As such, the SCS just became a convenient stage on which the U.S. geopolitical contest with China unfolded as a consequence.
Punctuating the gravity of the great power contest, rumors of a war, possibly imminent, between China and the United States took off in the days immediately after the election of Donald Trump as the U.S. President in late 2016. Scholarly speculations zeroed in on a war snare known as the Thucydides Trap, named after the ancient Greek historian who studied and pontificated on the Peloponnesian war as resulting from Athens’s rise and the fear that it instilled in Sparta. We devoted, not one but two chapters (Chapters 6 and 7) to an in-depth examination of how true the rumored war between the United States and China would come about in reality. Contrary to the habitual disregard of history in most media reports, these two chapters go through the long historical background of Sino–U.S. relations, beginning from the 19th century and continuing on through the ups and downs in between until their normalization after 1979, only to be marred by the “China threat” scare stemming from China’s relentless rise after the turn of the new century. Chapter 6 tries to see if the past sheds any light on the current clash of visions, based on mutual (mis-) perceptions and the chain of escalatory reactions between the two sides that seem to characterize the spirals in the on-going U.S.–China contest.
In Chapter 7, we turn to the differing strategies adopted by the two sides. The U.S. strategy is conceived in militarization, in fact naval militarization in the Asia Pacific, in particular, the SCS, as codified in Public Law 113–291. By contrast, the Chinese, under Xi Jinping, have deliberately opted for a geo-economics-oriented strategy, for the sake of pursuing a “nonsymmetric competition” with the United States. The ultimate purpose is to veer off from a military confrontation and, moreover, to avoid getting trapped into a race for the control of regional and global public order. The end result from this choice of a divergent strategy as such is that a violent end to the bilateral contest with the United States is, happily, not in the cards.
The final chapter (Chapter 8), which is to ascertain a possible way out of the geopolitical and legal tangles, has two parts, the first of which deals with the veracity of the “China threat” scare. We trace the unfolding waves of discernible shifts in the intellectual climate surrounding the China debate, until finally the earlier scare lost its punch, both because of a growing consensus on China’s relative power deficit and its lack of an identifiable “intention” to try to dominate and replace the United States as the ultimate hegemonic power. The second part of the final chapter addresses the question of how China might try to rid itself of the scofflaw stigma, the removal of which is absolutely necessary if China is ever to appear as a credible power with the moral “authority” (in the sense as David Lake used it)2 to work hand in hand with the United States, conceivably in a condominium, for the maintenance of peace and stability in regional and global public order. Peace can come only then, but not before it. And, China can cleanse its name by removing its undeserved scofflaw stigma only if it takes the adjudicative steps, as we suggest in the final chapter, but not without.
The book begins with concerns about regional tensions surrounding the SCS that began with the overlapping claims by competing Asian neighbors, but culminated in a U.S.–China contest, sustained by America’s geopolitical instincts to the rise of an unstoppable China, and to the “China threat” scare that came with it. The final part of the book returns to our enduring interests in finding a way out of the legal and geopolitical tangles associated with the SCS, after discussing the unsustainable scare about the China threat and the lack of an empirically identifiable Chinese intent to dominate and replace America as the leader over regional and global public order.
1Firestein, David. “The U.S.–China Perception Gap in the South China Sea,” The Diplomat, August 9, 2016.
2Lake, David. 2003. “The New Sovereignty in International Relations,” International Studies Review, vol. 4, no. 5: 303–323.
Chapter
1
The Provenance and Ramifications of the SCS Conflicts: Law, Resources, and Geopolitics
The South China Sea (SCS) may, by common sense, be assumed to be part of the Pacific Ocean. But, in this book, we treat it as a separate body of waters in its own right, due to its distinctive status arising from a combination of four peculiar factors: (a) its vital importance as a hubbub of trade, since one-third of the world’s shipping (valued at $5.3 trillion in 2015) sails through its waters; (b) its abundant resources, including oil and natural gas; (c) the wide attention it commands because of the clashes arising from the neighboring nations’ overlapping sovereign claims; and (d) post-2010 U.S. geopolitical interests in the region as a strategic site of rivalry with the rerising China, although largely dressed as a freedom of navigation dispute.
For amplification of (a) above, let me add that the oil transported through the Malacca Strait through the Indian Ocean en route to East Asia via the SCS is triple the amount that passes through the Suez Canal, and 14 times that through the Panama Canal.1
This body of waters, stretching over 1.4 million square miles, has been the locale for activities of, or interactions between, the surrounding societies going back to prehistorical times, through the Western colonial dominance in the region (dating from the 16 th to the mid-20th century), down to the post–Cold War era. Unlike in the East China Sea disputes, through much of this long stretch of time the SCS, surprisingly, had its share of relative peaceful tranquility. Exceptions were found in the past strife associated with the intrusion of Western colonialism and, more notably, the truculent inroads by the Japanese Imperial Army (1930s to 1945).2 Even the assertion by the parties of their competing claims, in the past, was relatively muted, by comparison. But, in more recent years, this maritime scene has become a tinderbox of explosive international tensions of rising magnitude, largely for two reasons, namely: (a) the salience of the newly identified abundance in oil deposits among other resources in SCS and (b) the spillover of the United States’ Asia Pivot policy. The following discussion will tackle each of these points separately, in greater depth.
Highlight on SCS Resources: Competing Claims
A 1968 U.N. report revealed the discovery of rich oil and natural gas deposits in the SCS, according to one source.3 This was echoed by a tweet on a Chinese blog, calling the SCS the “second Persian Sea” in reference to its vast oil deposits.4 The Council on Foreign Relations in New York gave a more modest, but still staggering, estimate: some 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas deposits under the subsoil of the SCS.5
It may not be coincidental that the conflicts with China by some Southeast Asian contending neighbors, such as Vietnam and the Philippines, began to hike in the years immediately following 1968. For instance, the struggle over the Paracels between Vietnam and China began in 1970; and a war broke out in 1974, in which Vietnam was defeated, and China took back the complete control of the island group. On its part, the Philippines in 1971 announced its claim to islands in the Spratlys adjacent to its territory, which it renamed Kalayaan and incorporated into Palawan Province the following year.6 On March 11, 1976, the first Philippine oil company “discovered” an oilfield off Palawan island. Also in the 1970s, the Philippines, Malaysia, and other countries began referring to the Spratly islands as included in their own territory. President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, for example, issued Presidential decree No. 1596, on June 11, 1978, declaring the Spratlys
