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China’s New Map: Just Another Dash?

The recent publication of China’s new national map – which both re-affirms its historical claims to the South China Sea and incorporates a 10th ‘dash’ in the East China Sea, near Taiwan – has created ripples in Southeast Asia and beyond. Since the 10th dash is not, in fact, new, there is less novelty to this development than first meets the eye. It nonetheless raises important questions about China’s intentions, which hover around the basic ambiguity of its position.

The latest national map was published in June by SinoMaps Press, China’s state mapping authority, under the jurisdiction of the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping. It is thus officially approved. Previously, Beijing had asserted its South China Sea claims with reference to a nine-dash line encompassing a large swath of the strategically important sea, including disputed islands close to neighbouring countries. This was previously presented as an ‘inset’ within the official map, with this inset appended, for example, to China’s official protest against Vietnam’s and Malaysia’s joint submission to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf in May 2009. Yet now, Beijing’s familiar nine-dash line has been supplemented by a 10th dash east of Taiwan, and has been fully integrated into the new national map. This map also features as a background in China’s latest passports, a development that has drawn protests from both Vietnam and the Philippines.

Close-ups of the front and back of the new SinoMaps Press map showing China’s ten-dash line in the South China Sea. Courtesy of SinoMaps Press.

China’s dashed-line claims in the South China Sea date back to a map issued by the Kuomintang government in 1947. This map featured a line of eleven dashes, extending from Taiwan to the Gulf of Tonkin. After the Communists came to power in 1949, the Kuomintang’s claims in the South China Sea were asserted by both of the rival regimes in Beijing and Taipei. However, it was in Beijing that the ‘inset’ map emerged as the official frame of reference, albeit without the 11th dash originally marked near Taiwan. Later, Beijing’s dashed line was further modified to reflect the bilateral maritime boundary agreed with Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin, ratified in 2004. Hence, the nine-dash line has become the most familiar reference point for China’s claims in the South China Sea.

 China’s South China Sea ‘inset’ map showing the previous nine-dash line. Courtesy of SinoMaps Press.

As such, the demarcation of a 10th dash off the coast of Taiwan is not, in itself, new. Yet it is not surprising that many Asian states, some of which contest China’s claims in the South China Sea, have elicited political significance from its re-appearance and the incorporation of the inset into the main part of the latest map.

In Japan, for example, the map has raised eyebrows because the new line is drawn very close to Yonaguni, the western-most island in its Ryukyu chain – located only 70 miles from Taiwan – and part of Okinawa Prefecture. Indeed, while China does not dispute Japanese sovereignty over Yonaguni – unlike the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands to the north – the island is practically obscured by the shading surrounding China’s 10th dash. 

Meanwhile, its re-appearance also serves to re-iterate Beijing’s longstanding assertion of sovereignty over Taiwan, as an extension of its claims in the South China Sea. Indeed, while the 10th dash does not expand on China’s existing territorial claims, it symbolically subsumes Taiwan’s identical claims in the South China Sea, which are derived from the same Kuomintang source. Taiwan is still an important player in the South China Sea, occupying the largest island in the Spratly archipelago. In the East China Sea, moreover, it vigorously disputes Tokyo’s claim to the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, its position virtually identical to that of Beijing. China may therefore be aiming to highlight the mirror-image symmetry of its own maritime territorial claims with those of Taiwan, as a means of further narrowing the cross-strait gap, aligning Taipei and Beijing along a common nationalist axis, and demonstrating a unity of purpose between the two. In doing so, it has sought to capitalise upon recent tensions between Taiwan and the Philippines, over the killing of a Taiwanese fisherman by the latter’s coastguard in May. Beijing may also see advantage in reaching out to Taiwan’s scholarly community, with the aim of buttressing the evidence base for China’s historical claims in the South China Sea through the study of documentation from the pre-1949 era.

Despite the improvement in cross-strait ties in recent years, however, Taiwan’s political leadership is wary of accepting overt support from China for its maritime claims, cognisant of the risk that Taiwan could be perceived as a proxy supporter of China’s own territorial ambitions and of the strains this would place on Taipei’s relations with the US and its regional allies as a result.

China, however, continues to promote this symmetry, particularly in relation to its ongoing confrontation with Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, where China’s claim to the islands runs through Taiwan. As such, the 10th line on the map hints at a broader linkage, in Chinese minds, between claims in the South China Sea and claims in the East China Sea, where Beijing’s political and strategic priorities are currently centred. It is also read as such by Japanese analysts.

 Legend of China’s new map. Courtesy of SinoMaps Press.

