Recently Chinese President Xi Jinping has called
on troops to "put all (their) minds and energy on preparing for war" in
a visit to a military base in the southern province of Guangdong according
to state news agency Xinhua.
This came shortly after Beijing increased military
drills around Taiwan. Almost 40 Chinese warplanes crossed the median line
between the mainland and Taiwan on 18-19 September, one of several sorties the
island's President Tsai Ing-wen called a "threat of force."
After years of the United States and China butt heads
over trade and other issues, opportunities for a mutually constructive
rapprochement are growing scarce. It will be up to Joe Biden's administration
to develop a more cogent strategy for dealing with the most important foreign-policy issue of this
century.
In a recent statement referring to the Taiwan problem,
China speaks of 'peaceful' yet at the same time insist ("China will resolutely
deter") that Taiwan cannot strife for independence and more
importantly insist Taiwan become part of mainland China (using the term
'reunification') something Taiwanese absolutely do not want especially after
they see what is happening with Hong Kong.
This whereby Taiwan's
President Tsai Ing-wen accurately stated that Taiwan de-facto is already
independent.
When the United States severed relations with Taiwan
(that time the Republic of China) in 1979 and discarded its mutual defense
treaty with the island, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, which made clear that the United
States maintained special commitments to Taiwan. The TRA asserted that the
United States would “consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by
other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the
peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the
United States.” It also stated that the United States would both maintain the
capacity to come to Taiwan’s defense and make available to the island the arms
necessary for its security. Importantly, however, the TRA did not declare that
the United States would in fact come to Taiwan’s defense.
American ambiguity however worked to deter China from
attacking Taiwan, as Beijing could never be
sure what the U.S. response would be.
As Joseph S. Nye, Jr. recently argued in What
Could Cause a US-China War? The US will retain some long-term power
advantages that contrast with areas of Chinese vulnerability. One
is geography. The US is surrounded by oceans and neighbors that are likely
to remain friendly. China has borders with 14 countries, and territorial disputes
with India, Japan, and Vietnam which set limits on its hard and soft power.
Following is an overview of the wider background that
led up to the current situation.
Geography and the construction of today's China
As we early on have seen, it was during the late Qing
Dynasty and the early Republic of China that became the formation stage of
modern Chinese nationalism and the stage of the proposition and initial usage
of the concept of 'the Chinese nation' first came in Use. To be more precise
modern Chinese nationalism developed around the
period of the May 4th Movement during the time of the Left and Right New Culture Movement. And
although Mao Zedong in March 1953 still referred to "Han chauvinism"
to criticize his rival Kuomintang party, this
drastically changed following the CCP's 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.
That is, where the anti-Mao Guomindang/KMT leadership
deliberately used fear of the loss of territory in the 1920s and 1930s to rally
political support, communist party's (for reasons we described) Deng
Xiaoping re-introduced the Guomindang's “one-hundred-year history of humiliation” narrative as a new source of legitimacy of the CCP’s
rule and the unity of the 'Chinese' people and CCP society. This was crowned by
a new ongoing yearly
National Humiliation Day.
In February 2019, the Chinese government (CCP) also
issued specific rules covering the printing within China of maps in books or
magazines intended for sale in overseas markets. Each map would require
permission from provincial officials and none would be allowed to be
distributed within the country. The possibility that a Chinese citizen might
see a map showing an unauthorized version of China’s territorial claims was
perceived as such a threat to national security that it justified the
involvement of the National Work Group for Combating Pornography and Illegal
Publications’, according to the regulations.1 To prove the point, in March 2019
the authorities in the port city of Qingdao destroyed 29,000 English-language
maps destined for export because they showed Taiwan as a separate country.2
As we pointed out the story of how certain current
Chinese territories came to be regarded as ‘rightfully’
Chinese while others did not is far from simple. During the twentieth
century, some areas that were held to be ‘natural’ parts of the country, such
as Outer Mongolia, were let go while others that had been abandoned, notably
Taiwan, were reclaimed. When the Qing Empire collapsed in 1911, most of its
borders were more imaginary than real. Except in a few places, where Russian,
French or British empires had forced them to be demarcated, they had never been
formally defined. In the decades after the revolution, the national elite in
Beijing had to ‘fix’ a national territory for the first time. This was a
process that had to take place on the ground but also in the national
imagination. Maps had to be drawn but, just as importantly, the world-view
expressed on those maps had to be inculcated in the minds of the people.
Anxiety about the vulnerability of those borders was deliberately generated,
right from the beginning. There were fears of foreign threats but there were
also expansionist dreams and political calculations.
Enter the China trade
As we have described the
history of Chinese foreign trade began as early as the Western Han dynasty when
the famous "Silk Road" (although that term was only later on coined
by Carl Ritter 1838 and popularized by Sven
Hedin in the 1930s) as a later symbol for trade
through Central Asia was pioneered by Chinese envoys.
Then in the middle of the seventeenth century in
the wake of Matteo Ricci who was the first westerner to enter the
forbidden city in 1601, gradually statesmen and scholars all over Europe
started to look at China as a beacon of commercial, intellectual, and cultural
potential, offering the promise of wealth as well as global civilizational
convergence.3
Later in the spring of 1843, after a number of lively
and often heated debates, the United States Congress approved funds for the
first US mission to China. President John Tyler spoke of the mission as one of
great "magnitude and importance“4 and Secretary of State Daniel Webster called it
"a more important mission than ever proceeded from this Country, and more
important mission than any other, likely to succeed it, in our day.“5 Indeed,
this mission, led by former congressman Caleb Cushing, resulted in the first US treaty with China (the
Treaty of Wangxia,1844), which secured trading privileges for American
merchants and opened a host of Chinese ports to serve as outlets for surplus
American production. Contained within the treaty was also the first appearance
of a most favored nation clause-inserted in order to assure the US of the same
privileges in China as might be granted any other nation. The impetus for this
mission was the threat of the British monopoly of the Pacific markets. American
rivalry with Britain for the markets and influence in the Pacific forced US
politicians and bureaucrats to assume a positive role in East Asia in the early
1840s.
