Yes, China has become a paper tiger, the same description for the US as it was mired in the Vietnam War, a prolonged military confrontation that US public opinion defeated in concert with the gallant stand of the Vietnamese people.
China could not do anything when the Argentinian Navy sunk a fishing militia ship poaching on Argentina’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) years ago, Beijing also failed to intimidate Jakarta’s Coast Guard when it seized fishing boats that normally strayed into Indonesian waters. Jakarta ensures that those Chinese ships would stop intruding by burning them.
Some Pacific island-nations have also allowed the US Coast Guard ships to patrol their waters with their own personnel on board and board the Chinese fishing vessels that behave as if they have the franchise to fish anywhere they like. Most of these nations have dumped their generously special ties with China under pressure from the US, Australia and New Zealand.
As regards the claim of China to 90% of the South China Sea (SCS), Beijing’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning claims that it is the Philippines that is illegally venturing into Chinese waters within the latter’s EEZ. It is said that diplomats are paid handsomely to lie but in Mao Ning’s case, she must have been beautifully compensated to repeated nauseatingly the same canard, press briefing after press briefing. Mao Ning fails to differentiate a mere claim from established and exercised sovereignty based on international law, in this case the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the 1982 treaty that both the Philippines and China signed, but which China now repudiates. China does not respect treaties and even so-called “gentleman’s agreements.
Mao Ning should see cartographers and UNCLOS experts who would ask her what China is doing in Panatag Shoal, which is 993.99 kilometers from Hainan, or even in the Paracels, which is 881.41 kilometers the Chinese province. China does not share a continental shelf with Panatag or Ayungin Shoals, as well as Kalayaan island and the maritime features that dot the Spratlys. All of them are located beyond the 12th parallel. The 1602 Ricci-Li map commissioned by the Ming Dynasty said China’s imperial territory ended at the 12th parallel.
Out of its revanchist dogma, China now wants its “territories” lost to Western powers to be restored pronto, and Xi Jinping talks about reuniting with Okinawa, which he imagined had been peopled by Han Chinese before national borders were established. He can also lay claim to the Koreans and Japanese to be latter-day Chinese or have descended from peoples that fled the harsh economic and political environments under dynastic rule. Talk of Japanese fascism’s Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere and find it rings a bell in “shared prosperity” in China, which is an unreachable star.
Mao Ning also claimed that the Philippines destroyed the reef in Ayungin Shoal, insisting that 38.2% of the reef had been destroyed by the marooned BRP Sierra Madre. This has been belied by Filipino marine biologists whose studies showed that the Chinese Coast Guard had been dispatching waste and sewage into the waters of the shoal. Not content with that, Beijing is also saber-rattling and claiming that the aircraft carrier Shandong had been patrolling the waters near the Philippine EEZ from Hainan. This much-hyped flattop hasn’t seen any naval battle to overturn the dismal performance of the Chinese Navy when its armada was sent to Davy Crockett’s locker by both the Japanese and Russian navies in the 19th and 20th centuries.
China’s protestations that it is the aggrieved party in the dispute with the Philippines fall on deaf ears. This is a case of a squatter demanding justice for encroaching on the properties of other nations. Patrolling the waters of Hainan is not asserting Chinese sovereignty in Panatag and Ayungin, both of which are outstanding maritime disputes. While local Chinese trolls and paid hacks continue to skulk in one Quezon City bakery, they continue to swallow the guff of “academic” assigned the task of fabricating evidence of Beijing’s “historical claim” 422 years late. If China cannot put up, it must shut up.
