China’s Territorial Disputes

Today, the People’s Republic of China has land borders with 16 separate political entities, with 14 of them sovereign countries and two (Hong Kong and Macau) special administrative regions of China. China’s land borders are over 22,000 kilometres long. With borders like these, combined with the tumultuous history of China during the last 150 years, it is hardly a surprise that China has had, and still has, several disputes with its neighbours relating to its borders. Since its founding, the PRC has been involved in 23 territorial disputes (Fravel 2008: 2). However, the majority of these disputes have been solved without them escalating to, for example, a military conflict.

Cases of China’s territorial disputes that have reached the stage of bloodshed do of course exist. The Sino-Indian War of 1962 brought the Aksai Chin region under Chinese control, which still hampers the development of relations between the two countries, together with another contested region of Arunachal

13 This has been particularly true after Foreign Minister Wang Yi (2014) published in December 2014 a review of China’s diplomacy titled “2014, ËǾɷâËà1̡ȍǚˇ” [The 2014 success of great power diplomacy with Chinese characteristics]. In this report, China’s activities towards peripheral countries were listed first, before other great powers such as United States, Russia and the EU.

14̘dnƥ, literally to cover light and nurture in the dark, referring to a policy of concealing one’s strength and biding one’s time; to keep a low profile. See Deng (1994).

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Pradesh, which India controls and China demands. However, in 2013 China and India signed an agreement to lower the tensions along the disputed borders (Panda 2013). The Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979, while started for other reasons, had links to the border disputes between the countries as well, but did not result in border changes. This was also the case with the border skirmishes between China and the Soviet Union on the Ussuri River in 1969. Whereas the border between China and India is still contested, the Sino-Vietnamese land border and the Sino-Soviet (today with Russian Federation) border have been agreed upon.

Ji Pengfei, a professor at Renmin University of China, has divided the development of China’s border issues to four distinct phases of which two, namely from the mid-1950s to mid-1960s and from the latter half of the 1980s onwards, count as “peak periods” of border negotiations between China and its neighbouring countries (Ji 2013: 2). As a result, 12 of China’s 14 land border disagreements were solved by 2012 (ibid). This number includes also China’s northern and western borders, where the number of disputes increased in early 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union, as China suddenly had four neighbouring countries where it previously had had only one.

Thus by 2012 China had solved nearly all of its land border disputes and was in the process of agreeing on the ones in Central Asia, as described in more detail in chapter 3.1.1 What remained were the disputes with India, and the maritime territorial disputes on East and South China Seas. While the disputes with India have proven themselves recalcitrant, there situation in the contested areas has remained largely peaceful and the two countries have been able to develop their bilateral relations without letting the disputes disturb these processes too much. The maritime disputes, however, are a completely different matter. As discussed further in chapters 4.1.2 and 5.1.1, the disputes over South China Sea and Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in fact intensified during the new millennium. In 2011 China announced in an official White Paper named “China’s Peaceful Development” that territorial integrity and state sovereignty are its “core interests” (China.org.cn 2011). While the White Paper did not mention Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands – or the South China Sea

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– directly, by claiming these territorial disputes to be issues of territorial integrity and national sovereignty China has in effect claimed them, too, as its “core interests.”

When discussing state interests, an IR realist easily finds explanations for China’s increasingly assertive policies. Already the increase in the capabilities of the country would dictate such a policy shift: with the capability to act comes the will to act. However, there are clear economic and security interests in the region as well, and a realist explanation, such as the one offered by Eric Hyer (2015), is based on China’s understanding of its strategic environment throughout the People’s Republic of China. According to Hyer, the different policies of China in its territorial disputes, as witnessed in the cases of Central Asia and other land borders versus the maritime disputes of China, can be explained through “Beijing’s larger strategic considerations and grand strategy” (Hyer 2015: 267–268). For example, the contested maritime regions are of great economic value, especially since the acquisition of modern technology that enables fishing and extraction of maritime resources on an unprecedented level (Chung 2012: 3). Additionally, the disputed areas are major trade routes, increasing both their economic as well as geopolitical importance, as the continuous freedom of navigation in the area is of primary importance to many countries in the region.

Freedom of navigation is an issue of national security, too. While ‘innocent passage,’ giving foreign ships the right to pass through a country’s territorial waters allows the free movement of commercial ships, it is more restricting on military vessels. Thus, should the South China Sea fall under Chinese sovereignty, that would hinder the movement of for example U.S. ships of war in the region.

Moreover, both East and South China Sea are seen in China as important parts of the ‘First Island Chain’ [diyi daolian, ɀĔ˼], a string of islands either containing or defending China’s coastline, depending on the view of the speaker.

However, there are other possible explanations than the realist one presented above. As Chien-peng Chung (2013: 2–3) has explained, China’s territorial disputes offer an excellent window to the behaviour of the rising China: even to those Chinese thinking in less nationalistic terms the disputed territories have become

“iconographic identities” that people use in thinking about the borders of China

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(ibid: 2–3).¹⁵ One does not have go far to look for the origin of such strong sentiments, as for example the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao claimed in September 2012 that the islands disputed with Japan were “China’s sacred and inherent territory” [ËȬÏșÊƯ̞Î] (FMPRC 2012c). Thus, the territories outside Chinese control but considered to be part of China have become even more strongly elements of the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy to rule. They are part of the historical narrative of communist China, in which the CCP saved China from foreign imperialism and promised to take back what had been taken from China in the past.

In contrast to such a belligerent rhetoric is the historical understanding of China as a ‘peaceful’ country. As described repeatedly in this study, Chinese leaders have saved no effort in their attempts to convince their audiences of the peaceful nature of China’s rise, often explained as a result of the inherently peaceful nature of the Chinese civilization. This peacefulness is either a “fine tradition of Chinese culture” (China.org.cn 2011) or a result of China’s own experiences as the victim of aggression (Hu 2005b). In either case, the Chinese historical “triumph of civil over military” (wen, Ɣ over wu, Ǔ) was not, according to Fairbank (1974: 4), an imagined but an actual part of the social order in ancient China. While the 20^th century has proven the ability and willingness of China to wage wars, this view of the peaceful nature of Chinese civilization has not disappeared.

As will be repeated frequently in this work, this study is not about China’s territorial disputes as such. However, in analysing the role change of China in the 2000s, territorial disputes offer an additional framework for analysis, making a comparison between my three cases more structured. Moreover, as the territorial disputes are naturally related to China’s close neighbours, the very same countries towards which China aimed its earlier peripheral diplomacy, the changes in China’s international roles become even better illuminated. In the territorial disputes Chinese foreign relations can be seen in a distilled form. Issues of extremely high relevance to the legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party, to the general popular

15 For an analysis of the complexities of nationalism in China, see Seo (2005).

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opinion in China, and to the continuous economic development and national security, all merge in China’s territorial disputes, constituting the “ideational and material components” (Breuning 2011: 26) of China’s national role conception. It would also be difficult to find issues that would be more crucial to the legitimacy and position of Chinese leaders, who define the country’s national role conceptions (ibid.).¹⁶

1.3. Research Questions, Material, and Methods of This Study