Russia posed a similar threat to US designs of spatial
order and regional hegemony. Moving east across Siberia, Russians attempted to
access Japan and the Pacific from the north.6 Russian territory already
stretched to the North Pacific, which posed a particularly dire threat to the
US. As Hawks wrote: "There is no power in the other hemisphere to which
the possession of Japan, or the control of the affairs, is as important as it
is to Russia. She is on one side of the islands, the United States on the
other. The Pacific ocean is destined to be the theatre of immense commercial
undertakings...with such harbors on the Pacific as Japan would give her, she
might hope to become the controlling maritime power of the world.7
Like the
treaty of Wangxia, the opening of Japan by Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1854 stands as a focal point of early US
foreign policy. The Perry's mission aimed at and succeeded in throwing open an
isolated Japan to the commerce of the world convinced Japan to welcome
shipwrecked sailors and laid the grounds for a merchant base to access the
China market. As the US worked to reinvent interaction with Asia in terms of
the Pacific trade running through the American continent the incorporation of
the Japanese islands into the global commercial system by Americans' own design
strengthened the US hand. Unlike the case of China however, the US initiated
the first treaty with Japan and thus set the terms by which this Asian country
would interact with the world. This not only gave American merchants an
advantage of primacy but also allowed the US to shape the relationship to its
liking and gain greater control over the Pacific and the Pacific markets.
Having watched Britain take the initiative in China
and American merchants gain a stronger foothold in that market, Russia could
not allow either the US or Britain to gain as much influence in Japan as they
did in China and moved accordingly to outdo the Perry mission and attempted to
open Japan first. On October 19, 1852, the Russian expedition sailed in an
attempt to beat the US to Japan. They arrived in the fall of 1853, right after
Perry had paid his first visit and gave Japan the ultimatum.8 Having failed to
beat Perry to Japan, the Russians actually succeeded in inciting the American
Commodore to move quicker to press for and conclude treaty negotiations lest
the Russians "interfere very seriously with my operation," Perry
wrote in his journal.9 Hawks reemphasized this point: "The Commodore,
suspecting that the Russians contemplated the design of returning to Japan and
of ultimately going to Yedo, which might seriously interfere with his
operations, induced him to alter his plans.“10 So Perry sailed sooner rather
than later, and Russia ended up negotiating and signing a treaty with Japan a
year later (1855), opening three ports to Russian trade.11
China's new geographers
Generally speaking the story of the invention of
present modern China’s territory, and its territorial anxieties, as we have seen can be said to have its beginnings
in the aftermath of the first world war and with the arrival of the Western
science of geography. It ends with the rediscovery of Taiwan, its reconnection
with the mainland, and then its separation.
The last major piece of territory to be formally
renounced by the Qing court the Treaty of Shimonoseki (Japanese: 下関条約, also known as Treaty of Bakan (馬關條約; Mǎguān Tiáoyuē) was signed away on 17
April 1895. The treaty that Li Hongzhang (also romanized as Li Hung-chang;
1823 –1901 Chinese politician, general, and diplomat of the late Qing
dynasty) agreed in the Japanese port of Shimonoseki ceded
Taiwan, and the Pescadores Islands off its coast, ‘to Japan in perpetuity
and full sovereignty. Just over a month later, the acting governor of the
island, a mainlander, and a few other officials and merchants declared
independence in the name of the Taiwan Republic’ rather than submit to Japanese
rule. They hoped to elicit support from Britain and France but the Europeans
saw no advantage in intervening and the Republic collapsed just eleven days
after being declared.
Throughout this long campaign, the Qing court declined
to offer any support to its former subjects in its former province. In fact,
material support for the rebel Republic was explicitly banned by a court edict
in May 1895.12
Thus in the aftermath of the treaty-signing, Qing
officials almost entirely ignored developments in Taiwan. The island was lost,
in the same way that other pieces of territory signed away by other treaties
had been lost. In 1858 the Qing had ceded 500,000 square kilometers of land
north of the Amur River to Russia through the Treaty of Aigun.13 They had then
been forced, through other ‘unequal treaties’, to allow European powers to
establish micro-colonies all around the coast. Taiwan appeared to have gone the
same way; there was no feasible way of wresting it back from Japan’s clutches. The
2 million or so Qing subjects on the island, mostly speakers of the Hokkien and
Cantonese topolects, along with the aboriginal population became colonial
subjects of Japan.
Surprisingly, perhaps, the same insouciance about
Taiwan’s fate also characterized the revolutionary movement. Sun Yat-sen and his comrades made no demands for the
return of the island to Qing control. At no point, so far as we know, did Sun
concern himself with the resistance to Japanese rule, even though it continued
to smolder. For Sun, Japanese-controlled Taiwan was more important as a base
from which to overthrow the Qing Dynasty than as a future part of the Republic.
We can see this in his behavior during 1900. That year, Sun left Japan and
traveled around Southeast Asia seeking support for a planned uprising in
Guangdong province. He was disappointed: neither the established reformists nor
local community leaders took him seriously. Instead, when Sun returned to
Nagasaki he became part of a Japanese plot to seize the port of Amoy
(modern-day Xiamen). Under Tokyo’s patronage, Sun based himself in Taiwan and
ordered his revolutionary forces to mass around their main support base in
Guangzhou. But, in a typically rash move, Sun changed the plan at the last minute,
diverting the fighters to Amoy, where he intended to join them accompanied by a
shipment of Japanese weapons. The Japanese, however, had become concerned about
provoking a Russian reaction and backed out of the entire scheme. Sun’s rebel
force found itself isolated and outgunned and was destroyed.14
Despite the betrayal in Amoy (modern-day Xiamen) when
the Japanese had become concerned provoking a Russian reaction and backed out,
Sun continued to regard the Japanese government as his main sponsor, and the
revolutionary movement continued to ignore the issue of Taiwan. The reformists
had little interest in the island, either. When a leading Taiwanese activist,
Lin Xiantang, met Liang Qichao in Japan in
1907, Liang advised him not to sacrifice lives in opposing Japanese rule since
the mainland would not be able to help. Since neither could speak the other’s
topolect, Liang had to communicate with Lin through ‘brush talk.’ This only
made Liang’s message more poignant: ‘(We were) originally of the same root, but
are now of different countries.’15 The Qing court, the revolutionaries, and the
reformists all took the same view: Taiwan had been ceded by treaty and lost to
China. It seems remarkable, given the passion that the island’s political
status generates today, but the island virtually disappeared from political
discussions in the decade before the revolution of 1911/12. Even after the
revolution, when Sun had no more need for Japanese support, he and his
supporters continued to ignore Taiwan's fate.
