On a related note, check out China’s Dong Feng 21D missile. China’s been putting a lot of money into this program for the last few years and they’ve now got them in production. They plan to be fully equipped with them by 2020.
A DF-21D is designed to do one thing: sink an aircraft carrier. Which countries do you think China was thinking about when it initiated this program?
Are we still going to be poking the dragon after these missiles are fully deployed?
Additional note: I’d be *very *surprised to find out that there are twice as many Chinese living in these islands as in the Falklands (pop. approximately 3,000). Any cite on this?
No, this is incorrect. While it’s true the majority of the Chinese population is military personnel, China has also started up civilian settlements. There are currently about 6000 Chinese military and 1000 Chinese civilians living in the disputed islands.
And if the argument is that an island must be self-sufficient and have a non-military population, what’s the justification for Midway and Diego Garcia?
Coincidentally, the current issue of Modern War features a cover article on the South China Sea (it’s the July-August 2016 issue). You can find the population figures I cited on page 22.
Thanks for the cite, will try to look for it.
The Arbitration decision ruled on the state of the islands *before *their reclamation, basically “artificial islands” are not considered islands in the real sense and are considered in their previous state (as sandbars and rocks). These certainly would not have been capable of sustaining a large human presence without deliberate changing of the status quo, and very recently at that.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
So do you think other countries, including the United States, are going to leave the unpopulated islands they’ve claimed in the past? Or is this policy only applicable to China?
For that matter, are other countries, including again the United States, going to leave the populated lands they’ve claimed in the past?
I’m sure you see the point I’m making. The precedents exist. China is going to argue that it isn’t doing anything that other countries haven’t done.
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The difference is, of course, that the ones the US claims are actually islands, and defined as islands. We didn’t go into the middle of a highly disputed area and just build a bunch of islands and then try and claim ownership and assert that they are territorial waters and EEZ.
The islands you are talking about are literally in the middle of no where, and if you look here it shows clearly what are claims are, visually. Compare and contrast that to China’s 9 dash line to see the difference.
We do around SOME of those islands, and we don’t attempt to claim the entire region. Again, look at the above and then compare it to China’s 9 dash line for the key difference. In a nut shell, we aren’t attempting to claim an entire REGION as our territorial waters and EEZ. We claim small bubbles around a few ISLANDS that, basically were and are uninhabited but are habitable. China claims an entire region based on some submerged reefs that they built into something like an island.
Precedence is the backbone of the law. If China successfully gets away with this, if the US backs down and allows them to bully the other powers in the region into accepting their ridiculous claims then it sets such a precedence, that any power with the money and the military right can just manufacture territory in a disputed region, militarize it and then make broad sweeping claims to an entire region.
Normally? In the US and through arbitration. China doesn’t seem keen on accepting outside arbitration, however. I don’t think those other countries in the region are going to back down…why should they, when if they do it means a large chunk of their ACTUAL territorial waters based on their ACTUAL nations will get subsumed by the Chinese??
China says a lot o things. Most of them are lies, exaggerations and horseshit for internal consumption. The way the CCP ACTUALLY works, they could turn on a dime tomorrow and decide to play nice in the SCS. Or they could do something incredibly stupid and push this to out right war. Or anything in between. What they are HOPING for is for the US to back down and go away, and leave them a free hand. The longer we don’t do that the more pressure builds on the CCP to shit or get off the pot.
And I stand by my own. I think you vastly overestimate China’s abilities and will in this, as well as your implications that they are some deep player in a deep game and will out weigh a weak US to gain the prize in the end. Personally, as I said, I think that they are on borrowed time, and I seriously doubt they will be able to take on the US (or WANT too) any time in my own lifetime. Their military capabilities, like their economy and so much more that gets touted on these boards and in the press, is vastly overestimated, and their internal issues are generally handwaved away, when they are not just ignored. China, to me based on things I read and watch, is a pressure cooker…and the temperature continues to rise. The SCS is the CCP trying to let out some of the steam, but it looks to me to be backfiring on them.
I guess this is an issue we’re going to disagree on. I think you’re underestimated the Chinese government’s commitment to this issue. They’re publicly linked their prestige to it. So they’re about as likely to surrender their claims in the South China Seas as they are decide it’s okay if Taiwan declares its independence.