Meanwhile, the new map’s legend has also attracted attention, both in Japan and Taiwan and, indeed, further south. This is because it designates the dashed line as a national boundary, using identical shading to that surrounding China’s land borders. This shading around the ten dashes has the visual effect of projecting China’s claims in the South China Sea, however defined, closer to the coastlines of the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam. Yet, in fact, the dashes themselves (apart, of course, from the 10th) are all in the same locations as those in recent Chinese maps. As such, the addition of the new shading, plus the fact that the space in between the dashes is marked (in diminutive characters within the legend) as ‘boundary not defined’, indicates that China seeks to maintain some ambiguity around the status of the dashed line, to minimise controversy while preserving its future room for manoeuvre. This may be having some effect, given that, to date, Southeast Asian reactions to the publication of the new map – and to the full incorporation of the dashed line within it – have been subdued, at least publicly.

However, it may well inflame underlying concerns about China’s ultimate intentions. For example, Indonesia’s semi-dormant sensitivities in the South China Sea may be pricked by the fact that China’s western-most dash clearly bisects its own gas-rich Exclusive Economic Zone, off the Natuna Islands, potentially reviving concerns that Jakarta believed it had put to bed through bilateral reassurances received from China in the early 1990s. Indonesia has not, thus far, offered any official objection to the new map, perhaps preferring to dwell on the positive fact that China’s map makers have acknowledged the outer limit of Indonesia’s archipelagic waters, to the north of the Natuna Islands. Yet China would do well not to take Indonesia’s neutrality in the South China Sea disputes for granted for, in reality, the latter’s maritime resource equities are potentially under threat, even though Jakarta is not party to the dispute over the Spratlys. This is underscored by the fact that Jakarta has already queried, in 2009, the legal basis for China’s nine-dash claim through the UN, while Chinese and Indonesian patrol boats faced off in an incident near Natuna in June 2010.

Looking further afield, even Malaysia, which has traditionally felt less threatened by China’s South China Sea claims, has found itself on the receiving end of its ‘assertiveness’. This was highlighted in late March by the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s excursion to James Shoal – the southern-most feature claimed by China in the South China Sea (even though it is submerged), but one also claimed by Malaysia. And certainly, none of the interested Southeast Asian parties will draw comfort from the fact that, despite continued ambiguity surrounding the status of the dashed line itself, Beijing’s new map also provides the most expansive accounting to date of the features claimed within it.

Yet since maps do not carry independent legal weight under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), China has still to bring its claims into conformity with international law. Privately, some Chinese interlocutors are conscious of the incompatibility between China’s UNCLOS obligations and a maximalist interpretation of the dashed line as a territorial enclosure. Others seek to reassure outsiders that China only claims sovereignty over the islands and other land features within the dashes while re-asserting its vaguely defined historical rights within the ‘relevant waters’. In a recent article in the American Journal of International Law, for example, Judge Gao Zhiguo, China’s appointee to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, opined that the dashed line has three meanings: first, ‘it represents the title to the island groups that it encloses’; second, ‘it preserves Chinese historic rights in fishing, navigation, and such other marine activities as oil and gas development in the waters and on the continental shelf surrounded by the line’; and third, it may serve as a basis for ‘potential maritime delimitation lines’. Given such ambiguity, official assertions of the dashed line will only continue to stoke unease among other South China Sea littoral states and China-watchers elsewhere.

In June, however, Foreign Minister Wang Yi announced that China was prepared to discuss a code of conduct on the South China Sea ‘in a step-by-step manner’. This move, welcomed by ASEAN members, appears to be aimed primarily at repairing bridges with the grouping, following last year’s divisive denouement at the ASEAN Regional Forum, without committing to hard timetables. Additionally, the red-carpet treatment accorded to Vietnam’s President Truong Tan Sang when he visited Beijing earlier in June suggests that Beijing is also intent on mending bilateral fences with Hanoi – the most potentially problematic of China’s rival claimants in the South China Sea. Yet it may also, through these actions, be seeking to further isolate the Philippines, which is currently the target of Beijing’s ire having unilaterally launched arbitral proceedings – lodged in January and formally underway since July – questioning the legal basis for China’s territorial claims. Indeed, the disputed islands and rocks in the South China Sea are now subject to unparalleled international judicial scrutiny. In spite of this, however, China’s map makers can probably put away their pencils, safe in the knowledge that the new leadership in Beijing will try to preserve ambiguity around the full extent of China’s South China Sea claims that the dashed line affords. 

Euan Graham
Associate Fellow, RUSI, and Senior Fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore.

Further Analysis: China, Pacific, Japan, International Institutions

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