"a gunnery demonstration against an uninhabited and unclaimed atoll would be useful."
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THE | DIPLOMAT
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China
acts because the only power able to prevent such action, the United
States, does nothing. Washington should contest China’s claims, both
physically and historically. At the very least, Washington should
challenge the historical basis for China’s myriad claims to demonstrate
that, on the historical record, China is a paper tiger."US Must Challenge China in South China Sea
“Washington should contest China’s claims, both physically and historically.”
By Richard C. Thornton
June 10, 2015
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter’s plea to China and the nations surrounding the South China Sea to end island base building will
fall on deaf ears for two reasons. First, it is in their respective
interests to create facts on the water to establish sovereignty claims
and, second, because no one can stop them. The United States explicitly
declares that it takes no position on these activities as they relate to
sovereignty claims; Washington simply wants to be free to sail in
international waters and fly in international air space.
Unfortunately
for Washington and Beijing, these two courses – base-building and
freedom of navigation are convergent. Sooner rather than later there
will be confrontation. Incidents will follow and perhaps proliferate.
The Beijing propaganda machine is already demanding that the United
States retreat before its too late, that China is determined to
establish a blue water presence in the Western Pacific, which it will
inevitably dominate.
The U.S. should accept China’s challenge,
the sooner the better. If China truly seeks to dominate the Western
Pacific, then the United States should contest Beijing’s claims now
while China is quite weak in terms of naval power and while the United
States still has the relative advantage. The United States should employ
a variant of the “Maritime Strategy” used against the Soviet Union in
the eighties against China today. Then, the U.S. Navy sailed into
so-called Soviet naval redoubts off Murmansk and the Sea of Okhotsk to
deny the Soviet navy sanctuary in any conflict. That is what the U.S.
Navy must do today against China. It must be made clear that China’s sea
bases offer no advantage at all in time of conflict. Perhaps
a
gunnery demonstration against an uninhabited and unclaimed atoll would
be useful. Perhaps a demonstration of the efficacy of fleet ABM
capability should be mounted. The objective would be to make public the
weaknesses China seeks to hide by its noisy propaganda.
A
concurrent approach must be to demonstrate that China’s political
claims in the East and South China Seas have no historical basis. To
date, the United States has failed to contest these claims,
leaving the impression that they are true, which they are not. Not one
of them. Beijing claims that Taiwan is China’s territory, which it is
not. If sovereignty is a function of conquest, colonization, and
control, then no mainland Chinese regime has ever in the five thousand
year history of China satisfied these conditions as far as Taiwan is
concerned. Indeed, China itself was ruled by a variety of non-Chinese
regimes for most of its history and the only quasi-serious claim “China”
has to Taiwan was made during the Qing Dynasty, which was a Manchu not a
Chinese regime. The Qing declared Taiwan an administrative region, but
never controlled the island. Its claim lasted a grand total of ten
years, from 1885 to 1895 when Japan took possession of the island as
part of the settlement of the Sino-Japanese war. It was Japan that
conquered, colonized, and controlled Taiwan against the will of its
overwhelmingly non-Chinese inhabitants for the subsequent fifty years,
until the end of World War II.
Beijing
claims that the Senkaku Islands are Chinese, which they are not. If the
Senkaku Islands, which Beijing calls the Diaoyutai, belong to anyone
they belong to the former kingdom of Ryukyu, which included the many
island groups stretching from the Senakakus to Okinawa. The kingdom
existed from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries before being
gradually absorbed by the Satsuma clan of Southern Japan. At the same
time the kingdom was a tributary to the Ming Dynasty.* Thus, as a dual
tributary, the Ryukyuan people sent hundreds of trade and tribute
missions to China and Japan, passing the Senkakus on the way to China.
Indeed, the Ryukyu Kingdom served as an entrepôt for
trade between Japan and China (Ming China prohibited direct trade with
Japan). Japan took control of the Senkakus after the Sino-Japanese War
in an action unrelated to that conflict.
The
People’s Republic of China, in fact, acknowledged that the Senkakus
were Japanese until relatively recently. After WWII the United States
administered the Senkakus, Okinawa and other formerly
Japanese-controlled islands, as part of the peace treaty with Japan. It
was only in 1968, when the United States initiated discussions with
Japan about returning these islands to Japan that Beijing saw an
opportunity to insert a claim. The true, political significance of the
Chinese move lies more as a challenge to the U.S. presence in the
Western Pacific because the islands still come under the legal purview
of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, which commits Washington to defend
them as Japanese territory.
The
Paracel Islands off the Vietnamese coast are another case of uncertain
provenance, none of it Chinese. It was France that annexed the islands
as part of their Indochinese colony and the Japanese who took over from
France during WWII. China came late to this party, when the Chinese
Communists seized the largest of the islands, Woody Island, in 1950 and took the rest in January 1974 when Vietnam was divided, at war, and unable to resist.
The
Paracels lie relatively close to Hainan Island and so a dispute with
Vietnam is understandable, even if not justified. But the Spratlys, a
conglomeration of a multitude of islets, reefs, inlets, and shoals, lies
over a thousand miles from Chinese territory. China’s actions here are a
brazen grab of territory, which must not be accepted. If China is
allowed to seize territory a thousand miles from its own country, what
country is secure?
China
acts because the only power able to prevent such action, the United
States, does nothing. Washington should contest China’s claims, both
physically and historically. At the very least, Washington should
challenge the historical basis for China’s myriad claims to demonstrate
that, on the historical record, China is a paper tiger.
Richard C. Thornton is Professor of History and International Affairs at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
*Correction:
an earlier version of this article referred to the Ming Dynasty
as non-Chinese, this is inaccurate and the reference has been removed.
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