China's Policy Towards Territorial Disputes

Chi-kin Lo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134984657
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Since 1949 and the founding of the People's Republic, China has been involved in more than one territorial dispute with its neighbours. Currently the most unstable and dangerous dispute is the one over the Paracel and Spratly islands in the South China Sea. With their potentially rich and accessible petroleum resources, these islands have become the new arena of conflict for the 1970s and 1980s, China having already fought a war with South Vietnam over the Paracel Islands. This book, based on a wealth of primary materials in the Chinese language, is the first to make a thorough and overall investigation of China's policy towards these islands. It deals with the battle for the Paracels, the dispute with Vietnam, the disputes with the Philippines and Malaysia, and the relationship between the territorial disputes and China's maritime claims in the South China Sea.

Chapter One

Introduction

With the founding of the People’s Republic (PRC) in 1949, one of the most important historical legacies inherited by the new government was the relatively ill-defined boundaries of China. It has been noted that “(t)he traditional frontiers” of the Chinese empire “were often not lines but zones of intermixture between Chinese settlements and the customary habitats of nomadic peoples owing a vague allegiance to the Chinese emperor.” (1) Even taking into account the boundary treaties and treaties of cession of territories that foreign powers had imposed during the nineteenth century, China’s boundaries were far from well-defined when the Communist Party assumed power. The status of the boundaries was made even more uncertain by the decision of the new Chinese government to reserve for itself the right to “recognize, abrogate, revise, or renegotiate” those treaties and agreements concluded between the Nationalist Chinese government and foreign governments.(2) In practice, as the territorial disputes during the 1950s and the early 1960s revealed, China adopted a similar approach towards those “unequal treaties” signed between Qing (Ching) China and foreign powers in the nineteenth century, although this position was not explicitly stated until 1963. (3)

Despite a number of boundary agreements that were signed in the early 1960s, disputes over many parts of China’s boundaries have remained unsettled. In fact, since 1949, China has quarrelled with nearly every one of its neighbours over disputed territories. The significance of territorial disputes for China’s relations with its neighbours has been underlined by the major military operations that it has undertaken in disputed territories: over the Sino-Indian border in 1962? over the Sino-Soviet border in 1969; and over the Paracel Islands in 1974.(4) To date, territorial dispute has remained a potent source of conflict in China’s difficult relations with its major neighbours--the Soviet Union, India, and Vietnam.

As a consequence, territorial dispute has been an important area of investigation for students of China’s foreign relations. Considerable academic interest has been attracted to a number of questions concerning China’s policies towards territorial disputes. What are the factors which have played a major role in these policies? Why did China undertake military operations to assert its territorial claims in some instances but not in others? Were these operations simply dependent on China’s capabilities and the local military balance? Why has China displayed different attitudes towards different disputes at the same time and different attitudes towards the same dispute at different times? (For example, during the early 1960s, China treated the territorial dispute with India in a different manner from territorial disputes with other Himalayan countries. And China’s attitude towards the territorial dispute with India itself underwent significant changes from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s.) Have these differences been simply due to variations in local circumstances, or differing behaviour on the part of the contending parties?

The overall objective of this research is to pose the above questions with particular reference to the territorial disputes over the Paracel and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Although there are a large number of existing studies of China’s policies towards territorial disputes, most of them are based on research into the Sino-Soviet and Sino-Indian border disputes. Since the early 1970s, these disputes have entered into a state of stalemate and, as I shall point out below, the disputes over the Paracel and Spratly Islands have become the major active territorial issue for China. A study of China’s handling of these disputes during the 1970s and the early 1980s should therefore improve our general understanding of China’s policies towards territorial disputes and may even shed new light on these policies.

As mentioned above, there are a large number of existing studies of China’s policies towards territorial disputes. There also exists a smaller body of literature on the disputes over the Paracel and Spratly Islands. A review of these studies is therefore appropriate before indicating the organization of this research later in the chapter. Such a review will also help to explain how this research is to be organized.

Irredentist Interpretation

In earlier days, especially in the immediate aftermath of the Sino-Indian border war of 1962, a popular interpretation of China’s policies towards territorial disputes was that they were dictated by insatiable irredentist ambitions. It has been claimed that it is the belief of the Chinese that “territory once won for civilization must not be given back to barbarism; therefore, territory which was once Chinese must forever remain so, and, if lost, must be recovered at the first opportunity.”(5) As a logical extrapolation of the above claim, one of the major aims of China’s foreign policy has been “to regain the full territory and standing of the Chinese Empire at its peak”.(6)

To a certain extent, the theoretical basis of this irredentist interpretation is rooted in a more general interpretation of China’s foreign policy provided by some historians, like Fairbank and FitzGerald. They believe in the existence of a Chinese traditional ‘world order’, or a traditional view of ‘their place in the world’(7), and that this historical legacy continues to exert an important influence on China’s foreign policy today. In FitzGerald’s words, “(t)he Chinese view of the world has not fundamentally changed: it has been adjusted to take account of the modern world, but only so far as to permit China to occupy, still, the central place in the picture.”(8)

As regards empirical evidence in support of the irredentist interpretation, the most notable must be a history book published in China in the early 1950s and a remark made by Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) in the late 1930s. In 1960, an Indian student brought back from China a manual published in 1954 entitled A Brief History of Modern China. Included in the book was a map which showed Outer Mongolia, Hong Kong, and Macao as integral parts of China and also indicated those Chinese territories “taken by the imperialists during the Old Democratic Revolutionary Era (1840–1919)”. Those territories included the southeastern part of Kazakhstan and and the eastern parts of Kirghizia and Tadzhikistan; the Soviet Far East north of the Amur River; the Soviet Maritime Province; the island of Sakhalin; Korea; the Ryukyu Islands; Taiwan; the Sulu Islands in the Philippine archipelago; Malaya; Thailand; Burma ; the Andaman Islands, Assam and the Northeast Frontier Agency; Bhutan; Sikkim; Nepal; and Ladakh.(9) Although China later denied that this map was official, some observers still believe it to be at least a sign of how extensive China’s irredentist goals could be.(10)