From the patriotic education movement to the new
Taiwan story
In a similar vein as above, in his speech on ‘The
Anti-Japanese Resistance War and the Future of Our Party,’ Chiang Kai-shek argued
that, ‘We must enable Korea and Taiwan to restore their independence and
freedom. Even more so, Mao's Communist Party had long supported independence
for Taiwan rather than reincorporation into China. At its sixth congress in
1928, the Guomindang party had recognized
the Taiwanese as a separate nationality.
In May 1928, just after the establishment of the
Guomindang’s ‘National Government’ in Nanjing, the party convened the ‘First
National Conference on Education.’ The conference resolved to adopt a new
national curriculum for schools based upon Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of
the People’: Nationalism, Democracy, and People’s Livelihood. Within months,
the GMD had captured Beijing and very quickly set about imposing a new
‘temporary curriculum’ nationwide. From 1929 all schools were expected to imbue
their pupils with strong feelings of patriotism, mobilized in particular
through the teaching of history and geography.16 Pupils were expected to study
the various regions of the country, ‘in order to foster the national spirit.’
A major contribution to this patriotic education
movement was the series of textbooks written by Chang Ch‘i-yün who
graduated from the Division of History and Geography of National Nanjing Higher
Normal School (later renamed National Central University and Nanjing
University) where he was a student of the first Chinese
geographer Zhu Kezhen.
In 1928 the Commercial Press published one as Benguo
Dili, ‘Our Geography.’ Its key message was that China formed a natural unit
despite its enormous size and variety. Using his geographical training, Zhang
divided up the country into twenty-three ‘natural’ regions based on their
environments and the inhabitants’ ways of life. He then compared them, telling
pupils that, for example, the Yangtze Delta was good for farming but had no
minerals; Shanxi was rich in coal but too dry for agriculture; Manchuria was
forested while Mongolia was good for grazing, and so on. He then told the young
learners that this diversity was actually proof of the need for national unity
since each different part was an essential part of a coherent whole.17
Yet the ‘whole’ that Zhang portrayed in the textbook
was a territory that, in reality, did not exist. The book contained various
maps of the country drawn on blank backgrounds so that the rest of the world
disappeared from view. The simple black line marking the national boundary
encompassed huge areas that were not actually under the government's control:
the independent states of Mongolia and Tibet. Zhang portrayed them as a natural
part of the Republic, nonetheless. How reality would be reconciled with the map
was not explained to the pupils. Remarkably, given present-day politics, there
was a significant omission: Taiwan was not drawn in any of the textbook's
national maps. It seems that, in Zhang’s view, the ‘natural’ shape of the
Republic was exactly the same as the shape of the Qing Empire at its collapse
in 1911. Mongolia was included; Taiwan was not. The rocks and reefs of the
South China Sea did not feature at all.
Zhang spent the next four years writing the geography
textbooks used in most Chinese schools during the later 1920s and beyond. But
while dozens of geography textbooks were printed during the 1920s and 1930s,
and they all ignored Taiwan while stressing the importance of Mongolia and
Tibet. Zhang himself, in another textbook he co-wrote in 1933, Waiguo Dili,
‘The Geography of Foreign Countries’, described the people of Taiwan as
‘orphans’ deserted by their birthmother, the Chinese nation Zhonghua minzu, and
abused by their stepmother, Japan.
Zhang, and the other authors of these books, faced a
problem that was both pedagogic and deeply political. How could they persuade a
child in a big coastal city, for example, to feel any connection with a
sheepherder in Xinjiang? Why should they even have a connection? The general
purpose of human geography was to explain how varying environments had created
groups with differing cultures. However, nationalism required all these
different groups to feel part of a single culture and loyal to a single state.
It was up to nationalist geographers to resolve the puzzle. They found two main
ways to do so. One group of textbook authors simply stated that all Chinese
citizens were the same: they were members of a single ‘yellow’ race and a
single nation, and no further explanation was needed. However, a second group
acknowledged that different groups did exist but were nonetheless united by
something greater. Within this group, some authors made use of ‘yellow race’
ideas, some used the idea of a shared, civilizing Hua culture, while others
stressed the ‘naturalness’ of the country’s physical boundaries.
The textbook writers argued that the answer to the
'border question’ was to ‘civilize’ the inhabitants. One, Ge Suicheng (who was
employed by the rival, but equally nationalistic, Zhonghua Publishing Company),
found himself facing the same dilemma as the Guomindang government. Both needed
to emphasize all ethnic groups' theoretical equality while simultaneously
making a case for their melding into a single Chinese nation based on ‘Han’
culture. In Ge’s view, the study of geography should make the different peoples
of the state love their particular home areas but also connect them emotionally
to the wider national territory. But in the meantime, in the words of his
textbook, ‘We should urgently promote the acculturation of the Mongols, Hui
[Muslims] and Tibetans so that they are not lured by the imperialists, [and we
should] move [Han] inhabitants to the border areas for colonization...’
Zhang Qiyun’s 1928 textbook was also deeply imprinted
with racial chauvinism. One part of the book’s message to its millions of young
readers was that the country was on a journey from barbarism to civilization
and that the wild frontier, where the minorities lived, needed to be tamed and
developed. The book included a table of various ethnic groups showing how
assimilated they were to the ‘main body’ (zhuti) of the Han. In a description
of the southwest Miao people, Zhang wrote, ‘They maintain the customs of great
antiquity and are totally incompatible with the Han people. Eliminating their
barbarism and changing their customs and habits is the responsibility of the
Han people.’ For Zhang, the Han provided the ‘norm’ against which the other
groups needed to be measured in order to judge their level of civilization:
they had to be made ‘Han.’ He shared Zhu Kezhen’s opinion that climate was the
determining factor in the spread of civilization. In his 1933 textbook, he
observed that in southwestern Yunnan province, the native population lived in
the hot and humid lowlands while the Han people (Han-ren) lived on the cooler
plateaus. On the other hand, in the mountains of the northwest, the Han lived
in the valleys where it was warm while the natives lived at altitudes where it
was colder. It was only natural, therefore, that the ‘temperate-dwelling’
Han-ren, free of ‘degenerating’ environmental influences, should
exert their influence over the minorities, the tu-ren.18 Other textbooks made
the same point, stressing Sun Yat-sen’s arguments that the Han made up 90
percent of the country’s population and that it was only natural that the other
groups would assimilate.19 An idea that, as pointed out by me in Jan. 2018 is very present also
in Xi Jinping’s repeated promise of “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese
nation.”
