From Foreign Policy, June 10:
Washington missed the boat to shape the global maritime order. Beijing is stepping in.
By Peter A. Dutton, a professor of international law in the Stockton Center for International Law at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct professor of law at New York University.
For decades, scholars and policymakers have puzzled over the question: What is China trying to accomplish with its extensive maritime claims throughout the South and East China seas?
A few answers are floated regularly: Perhaps Beijing wants to control natural resources. The South China Sea is a rich source of fisheries and other living resources, and it contains commercially viable hydrocarbon deposits. Or, perhaps, Chinese leaders seek security. After all, Beijing has constructed military bases on Woody Island in the Paracels and on all seven of the Spratly Islands that it occupies. Chinese leaders may also want to bolster Beijing’s status in the larger regional order by setting the maritime agenda and making the rules for dispute resolution.
But neither resource interests, security, nor status alone provide satisfactory explanations for Beijing’s behavior. Instead, as China analyst Isaac B. Kardon argues in his groundbreaking book, China’s Law of the Sea: The New Rules of Maritime Order, Beijing sees itself as fundamentally above the law and beyond accountability to others, especially smaller states. And while full-scale global change to the oceans regime is beyond China’s grasp, Kardon writes, Beijing’s actions may have consequences beyond its nearby waters.
The law of the sea—codified for decades in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea—is pretty clear on most things. Countries have territorial seas stretching 12 nautical miles off their coasts. Islands do, too. Rocks and submerged features do not. Countries also have resource zones that stretch at least 200 nautical miles, theirs alone to fish, mine, and harvest deep-sea riches. Every state can fly, sail, and operate in waters beyond the territorial seas and pass freely through straits. The problem is that China, though a party to the U.N. convention, flouts each of these elements.
China, as Kardon systematically demonstrates, challenges the prevailing law of the sea by undermining the geography-based rules for defining coastal zones, controlling ocean resources that belong to other states, hampering freedom of navigation, and ignoring its commitment to abide by dispute resolution provisions.
In East Asia, Kardon argues, “China is not so much changing the rules as it is reducing their importance.” In other words, existing international law is fine elsewhere, but in this region, what China says goes. For instance, China exercises regional “veto jurisdiction” in maritime resources zones by blocking Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines from developing their oil and gas fields unless they accept Beijing’s terms....
....MUCH MORE
Okay, that's enough China and the South China Sea. On to cat videos.
