on articles published in Chinese Communist Party journals following the Chinese invasion of the Paracel Islands in January 1974. One was published in the March 1974 edition of
The
70s Monthly
(
Ch'i-shi nien-tai yüeh-k'an
) and two in the May 1974 edition of
Ming Pao Monthly
. These were clearly not neutral pieces of scholarship: they were intended to justify the invasion. Heinzig and Samuels are not to be blamed for this. There was little other material available at the time.

However, by relying on these early works (and the works that rely on these works), too many academics and commentators are still, in effect, allowing these three Chinese articles to frame the entire debate about the South China Sea, 40 years after they were published. Knowledge about the history and current situation of the Sea has proliferated since then, allowing researchers to re-examine the old certainties. Too much of this new material is lying unread in academic journals. I hope that by bringing some of that work to wider attention, this book will make a contribution to changing the terms of the debate.

There is much more to the South China Sea than apparently Lilliputian squabbles over barren lumps of rock. Mysterious cultures have risen and fallen around its shores, invaders have come and gone, winds of trade and war have directly connected the Sea to the fates of faraway empires for centuries. Its history is also a global history. Its future should be a global concern. In our era, what happens in the South China Sea will define the future. Will China's rise lead to conflict between the superpowers? Does the Chinese leadership intend to play by the rules of the international game or challenge them? Does the United States have the will to stand its ground? Will the countries of Southeast Asia win or lose from superpower competition? How has the hunt for hydrocarbons affected the conflict? Above
all, what can be done to prevent war ever breaking out? How could the resources of the Sea be equitably shared among the hundreds of millions of mostly poor people living around its shores? Read on.

Yangon, Myanmar

December 2013

CHAPTER 1

Wrecks and Wrongs

Prehistory to 1500

V
ICTOR PAZ DREW
breath. In front of him lay three slabs, about the length of a person in all. This was going to take some effort. He took a moment to control his excitement: hope and caution battling for supremacy. As he paused, larks –
hinay hinay
in Tagalog – flitted among the
bili
trees, their songs echoing around the cave mouth, heralds for an archaeological revelation. Above the cave, the huge Illé limestone tower soared out of the paddy fields, dominating the wide, green valley floor. By now, the others had put down their tools to watch, forming an audience around him. The middle stone looked the easiest to lift. Victor reached down and grabbed it with both hands. Gingerly, he prised it away.

Beneath the slab was a ribcage: smashed but still recognisably human. Victor grinned. This was good, a fine reward after a season of digging. The small crowd pressed in around the edge of the pit, a metre above where Victor was kneeling. As the stone was placed aside they could see that the skeleton had been buried with ceremony. In the centre of the chest was a hammerstone: a vital tool for a Neolithic craftsman. Above it lay a small clutch of shells, still pressed together, although the pouch that once confined them had long rotted away. Two large bailer shells were placed to one side, but what would later prove to be the most significant find lay at the top of the chest: a necklace of discs interspersed with conus beads – jewelry made from tiny cone-shaped shells.

Victor removed the two remaining slabs, revealing the entire skeleton. Now he could see just how elaborate the burial had been. Around the body were more stones, enclosing it within a deliberate shape. Above the head, the stones formed a point with a polished pebble at the apex. As head of the Archaeological Studies Programme at the University of the Philippines, Victor was obliged to be a professional sceptic. But he knew this find could have an emotional importance as much as a scientific one. His predecessor in the role – and his mentor – had been Wilhelm Solheim and for decades Solheim had scoured this end of Palawan Island, piecing together evidence for a theory that would explain how and why peoples, languages and cultures spread across Southeast Asia. But after a lifetime of research around the South China Sea, Solheim was running out of time. At the age of 81 his faculties were slowly leaving him. The discoveries in the Illé Cave in April 2005 would be his reward.