Underneath the diplomat and poet
Huang Zunxian (center) with some of his family. He was one of the
pioneers of the ‘yellow race’ thinking in the late Qing period but later helped
ensure the Hakka people were classified as part of the ‘Han race.’
These arguments can be traced back to those made
by Liang Qichao a
couple of decades before. Liang created a story of continuity: the expansion of
a civilized territory outwards from its cradle in the Yellow River
valley. The new geographers tried to write the final chapter, its
diffusion to the Republic's very edges.
The birth of the national territorial neurosis
An ever-present theme in these textbooks was the
threat of foreigners eating away at the country’s edges. It was reinforced
through school lessons about territory ‘lost’ during the previous century.
Teachers could use a peculiarly Chinese form of nationalist cartography, the
‘map of national humiliation.’ Dozens of such maps were published by the
Commercial Press, Zhonghua Publishing, and other companies during the 1910s,
1920s, and 1930s, sometimes within textbooks and atlases and sometimes as
posters for display in classrooms and public buildings. They are typically
portrayed in bright colors, land ‘conceded’ to neighboring states over the
previous century.20 There was a clear political purpose behind the making of
these maps. They served to delegitimize the Qing Dynasty, by demonstrating its
failure to ‘defend the country’ and thereby legitimize the revolution. But they
also deliberately generated a sense of anxiety about the nation’s border's
vulnerability to promote loyalty to the new Republic. It seemed to work with a
young Mao Zedong. He later told the American journalist Edgar Snow that hearing
about national humiliation made him an
activist.21 It wasn’t just Mao. This was the birth of the national territorial
neurosis.
The geographers took the nationalist idea of
‘territory’, lingtu (領土 lǐng tǔ), and projected it back to the time
of ‘domain’, jiangyu (降雨 jiàng yǔ), when there were few fixed borders. A
map of national humiliation in Ge Suicheng’s 1933 textbook showed vast areas of
central Asia, Siberia, and the island of Sakhalin as territory ‘lost’ to
Russia. The map may have displayed different areas as ‘territory,’ ‘tribute
states,’ or ‘vassal states’ but all were categorized as inherently ‘Chinese,’
nonetheless. The idea that at the time they were ‘lost,’ these territories
might have been contested areas with no clear allegiance to any particular
empire was not part of the lesson. They were presented simply as ‘Chinese’
lands that had been stolen. Ge Suicheng called on the young citizens reading
his textbook to do what they could to recover all this lost territory. Did this
mean this ‘lost’ territory should be included within the state's rightful
boundaries, or not? Was the shape of the country at that time natural or not?
These questions were not even posed in the textbook, let alone answered. What
was important for authors like Ge was to encourage students to feel the sense
of loss, a collective sense of ‘national humiliation,’ and thereby develop a
patriotic attachment to the country. Anxiety about the territorial loss was a
fundamental part of the nationalist education project right from the beginning.
The anxiety was compounded because no one, not even the geographers, knew where
the borders actually were. The historian Diana Lary has shown how, in the
southwestern province of Guangxi, the border's exact line was almost
irrelevant. Although it had been formally agreed with Indochina'se French
colonial rulers in 1894, as far as the Republican officials were concerned, the
border was just somewhere in the mountains: high, remote, and difficult to reach.
The state had generally managed minority groups in southern highlands through a
system known as tuse, in which local leaders were held responsible for their
people’s actions.22 Borders were largely irrelevant. So long as they didn’t
trouble the authorities, the mountain peoples were generally left alone. In
Lary’s words, ‘The Chinese world stopped well before the
borderlands.’23 (Things would change. This is the same border that
thousands of Chinese and Vietnamese soldiers died fighting over in 1979.)
In 1928, the first Chinese geographer Zhu Kezhen
declared that Chinese cartography was about a century behind its European
counterpart. At the time, most of the publicly available maps were still based
on 200-year-old surveys from the early Qing period. In January 1930, the
government issued an official ‘Inspection Regulations for Land and Water Maps’
(Shuilu ditu shencha tiaoli), instructing the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the
Foreign Ministry, the Marine Ministry, the Ministry of Education, and the Committee
of Mongolia and Tibet to work together to regularise the country’s cartography.
Nothing actually happened, however, until 7 June 1933, when the official ‘Land and Water Maps Review Committee’
held its first meeting.
The re-invention of Taiwan and the South China Sea
question
The man who re-invented the South China Sea
and caused China to claim non-existent islands hundreds of kilometers from
its shores was a Manchu who probably never went to sea in his life. Bai Meichu was
born into relatively humble origins in 1876 in Hebei province, 200 kilometers
due east of the Forbidden City.
He became a schoolteacher and then a teacher of
teachers at the Women’s Normal School in Tianjin. There he taught, among
others, Deng Yingchao, a future senior cadre in the Communist Party and
the wife of Zhou Enlai. At the same time, he was becoming a pioneer in the new
subject of geography. This was not yet geography as the later generation of the
above-mentioned Zhu Kezhen, and Zhang Qiyun would come to define
it but a hybrid of old ideas and new nationalism.
In 1909 Bai became one of the ‘China Earth-Study
Society’ (Zhongguo di li xue hui 中國地理學會#). According to the historian Tze-ki Hon,
none of its members had any professional training in the subject. Instead, they
recruited members from the old literati. Like Bai, they were people who had
once expected to join the scholar-bureaucracy but were now struggling to
adapt.24
Members of the China Earth-Study Society were also
profoundly influenced by Social-Darwinism. In the first issue of their
‘Earth-Study Journal’ (Dixue Zazhi) they collectively declared: ‘The cause
[of the rise and fall of power] is due to the level of geographical knowledge
each group. Thus, the level of geographical knowledge directly impacts a
country, and it can cause havoc to a race. It is indeed [a manifestation of]
the natural law of selection based on competition.’ In other words, the size of
any group’s territory ebbed and flowed depending on its relative civilization.
