China's not-so-great wall

Everything else, including “peacefulness”, comes second.

Consider the latest Chinese assertion of its absurd, sweeping, ahistorical claim to almost all of the South China Sea. Photographs taken from a Philippine Navy aircraft last Saturday showed that concrete blocks had been laid on Scarbourough Shoal, the disputed area the Philippines call Panatag and which locals refer to as Bajo de Masinloc. (China calls it Huangyan.)

“We have…sighted concrete blocks inside the shoal which are a prelude to construction,” Defence Secretary Voltaire Gazmin said at a budget hearing in Congress on Tuesday. 

His reading of the new situation at Scarbourough Shoal was shared by an expert in regional security studies. “If China starts building at Scarbourough, then it is an occupation and, I believe, the most egregious violation yet of the 2002 Declaration of Conduct [DOC],” Singapore-based scholar Ian Storey said. “It is a very significant development indeed, and one that will certainly add to tensions.”

The DOC is an agreement on maritime conduct reached between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and China in 2002. It is non-binding but forms a key part of the commitments that China has offered to its neighbours and is meant to prepare the way for a comprehensive Code of Conduct. Construction at the disputed reef means the nature of China’s commitments is now at issue.

The placing of some 30 concrete blocks inside Scarborough Shoal should now disabuse anyone of these geopolitical illusions. The leaders in Beijing are heavily invested in China’s grandiose claim to almost all of the South China Sea; they will be loath to dilute any part of that claim.

It will be interesting to hear what the Chinese Foreign Ministry will say about this latest episode in adventurism. Beijing has been scathing about the Philippine attempt to seek legal remedy from a United Nations tribunal, calling Manila’s suit provocative. What does that make of China’s creeping occupation of territory that lies within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone – and is at least 1,000 kilometres from China?

The Chinese claim to almost all of the South China Sea is based on the so-called “9-dotted line”. Chinese scholars have laboured to show that this 20th-century document has deep historical roots, but to risible effect. That is one reason why, despite all the rhetoric about a “peaceful rise” in the world, China will resort to furtive construction followed by outright occupation. Their claim, a not-so-great wall of fabrication and imagination, will not withstand close scrutiny