The Communist government has made a huge domestic issue out of foreign incursions in China. They said that regardless of what good the Imperial or Republican governments may have done, they failed because they allowed foreigners to occupy parts of China and therefore they needed to be overthrown. The Communist regime has justified its existence in a large part by having driven the foreigners out of China (and this is China as defined by the borders the Chinese government has drawn).
The Chinese government has declared the South China Sea islands to be part of China. To surrender them would be allowing foreigners to occupy part of China. By their own standards this would be saying that the regime has failed in its duties and is unfit to run the country. This is not a trivial issue to the Chinese government.
Back in 1947, when these claims were first made, Chinese government officials would probably acknowledge privately that this was just a land grab (or water grab) and that China had no legitimate claim to this territory. But decades have passed and generations have grown up being told these islands are part of China. They believe it.
To the Chinese, when America sends navy ships through the region, we’re not asserting the freedom of international waters. To them, we’re invading China and taunting them: “We’re doing this to demonstrate that we’re stronger than you and therefore you can’t stop us.”
As I said above, as an American and even as a theoretical objective observer, I can feel that the American position is the right one and these waters should be international seas. But we need to acknowledge that the Chinese (both the people and the government) don’t see it that way. They believe they’re in the right. They see us as the aggressors who are provoking a war and see themselves as the beleaguered victims who have been showing restraint.
Well, we will definitely have to agree to disagree, though I don’t deny that the CCP has linked this issue to their prestige and have been pouring on the propaganda about this issue…and have made a point to attempt to demonstrate, to their own people that it’s the US who is the aggressor. You see it in many state run media articles and editorials on this issue.
But the CCP has done things like this in the past…staked a lot on a given program or course of action, only to have that blow up in their faces and have to back track or shift the goal posts/change course. I could name half a dozen instances where the party has back tracked on things they said they would never budge on. Will they do that here? Hard to say. Maybe yes, maybe no…depends on how it plays out. Internationally, China is increasingly being viewed negatively over this, and regionally they are seen as a bully, and the US is being looked at more and more favorably, even by former enemies or by former allies who at one point wanted us out of the region.
Where I disagree with you most is where you seem to think that China is a rock on this, and we are or will be a marshmallow and just cave in…or that the other regional powers will somehow be coerced or bribed into giving up their core territorial rights just because China says so and means it. Even if you are right, and China will not budge on this, it doesn’t mean that the Philippines or Vietnam or any of the others will either…nor that the US will just shrug our shoulders and slink back to our own waters, hoping for the best.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
As I said above, as an American and even as a theoretical objective observer, I can feel that the American position is the right one and these waters should be international seas. But we need to acknowledge that the Chinese (both the people and the government) don’t see it that way. They believe they’re in the right. They see us as the aggressors who are provoking a war and see themselves as the beleaguered victims who have been showing restraint.
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There are a lot of things that China (or the CCP) SAYS, or even really does perceive as slights against them or that demonstrate, to them anyway that they are the peaceful ones and the other side are the aggressors. In a lot of cases, China tries to manipulate foreign opinion or even policy through just such actions…getting Canada to cancel a Falun Gong parade or having South Korea cancel a dance festival because the troop has ties to Taiwan or Falun Gong. They are really serious about this stuff, and they really believe that they are in the right and others are in the wrong on stuff like this.
Got to hate that. I guess as with you and I, we’ll just have to agree to disagree and move on. China is not going to be allowed to annex that entire region…and, realistically, not going to be allowed to exert even territorial waters or EEZ status around any of their made up islands, no matter how many missile sites they put on them or how aggressively they act. It’s not going to happen…nor should it, IMHO.
At any rate, I guess we shall see how this plays out, especially in light of the Hague ruling, which is the main focus of this thread. What I hope comes out of this is China willing to negotiate with the other claimants, and basically some sort of agreement where by no one makes hard territorial claims, but some of the resources in the region are exploited and managed jointly between the various claimants. It would be the best of all worlds if that happened…and the ball for something like that is in China’s court. If there is a shooting incident and people are killed, it’s going to be on China’s head, basically, as more peaceful paths that they could take.