By comparison, Mao’s remark made in 1939 is less breathtaking. In an edition of The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party published not long after 1949, which probably explains why Tsarist Russia’s encroachments were not included, Mao said:

In defeating China in war, the imperialist states have taken away many Chinese dependent states and a part of her territories. Japan took away Korea, Taiwan, the Ryukyu Islands, the Pescadores, and Port Arthur; Britain seized Burma, Bhutan, Nepal, and Hong Kong; France occupied Annam, and even an insignificant country like Portugal took Macao.(11)

Like the history book mentioned above, Mao’s remark is believed to have lent weight to the irredentist interpretation of China’s territorial policies.

While the irredentist interpretation seems to provide a simple and powerful interpretation of China’s policies towards territorial disputes, there exist a number of important reservations. First of all, it is questionable whether a Sinocentric ‘world order’ is an accurate description of the Chinese view of their place in the world for the whole length of pre-modern Chinese history. (12) Even if it is, such a view would have collapsed or been modified to a significant extent at the beginning of the twentieth century. To take this view as the basis for a general interpretation of China’s foreign policy today is certainly problematic. As Yahuda has pointed out, although “the legacy of the imperial or feudal past is far from negligible… (t)he dominant historical experiences of the leaders who founded the PRC were, first, those of the nationalist awakening of the Chinese people attendant upon the collapse of the traditional order, and second, the revolutionary struggles which ultimately brought those leaders to supreme power.”(13) Even Schwartz, who himself believes in the existence of a traditional Chinese view of the ‘world order’, has warned that such a view “was fundamentally undermined in the twentieth century”, and that “we should be extremely skeptical of assertions that assign it great causal weight in explaining present or future Chinese policies” (emphasis in original).(14)

The above observations probably apply to China’s policies towards territorial disputes as well. With the experience of humiliation at the hands of Western and Japanese imperialists in the last hundred years or so, Chinese leaders have realized that in the modern nationalist era, territorial integrity within clearly defined borders is an imperative for national security and independence. In fact, notwithstanding the ‘unofficial’ history book and Mao’s ‘edited’ remark, by the foundation of the PRC in 1949, China had already come to accept the independence of former tributaries like Korea, the small Himalayan countries and those in Southeast Asia.(15) As far as China’s official positions are concerned, its unfulfilled territorial claims are limited. As regards land borders, its major claims include: along the Sino-Soviet border, the islands at the confluence of the Ussuri and Amur rivers, and an area of about 41,000 square kilometres in the Pamir region(16); along the Sino-Indian border, Aksai Chin in Ladakh with an area of about 33,000 square kilometres in dispute. China’s claim to the area bordering India’s Northeast Frontier Agency, which amounts to about 90,000 square kilometres, has remained ambiguous. While it does not recognize the legal validity of the MacMahon Line, the control it established in 1962 roughly runs along that Line. It is possible that China views this area as a potential bargaining counter for Aksai Chin.(17) As regards mid-ocean islands, China’s unfulfilled territorial goals are to control the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, and the Diaoyudao (Senkaku Islands) in the East China Sea. The PRC government also claims the Pratas and Macclesfield Bank in the South China Sea. The Pratas are currently under the control of the Taiwanese (Republic of China, ROC) government. The dispute over them may be understood as part of the unresolved struggle between the two rival Chinese governments for control over the entirety of China. Macclesfield Bank, however, is permanently submerged and the question of exercising control over it is not a practical matter.

It may be argued that how China behaves in a territorial dispute is at least equally, if not more, important than what it actually claims. In this respect, the irredentist interpretation is even less convincing. As pointed out above, the irredentist interpretation was especially popular in the immdiate aftermath of the Sino-Indian border war of 1962. The war was then considered as a classic example of China invading a neighbouring country as a direct result of its irredentist ambitions.(18) However, the conventional wisdom that China was the principal culprit in that conflict was seriously challenged by later studies. While Lamb and Woodman have questioned the legal validity of India’s positions in the border dispute (19), Maxwell’s well-researched India’s China War(20), based on Indian primary sources, has powerfully demonstrated that New Delhi’s inflexibility and imprudence should bear a large part of the responsibility for the outbreak of the border war. The irredentist interpretation may also find it difficult to explain why Chinese troops retreated to the MacMahon Line after their decisive victory.

In fact, use of force is but one of many variants of China’s behaviour in territorial disputes. There have also been occasions when China has maintained a low profile over a dispute: for example, towards India and the Soviet Union in the 1950s; towards Japan over the Diaoyudao since the early 1970s; and with the Philippines and Malaysia over the Spratly Islands since the early 1970s. It has also sought to apply political pressure on the adversary party to the dispute: for example, towards the Soviet Union in the 1960s; towards Vietnam over the Paracel and Spratly Islands from the mid-1970s onwards. Finally, it reached a peaceful boundary agreement with neighbours such as Burma, Nepal, Mongolia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan during the early 1960s.

The above variants in China’s behaviour suggest that a simple direct relationship between what it claims and how it behaves in a territorial dispute does not exist. Given a particular claim in a territorial dispute, there could be a range of options available to China in handling it. To account for the particular course of action chosen by China, it is therefore neces...