In society's view, China had advanced early but then retreated in the face of
Western advances. The only way to regain strength was to master geography. In
the words of Bai himself in 1913, ‘Loving the nation is the top priority in
learning geography while building the nation is what learning Geography is
for.’25
Bai was the first Chinese to draw a map of the South China Sea in
his New Atlas of China’s Construction in 1936 and have
been taught in Chinese schools since the 1940s while using a
British example.
Thus James Shoal (off Borneo), Vanguard Bank (off
Vietnam), and Seahorse Shoal (off the Philippines) are drawn as islands, yet in
reality, they are underwater features. Almost none of the islands that Bai drew
in the central and southern parts of the South China Sea actually:
The ‘Land and Water Maps Review
Committee’ did not have the capacity to undertake its own surveys,
however. Instead, it undertook a table-top exercise: analyzing maps produced by
others and forming a consensus about names.
When it came to the South China Sea, it is clear from
the committee’s conclusions that its leading references were British, which had
far-reaching consequences. On 21 December 1934, the Review Committee held its
twenty-fifth meeting and agreed on Chinese names for 132 South China Sea
features. All of them were translations or transliterations of the names marked
on British maps. For example, in the Paracels, Antelope Reef
became Lingyang jiao, and Money Island became Jinyin dao (金銀島 Jīn yín Dǎo), both direct
translations.
We know exactly where the committee’s list of island
names came from. It contains several mistakes, which are only found in one
other document: the ‘China Sea Directory’ published by the UK Hydrographic
Office in 1906. This British list is the origin of all the names now used by
China. Some of the names on the list had Chinese origins, such
as Subi Reef in the Spratlys, while others had Malay origins
(such as Passu Keah in the Paracels). Still, British navigators
coined more than 90 percent translating these names caused some difficulties
and a legacy that disturbs the region to this day.
Is China prepared to go to war over a translation
mistake?
The committee members were confused by the English
words ‘bank’ and ‘shoal.’ Both words mean an area of the shallow sea: the
former describes a raised area of the sea bed, the latter is a nautical
expression derived from Old English meaning ‘shallow.’
However, the committee chose to translate both into
Chinese as tan, which has the ambiguous translation of ‘sandbank,’ a feature
that might be above or below water. Sea Horse Shoal, off the Philippines, was
dubbed Haima Tan; James Shoal, just 100 kilometers off the coast of
Borneo, was given the name Zengmu tan, and Vanguard Bank, off the
southeastern coast of Vietnam, was given the
name Qianwei tan. Zengmu is simply the transliteration of
‘James,’ Haima is the Chinese for seahorse. Qianwei is a
translation of ‘vanguard’ and tan, as mentioned above, is the erroneous translation
of ‘bank’ and ‘shoal.’ As a result of this bureaucratic mistake, these
underwater features, along with several others, were turned into islands in the
Chinese imagination. Ultimately this screw-up is the reason why the Sapura Esperanza was harassed while drilling
for gas near the James Shoal eighty-five years later. China is prepared to go
to war over a translation mistake.
The committee conferred the Chinese
name Tuansha on the Spratlys. The name vaguely translates as
‘area of sand.’ In 1935 however, neither the committee nor the Chinese
government was prepared to claim the Spratlys.
A turning point for Bai, like so many other intellectuals
of the time, was the Versailles peace conference's outcome in 1919. The
decision to hand over the former German enclave
in Shandong to Japan enraged students and the Earth-Study Society
members. Their journal carried several articles denouncing the decision and
urging the government to prevent the expansion of Japanese influence on the
peninsula.
At around this time, Bai became a mentor to a young
Li Dazhao, who had also studied at Jingsheng College and would
become one of the founders of the Communist Party in 1921. It is possible that
some of Bai’s energetic views on geography and national territory were passed
directly into the communist movement.26
In 1929 Bai lost his teaching post at Beijing Normal
University and moved to the women’s equivalent, instead. In 1935 he left
university teaching altogether.
By chance, he came across the ‘Programme for
National Reconstruction’ (Jianguo fanglue) that
Sun Yat-sen had published in 1920, during his time in the political
wilderness. This book inspired him to devote his remaining years to Sun’s
mission from Bai's own account: from Bai's own account using geography to
enable national reconstruction.
In 1936 Bai gave the world his lasting legacy: a line
drawn through the South China Sea. It was included in a new book of maps, the
New Atlas of China’s Construction (Zhonghua jianshe xin tu),
that Bai published for schools. He included some of the new information about
place names and frontiers agreed upon by the government’s Maps Review
Committee, published the year before. As was typical of maps of this period,
the atlas was, in many places, a work of fiction. A bright red borderline
stretched around the country, neatly dividing China from its neighbors. The
line was Mongolia, Tibet, and Manchuria, plus several other areas that weren’t
actually under the republican government's control. However, the fictitiousness
reached spectacular levels when it came to the South China Sea.
It is clear that Bai was quite unfamiliar with the
South China Sea geography and undertook no survey work of his own. Instead, he
copied other maps and added dozens of errors of his own making, errors that
continue to cause problems to this day. Like the Maps Review Committee, he was
completely confused by the portrayal of shallow water areas on British and
foreign maps. Taking his cue from the names on the committee’s 1934 list, he
drew solid lines around these features and colored them in, visually rendering
them on his map as islands when in reality, they were underwater. He conjured
an entire island group into existence across the sea center and labeled it
the Nansha Qundao, the ‘South Sands Archipelago.’ Further south,
parallel with the Philippines coast, he dabbed a few dots on the map and
labeled them the Tuansha Qundao, the ‘Area of Sand Archipelago.’
However, at its furthest extent, he drew three islands, outlined in black and
colored in pink: Haima Tan (Sea Horse Shoal), Zengmu Tan
(James Shoal), and Qianwei Tan (Vanguard Bank).
