China cannot exact justice and compensation from the Western colonial powers and Japan by seizing the island territories and maritime zones of ASEAN coastal states and bullying them
China’s most mind-boggling claim to the South China Sea is the nine-dash line, which encloses about 85.7% of the waters of the South China Sea. China’s narrative is that it owned all the islands, oil, gas, fish and other resources within the nine-dash line 2,000 years ago. Never mind that it was only in the mid-20th century that people learned oil and gas could also be found, and exploited, in the seabed of the seas.
It took the July 12, 2016 arbitral award to definitively debunk as totally baseless China’s nine-dash-line narrative. Before that scholars in the West thought that since China had a very old civilization, China might actually have owned the South China Sea since thousands of years ago.
Today, China’s nine-dash line narrative is laughed at as fake history. China therefore has pivoted to a new narrative – the Four Sha or the four island archipelagos of the South China Sea. Scholars laugh even harder at this new narrative since none of the cluster of islands in the South China Sea qualifies as an archipelago under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea or UNCLOS.
For example, China’s Zhongsha Qundao on the northeastern part of the South China Sea is largely Macclesfield Bank, which is not even an island since it is fully submerged, its highest area being 15 meters below sea level.
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