Victor stood back and looked again at the stones surrounding the body. They were in the shape of a boat, heading into the shadows of the cave and the afterlife beyond. The polished stone marked the prow of the boat and bailer shells, as their name implies, are vital accessories for anyone taking a leaky canoe onto the ocean. But even Victor wasn't prepared for the next revelation. The conus beads were taken to the laboratory in Manila for testing. Because animals make shells from the nutrients and minerals they eat, they carry molecular markers of the time and place where they live and die. And these conus shells, which had been collected, crafted, turned into jewelry and placed in this burial, had lived and died at least 4,200 years ago. And that, to Victor Paz and Wilhelm Solheim, was the evidence they had been seeking for years. It gave them a chance to clinch a debate that has divided archaeologists: how and why did modern humans populate Southeast Asia? Their discovery appeared proof that the people who buried their dead at Illé Cave were already maritime people more than four millennia ago. That would knock out a key plank of the dominant explanation that Southeast Asian culture had simply diffused from southern China. ‘We still have to know more,’ admits Paz, ‘but it is more and more becoming an argument that cannot be ignored.’

Paz, Solheim and their colleagues had journeyed to a remote valley in the wild northern tip of Palawan to try to win an argument. Their motivations were both personal and scientific. They were deliberately looking for
evidence that might support a theory they had already formed but their methods were honest, their team was open and their reasoning was logical. Unfortunately, the independent pursuit of knowledge is only one of several motives for archaeological exploration in the South China Sea. Others are less interested in the big questions because they have chosen their answers already: their purpose is to find treasure or justify territorial claims. And those with less noble intentions have access to vastly greater resources.

Mixed motives among archaeologists and historians – and their masters – in Southeast Asia are nothing new. For centuries, the writing of the region's history has revealed as much about contemporary obsessions as about the past. Has Southeast Asia been anything more than a stage upon which outsiders have played imperial games? Are the people who live around the South China Sea descended from China or from somewhere else? Were the great civilisations of Champa, Angkor and Srivijaya home-grown or implanted? Did culture and civilisation flow from one source or from many? Who controlled territory and what did that actually mean? Colonialist, nationalist and internationalist historians have all answered these questions differently. Recent evidence from linguistics, ceramics, genetics, botany and sedimentology is shining new light. The more it reveals, the more complex the story becomes.

* * * * * *

The earliest evidence of humans in Southeast Asia dates from about 1.5 million years ago. Remains of ‘Java Man’, more formally known as
homo erectus
, have been found both in Java and in China. But he, and his wives and children, appear to have died out around 50,000 years ago, possibly chased into oblivion by his smarter relative,
homo sapiens
. Modern humans probably reached Australia around 50,000 years ago, suggesting they had already settled Southeast Asia en route. Skulls found in Borneo and the Philippines indicate that modern humans had arrived in those places by 40,000 and 22,000 years ago respectively. The problem is that there's very little other evidence – mainly because the world then looked very different. Sea level 17,000 years ago was around 120 metres lower than it is today. The modern islands of Java, Sumatra and Borneo were joined to the mainland and Australia was joined to New Guinea. If, as
seems likely,
homo sapiens
lived along the sea shore, then the villages he built and the tools he manufactured now lie well beyond the reach of archaeology, 120 metres under water. There are huge gaps in our understanding and very little evidence with which to close them.

But as we come closer to the present – a few thousand years ago – the evidence multiplies and so do the arguments. How did scattered subsistence settlements evolve into urban centres? How did people who knew only stone tools come to master bronze and iron smelting? And how were these innovations spread? The first explanations sprang from a remarkable insight by a German scholar, Otto Dempwolff. Around the start of the twentieth century he began to demonstrate similarities between the different languages of Southeast Asia. By the time the American linguist Robert Blust came to develop this work at the end of the twentieth century, links had been discovered between more than 1,000 languages spoken as far apart as Taiwan, Hawaii, Easter Island, New Zealand, Malaysia and Madagascar. The implications were extraordinary. They demonstrated that people separated by thousands of miles of ocean – covering half the world's circumference – shared cultural roots. Blust argued that these roots could all be traced back to a single language spoken in Taiwan around 5,500 years ago, a language he called ‘proto-Austronesian’. And by showing how this language had divided and multiplied, he devised a theory linking the diffusion of Austronesian languages across the islands of Southeast Asia to the migration of peoples, the settlement of new territories and the spread of agricultural and other technologies. It became known as the ‘Out of Taiwan’ model.