Thus, the underwater ‘shoals’ and ‘banks’ became
above-water ‘sandbanks’ in Bai’s imagination and on the map's physical
rendering, he then added innovation of his own: the same national border that
he had drawn around Mongolia, Tibet, and the rest of ‘Chinese’ territory snaked
around the South China Sea as far east as Sea Horse Shoal, south as James Shoal
and as far southwest as Vanguard Bank. Bai’s meaning was clear: the bright red
line marked his ‘scientific’ understanding of China’s rightful claims. This was
the very first time that such a line had been drawn on a Chinese map. Bai’s
view of China’s claims in the South China Sea was not based upon the Review
Committee’s view of the situation, nor that of the Foreign Ministry. The result
of the confusion generated by Admiral Li Zhun’s interventions in the
Spratly crisis of 1933, combined with the nationalist imagination of a
redundant geographer without formal academic training. This was
Bai Meichu’s contribution to Sun Yat-sen’s mission of
national reconstruction.
According to the Taiwanese academic Hurng-Yu
Chen, ‘Director-General of the Ministry of the Interior Fu Chiao-chin . . .
stated that the publications on the sovereignty of the islands in
the South China Sea by Chinese institutions and schools before the Anti-Japanese
War should serve as a guidance regarding the territorial restoration issue.’ In
other words, the government would be guided by putative claims made in
newspapers in the 1930s. The meeting agreed that the entire Spratly archipelago
should be claimed. Still, given that only Itu Aba (Taiping Dao) had
been physically occupied, the claim should wait until other islands had
actually been visited. This never happened, but the claim was asserted
nonetheless.
A key part of asserting the claim was to make the
names of the features in the sea sound more Chinese. In October
1947, the RoC Ministry of the Interior issued a new list of island
names. New, grand-sounding titles replaced most of the 1935 translations and
transliterations. For example, the Chinese name for Spratly Island was changed
from Si-ba-la-tuo to Nanwei (Noble South), and Scarborough Shoal
was changed from Si-ka-ba-luo (the transliteration)
to Minzhu jiao (Democracy Reef). Vanguard Bank’s Chinese name
was changed from Qianwei tan to Wan’an tan (Ten Thousand
Peace Bank). The name for Luconia Shoals was shortened from
Lu-kang-ni-ya to just Kang, which means ‘health.’ This process was
repeated across the archipelagos, largely concealing the foreign origins of
most of the names. A few did survive, however. In the Paracels, ‘Money
Island’ kept its Chinese name of Jinyin Dao and Antelope Reef
remained Lingyang Jiao. To this day, the two names celebrate a
manager and a ship of the East India Company, respectively.
At this point, the ministry seems to have recognized
its earlier problem with the translations of ‘shoal’ and ‘bank.’.’ In contrast,
in the past, it had used the Chinese word tan to stand in for both (with
unintended geopolitical consequences), in 1947 it coined a new
word, ansha (Ànshā), literally ‘hidden sand’, as a replacement.
This neologism was appended to several submerged features, including James
Shoal, which was renamed Zengmu Ansha.
In December 1947, the ‘Bureau of Measurements’ of the
Ministry of Defence printed an official ‘Location Map of the South
China Sea Islands’, almost identical to the ‘Sketch Map’ that
Zheng Ziyue had drawn a year and a half before. It included the
‘U-shaped line’ made up of eleven dashes encircling the area down to the James
Shoal. In February 1948, that map was published as part of the Atlas of
Administrative Areas of the Republic of China. The U-shaped line, with an
implicit claim to every feature within it, became the official position.
Therefore, it was not until 1948 that the Chinese
state formally extended its territorial claim in the South China Sea to the
Spratly Islands, as far south as James Shoal. Clearly, something had changed in
the years between July 1933, when the Republic of China government was unaware
that the Spratly Islands existed, and April 1947, when it could ‘reaffirm’ that
its territory's southernmost point was James Shoal. What seems to have happened
is that, in the chaos of the 1930s and the Second World War, a new memory came
to be formed in the minds of officials about what had actually happened in the
1930s. It seems that officials and geographers managed to confuse the real
protest issued by the RoC government against French activities in
the Paracels in 1932 with a non-existent protest against French
activities in the Spratlys in 1933. Further confusion was caused by
the intervention of Admiral Li Zhun and his assertion that the
islands annexed by France in 1933 were indisputably Chinese.
The imagined claim conjured up by the confusion
between different island groups in that crisis became the real territorial
claim.
Pratas's islands now a conservation zone, from
where visitors can send postcards back home from a mailbox guarded by a
cheerful-looking plastic shark. Not far away is a new science exhibition
explaining the natural history of the coral reef and its rich marine life.
Overlooking the parade ground (which doubles as a
rainwater trap) stands a golden statue of Chiang Kai-shek in his sun hat, and
behind him is a little museum in what looks like a scaled-up child’s
sandcastle.
This museum holds, in effect, the key to resolving the
South China Sea disputes. Its assertion of Chinese claims to the islets
actually demonstrates the difference between nationalist cartography and real
administration. Bai Meichu may have drawn a red line around various
non-existent islands in 1936 and claimed them as Chinese, but no Chinese official
had ever visited those places. The maps and documents on the museum walls tell
the RoC expedition's story to Itu Aba
in December 1946 and a confrontation with some Philippine
adventurers in 1956. Still, in the absence of any other evidence, the museum
demonstrates that China never occupied or controlled all islands. In
the Paracels, it occupied one, or just a few, until 1974, when the
People’s Republic of China (PRC) forces invaded and expelled the Vietnamese
garrison. In the Spratlys, the RoC occupied just one or two. The
PRC took control of six reefs in 1988 and another in 1994.
In the meantime, the other countries around the South
China Sea, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia, took control of other
features. The real history of physical presence in the archipelagos shows how
partial any state’s claim actually is.
The current mess of rival occupations is, with some
exceptions, the only one that has ever existed. Understanding this opens a
route to resolving the South China Sea disputes. By examining the historical
evidence of occupations, the rival claimants should understand that there are
no grounds for them to claim sovereignty over everything. They should recognize
that other states have solid claims to certain features and agree to compromise.
