Most international scholars dismiss as baseless China’s Nine-Dash Line which demarcates almost the entire South China Sea as being Chinese territory. The international arbital tribunal in The Hague agreed that there were no legitimate grounds for China to claim “historic rights” to the territory.
But Bill Hayton writes for Nikkei Asian Review that Western countries have to take China’s claim seriously, not for the purpose of conceding its validity, but for the purpose of challenging it.
While China’s strategic interests such as defending lines of communication and defending against seaborne attacks are clearly important to Beijing, Western observers place too much emphasis on these factors. China’s actions in the region are based on a very real sense of entitlement to the territory. This feeling is informed by an obsession with ending the country’s “national humiliation” suffered at the hands of Western colonial powers in the 19th and 20th centuries.
This sense of entitlement to the territory means that Beijing will only grow more assertive, especially in the face of military confrontation. If other nations want to balance China’s interests in the region they must first understand China’s objectives.
Hayton argues that, while China’s strategic objectives for the defense of its coast, sea lanes and nuclear deterrent, will endure, the flawed historical narratives on which its claims are based can and should be challenged.
There may be some validity to this argument, but if China continues to erode regional challenges to its claims, as it seems to be doing in the Philippines, then the US, Japan and other Western powers will have little grounds for pushing back, regardless of how historically accurate their argument is.
They did not exist thousands of years ago as their god was not even born yet.
I’m surprised there are actually people who read this biased, nebulous, rubbish. Not many though, I see.
Hopefully, with the weather as it is, a typhoon will wipe out these military islands with ease. The ocean never plays the way you want it too. Water is strongest when annoyed.
Chinas leaders smashed into their own peoples not that long ago. Enslaving and making people work for starvation wages. There is no indication they did it for Peace. Greed motivated.
Henry Tan N K yeah, right. If only everyone was as wonderful as you we would all be singing kumbaha. Lol. How is China doing on the interest rates they’re charging Cambodia? Nothing exploitive there.
Jeff Wolfers,. The USA is not even a signatory to the relevant international laws. Read up, will ya?
Humiliation at the hands of the West….. Really? Got nothing to do with the ruinous communist PRC reign commencing in 1949 then.
You are wrong
It’s about international law. China is in violation.
John Brown actually, just the opposite. Never said it was OK. If you were right when you said it was wrong before, then your asumptions about exploitation are right now. Everybody is full of it, as soon as you said white … You are establishing the very double standard about which you complain so much? Lol
Someone did "discover" an entire a continent, with about 100 million people already live on it.
Then that 100 million people was killed off to be replaced by the "discoverer"’s own people
And today, there is still a holiday named after his "discover" for celebration.
Oh and all of this is very accepted as normal not at all "madness"
So Israel is ok, Falkland Islands is Ok, Guam is Ok but anything Asian people do is not ok, because they are not White….
Got it!!!
Greedy, power, are the cost of war.
God knows, that Philippines has rigth to claim, the only thing you have is money so that you make a land on sea am I rigth.
"old colonizers" and their "poisonous legacies" do not create this dispute as they never defined who owned what of this SCS. Rather, it’s the fabricated Chinese 9-dashed claim that UNCLOS ruled invalid and no neighbor agrees to.
Never heard of "Europeans and Anglo Saxons…discovered Philippines, Australia, etc." in the context of this SCS dispute and what does "These lands were known to chinese sailors centuries before…" have anything to do with their territorial aggression that UNCLOS’s PCA ruled baseless, illegal? Ancient people who are now living in Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, never sailed their seas nor occupied their lands?
To claim the ENTIRE sea is plain madness
So, because China could bully these people thousands of years ago they are entitled to do so again today? Same reason – imperilism which is deamed so wrong when practiced by the West? lol
Most of the land and Sea disputes in the world are the poisonous legacies left by the old colonizers in the evil colonization era.
Sadly modern nations still have to base their arguments on the words and arrangements of their former colonizers.
Only Europeans would be so conceited that they discovered Philippines, Australia, etc. These lands were known to chinese sailors centuries before the Europeans even had compasses.