Greg Poling

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344 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

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Pekingology · Avoiding War in the South China Sea · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

That included the US.

So over the last thirty, thirty-five years, what we've seen is China's claims have advanced beyond just arguments over who owns the Spriley Islands or the Parasol Islands to this much more ambitious and more illegal claim that everything within the South China Sea, all the water, seabed airspace, has some kind of historic Chinese imprint on it that that the rest of the world has to respect that goes beyond customary international.

wall and the UN Conventional Wall of the C.

That's problem one.

That's what's drawn in the international community.

It was a weird combination of ironically

an outcome of cross strait academic exchange at the time, the concept of historic rights and the what Taiwan would call the U-shaped line being a national boundary, that evolved in academic circles in the KMT.

not in the mainland, at least not primarily.

And then it was carried through academic exchange and conferences and faculty from Taiwan in Chinese universities into the mainland in the late eighties.

And eventually there was a decision by the mid to late nineties in Taiwan explicitly to reject this, that Taipei had an opportunity and rejected the opportunity to bake historic rights into its maritime laws in the late nineties.

And China went the other direction and embraced this idea, which was an import from Taiwan.

I think it also coincides with a degree of hubris that emerged on the maritime front in China as a result of the naval modernization launched from seventy nine onward and that really

picked up steam and led to the nineteen eighty seven and nineteen eighty eight occupations in the Spratleys.

So at the same time that this new concept of the Nine Dash line, the U shaped line being a national boundary, came across the strait, you had particularly a naval complex in China that was riding high after getting tons and tons of money dumped on it and suddenly these new footholds in the Spratleys in eighty seven and eighty eight.

So even as that claim was being baked in, nobody paid that much attention except in rare cases like the seizure of Mr.

Frief in ninety five, because China still didn't have much of a blue water navy and certainly didn't have blue water law enforcement capabilities to extend it because these claims are effectively academic until more recent years.

Yeah.

So you'd get one offs like after ninety-five, you had to have the State Department issue these statements pretty boilerplate about we don't accept the use of force to resolve territorial disputes.

And we'd view with concern any maritime claims that do infringe on the rights of third parties, which is our sly way of saying, Look, if this historic rights thing means what we think it means, it's gonna be a problem.

But for now, the Chinese Navy can't do anything about it.

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