Conclusion: Taking the long view
Over the last two decades, China has moved from the
periphery to the very center of the world’s international relations. Given that
China’s economy is now more than five times as large as it was at the turn of the millennium,
that transition is hardly surprising. But many of China’s new international
relationships, initially hopeful, have now turned hostile. China still has some
down-at-the-heels allies, such as Pakistan and North Korea, but it is
increasingly isolated from the developed countries that alone can facilitate
its continued economic growth.
For China, that means trouble. Its promises are no
longer taken seriously, and its propaganda falls on deaf ears. Many of its Belt
and Road Initiative projects have ground to a halt. Virtually no one supports its nine-dash line in
the South China Sea, and Western countries have been lining up to offer immigration pathways to
professionals fleeing Hong Kong after Beijing’s takeover last year. Many
countries have banned China’s Huawei and ZTE from their telecommunications
networks. And India, Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan are all
modernizing their armed forces in response to potential Chinese threats.
Under these circumstances, the best thing that U.S.
President Joe Biden can do to stem the rising tide of Chinese expansionism is …
nothing. China’s red tide is already rolling out all on its own. Biden can
afford to pursue a policy of “masterly inactivity,” relying on China’s own aggressive
foreign policy to further isolate the country from the rest of the world.
Instead of increasing the pressure on China, now is the time for him to lighten
up a bit.
The worst thing Biden could do is put so much pressure
on China that its leaders lash out because they feel they have nothing to lose.
That was arguably what happened in 1941 when the United States
successfully countered Japanese
expansionism with military aid to China, a trade embargo, and the freezing of
Japanese assets in the U.S. banking system. Japan wasn’t on the rise in 1941;
it was on the wane. Bogged down in China, checked by the Soviet Union in
a little-remembered conflict in Mongolia, and
increasingly squeezed by U.S. economic sanctions, Japan’s leaders recklessly
sought a kantai kessen (“decisive battle”) with a naval strike
at Pearl Harbor. They saw no other way to forestall a long, smothering defeat.
Of course, what Japan’s leaders got instead was a
decisive, blood-soaked defeat. But today, no one except the hardest of
hard-liners wants to see China defeated. That kind of language makes no
practical sense. Short of a world war, there is no way for anyone outside China
to dislodge Chinese Communist Party leadership from its headquarters in central
Beijing. A more sensible goal for the United States and its allies would be to
see China return to the slow liberalization trajectory it was arguably following before President Xi Jinping took
power as the party’s leader at the end of 2012. And that’s a goal that China
must be convinced to choose for itself.
As long as China’s leaders remain convinced that all
of their problems stem from Washington’s ill will, reform is unlikely. Today,
they seem to completely buy into their own narrative that the United States is
a petulant former superpower too proud to gracefully stand aside while China
takes its rightful place at the top of the world. But as China finds itself at
odds with more and more countries, often with no connection to U.S. pressure,
its leaders may eventually get the message. Whatever the future of their
relationship with the United States, the other countries of the world have
their own reservations about Chinese hegemony.
Australia’s fight with China over the former’s efforts
to restrict foreign influence, Japan’s standoff with China over the Senkaku Islands,
India’s actual battle with China in Ladakh, none of these were
prompted by U.S. arrogance. Nor was the South China Sea dispute, which pits China against no fewer than five of its
Southeast Asian neighbors. Beyond its immediate region, China is now also
arguing with European countries over human rights, with Latin American countries over illegal fishing, and with African countries
over-development debts. At some point, it must dawn on China’s leadership
that these problems have little or nothing to do with the United States, and
everything to do with their own provocative behavior.
The most effective way the Biden administration can
help drive home that message is to mind its own business. Each of these
countries has its own reasons to be unhappy with China. They don’t need U.S.
encouragement, and it would only muddy the waters to offer support. For all
Biden’s talk of working with allies and U.S. Secretary of State Antony
Blinken’s pledge to hold China “accountable for its abuses of
the international system,” they should resist the temptation to try to solve
other countries’ China problems. The truest love the United States can offer
the world on China right now is the tough love of encouraging other countries
to stand up for themselves.
Biden shouldn’t try
to out former President Donald Trump by showing he is even tougher on
China. If Biden really wants to differentiate his China policy, he should sit back
and let history take its course. While keeping sensible restrictions on Chinese access to U.S. advanced
technologies, he should consider pulling back in areas where the Trump
administration arguably overreached. A good first step might be to reverse
the steel and aluminum tariffs aimed at China that have
hurt friendly countries such as Japan and Taiwan. He could also lift
Trump’s visa limitations on members of the Chinese Communist
Party, which are almost entirely symbolic and nearly impossible to enforce.
Such measures would establish a more conciliatory tone in U.S.-Chinese
relations without relieving any of the pressure Beijing faces for reform.
As for the above-mentioned Taiwan
Relations Act,
which made clear that the United States maintained special commitments to
Taiwan.
When Sen. Rick Scott asked Asia Pacific commander
Philip Davidson whether it was time for the U.S. to "state
clearly that we are not going to allow communist China to invade and subdue
Taiwan," Davidson did not shoot it down.
"I wake up every day, you know, trying to assess
the dynamic nature of the geostrategic environment, and you know, frankly, we
ought to be thinking about these things every day," Davidson said.
"I would submit that we have got more than 40
years of the strategic ambiguity, as you know, has helped keep Taiwan and its
current status, but you know these things should be reconsidered
routinely," he said, adding, "I would look forward to the
conversation."
Whereby as another potential warning to
China, Davidson said that while India may remain committed to its nonaligned
approach for the immediate future, he thinks the country will deepen its
engagement with the Quad. "I think that's a key strategic opportunity for
us, Australia, and Japan," he said.
In a CNN report also quoted as saying: "I see
them developing systems, capabilities and a posture that
would indicate that they're interested in aggression."
Meanwhile, the US has confirmed a high-level meeting
with Chinese officials in Alaska next
week.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will meet Yang
Jiechi, China’s most senior foreign policy official, and Foreign Minister Wang
Yi Blinken and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan plans to
discuss a range of issues with their Chinese counterparts.
The meeting, slated for Thursday will take place after
US President Joe Biden takes part in a summit with the leaders of Japan, India,
and Australia, which together with the US form an alliance known as the Quad.
Blinken and Sullivan will use the meeting with Yang and Wang to address a range
of issues, including those where the two sides have “deep disagreements.”
The trip comes as the Biden administration has tried
to highlight Washington’s alliances as an essential part of its strategy to
counter a rising China, a contrast to the Trump administration’s more
transactional approach to those relationships.
Even still, at the House Armed Services hearing on
Wednesday, a top Pentagon official overseeing China policy insisted to
lawmakers that the US was not asking any countries in the region to “choose”
between Washington and Beijing.
“We welcome and encourage all nations across the
Indo-Pacific to maintain peaceful, productive relations with all of their
neighbors, China included,” said David Helvey, the acting assistant secretary
of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs.
Instead, Helvey said, the fundamental choice for
nations now is between two different international orders: the existing one
that is free and open, and
another, pushed by Beijing, that is authoritarian and closed. Whereby as we
have explained above it is doubtful the Chinese delegation will agree with the
latter charcterization.
1. Zhang Han, ‘China Strengthens Map Printing Rules,
Forbidding Publications Printed For Overseas Clients From Being Circulated in
the Country’, Global Times, 17 February 2019.
2. Laurie Chen, ‘Chinese City Shreds 29,000 Maps
Showing Taiwan as a Country’, South China Morning Post, 25 March
2019, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3003121/about-29000-problematic-world-maps-showing-taiwan-country
3. After he entered the Forbidden City, Ricci wrote:
“The great courtyards in the Forbidden City palace … could have held 30,000
people, and the emperor’s elephants, the 3,000 royal guards, and the huge walls
all increased the sense of majesty and power,” according to The Memory Palace
of Matteo Ricci by US historian Jonathan Spence. See also Zhu Yon, Yuanlu Qu
Zhongguo (Long Way to China), which was published in Chinese in 2019.
4. James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the
Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1897 (Washington: Govt. print.
off., 1896), v. 4, p. 211-214. House Journal 27-3, p.122-124; House Document
27-3, no. 35, Fiche 420
5. Charles Maurice Wiltse and Harold D. Moser, eds.,
The Papers of Daniel Webster: Diplomatic Papers V. 1 (Hanover, N.H.: Published
for Dartmouth College by the University Press of New England, 1974), 900.; Richardson,
ed., Messages and Papers, v. 4, p. 211-214.
6. See Mark Bassin, “Expansion and Colonialism on the
Eastern Frontier: Views of Siberia and the Far East in Pre-Petrine Russia,”
Journal of Historical Geography 14, no. 1 (January 1988): 3–21, doi:10.1016/S0305-7488(88)80124-5;
and for the nineteenth century, Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions :
Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East,
1840-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
7. Narrative of the Expedition of An American Squadron
to the China Seas and Japan Under the Command of Commodore M. C. Perry, United
States Navy. Compiled at His Request and under His Supervision, by Francis L.
Hawks. Abridged and Edited by Sidney Wallach, 1952, 62.
8. See George Alexander Lensen, The Russian Push
Toward Japan: Russo-Japanese Relations, 1697-1875, 1971.
9. Matthew Calbraith Perry and Roger Pineau, The Japan
Expedition. 1852-1854; the Personal Journal of Commodore Matthew C. Perry
(Washington, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1968), 138.
10. Narrative of the Expedition of An American
Squadron to the China Seas and Japan Under the Command of Commodore M. C.
Perry, United States Navy. Compiled at His Request and under His Supervision,
by Francis L. Hawks. Abridged and Edited by Sidney Wallach, 1952, 303.
11. See George Alexander Lensen, The Russian Push
Toward Japan: Russo-Japanese Relations, 1697-1875,1971, 337.
12. Alan M. Wachman, Why Taiwan? Geostrategic
Rationales for China’s Territorial Integrity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2007, p. 69. 8. Ibid., pp. 50–60. 9. S.C.M. Paine,
Imperial Rivals: China, Russia, and Their Disputed Frontier, Armonk, NY: M.E.
Sharpe, 1996, p. 352.
13. S.C.M. Paine, Imperial Rivals: China, Russia,
and Their Disputed Frontier, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996, p. 352.
14. Marie-Claire Bergère (trans. Janet Lloyd),
Sun Yat-sen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, pp. 92–6.
15. Shi-Chi Mike Lan, ‘The Ambivalence of National
Imagination: Defining “The Taiwanese” in China, 1931–1941’, China Journal, 64
(2010), p. 179.
16. Hsiang-po Lee, ‘Rural-Mass Education Movement In
China, 1923–1937, PhD thesis, University of Ohio, 1970, pp. 60–61.
17. Robert Culp, Articulating Citizenship: Civic
Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940, Cambridge,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, pp. 85–7.
18. Chen Zhihong.“'Climate's Moral Economy':
Geography, Race, and the Han in Early Republican China.” In Critical Han
Studies: The History, Representation, and Identity of China's Majority, edited
by Thomas S. Mullaney, James Leibold, Stéphane Gros, and Eric Van den Bussche,
pp. 80–81.
19. Peter Zarrow, Educating China: Knowledge, Society
and Textbooks in a Modernizing World, 1902–1937,2015, p. 242.
20. William A. Callahan, ‘The Cartography of National
Humiliation and the Emergence of China’s Geobody’, Public Culture, 21/1 (2009).
21. Alan M. Wachman, Why Taiwan?: Geostrategic
Rationales for China's Territorial Integrity (Studies in Asian Security), 2007,
p. 86.
22. Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise:
Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2001, pp. 117–20.
23. Diana Lary, ‘A Zone of Nebulous Menace: The
Guangxi/Indochina Border in the Republican Period’, in Diana Lary (ed.), The
Chinese State at the Borders, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press,
2007.
24. Wu Feng-ming, ‘On the new Geographic Perspectives
and Sentiment of High Moral Character of Geographer Bai Meichu in Modern
China’, Geographical Research (China), 30/11, 2011, pp. 2109–14.
25. Ibid., p. 2113.
26. Tsung-Han Tai and Chi-Ting Tsai, ‘The Legal Status
of the U-shaped Line Revisited from the Perspective of Inter-temporal Law’, in
Szu-shen Ho and Kuan-Hsiung Wang (eds), A Bridge Over Troubled Waters:
Prospects for Peace in the South and East China Seas, Taipei: Prospect
Foundation, 2014, pp. 177–208.
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