China's National Territory PDF

Unit 1 Lesson 4 1 China’s Invention of a National Territory The excerpt below argues that there were no formally defined physical boundaries of China during the centuries of dynasty rule except those that were established by the European powers; that it was during...

Unit 1 Lesson 4 1 China’s Invention of a National Territory The excerpt below argues that there were no formally defined physical boundaries of China during the centuries of dynasty rule except those that were established by the European powers; that it was during the Guomindang/ Kuomintang government that used the science of geography to establish the real and imagined national territory of China, and that education was effectively used to condition the Chinese minds on what constitutes China’s national territory. This lesson also provides a history of Taiwan, of not being a formal part of Dynastic China, and of having been included in China’s territory only in the middle of the 20 th century due to geopolitics and the political survival of the Guomindang/ Kuomintang government. Learning Outcomes 1. explain how geography was used to establish the national territory of China 2. give a historical explanation for the resistance to China’s rule in Tibet, Xingiang, and Taiwan Key Concepts to Understand guangfu ‘loose rein’ Treaty of Shimonoseki Zhang Qiyun Zhu Kezhen excerpt: Hayton, B. (2020). The invention of China. London: Yale University Press. On 27 April 2017 China’s rubber-stamp parliament tightened up the country’s ‘Surveying and Mapping Law’ to, among other things, ‘raise public awareness of national territory’. The spokesman for the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, He Shaoren, told journalists that incorrectly drawing the country’s boundaries ‘objectively damages the completeness of our national territory’. In February 2019 the government went even further with specific rules covering the printing within China of maps in books or magazines intended for sale in overseas markets. Each map would require permission from provincial officials and none would be allowed to be distributed within the country. The possibility that a Chinese citizen might see a map showing an unauthorised version of China’s territorial claims was perceived as such a threat to national security that it justified the involvement of the ‘National Work Group for Combating Pornography and Illegal Publications’, according to the regulations. To prove the point, in March 2019 the authorities in the port city of Qingdao destroyed 29,000 English- language maps destined for export because they showed Taiwan as a separate country. China is far from being the only country with concerns about its borders. What is striking, however, is the extent to which anxiety about those borders has become a national neurosis. Government statements explicitly connected the mapping laws and regulations of 2017 and 2019 to the state’s ‘patriotic education’ campaign. Part of their purpose was to guide the teaching of schoolchildren in the correct view of the country. Messages from the national leadership obsessively remind the population that the only way to be a Chinese patriot is to fervently seek the ‘return’ of Taiwan to control by the mainland; to insist that China is the rightful owner of every rock and reef in the South China Sea; demand that Japan hand over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands; and insist on maximalist claims in the Himalayas. The official media constantly remind citizens of the state’s territorial claims, exhort them to personally identify with those claims and nurture feelings of hurt and shame towards unresolved border disputes. Paranoia about national boundaries in China is not merely an obsession of online gamers or Weibo patriots, it is central to the state itself. The speeches of Xi Jinping make clear that his vision of national rejuvenation can only be complete when all the territory claimed by China is under Beijing’s control.  Unit 1 Lesson 4 2 But the story of how certain territories came to be regarded as ‘rightfully’ Chinese while others did not is far from simple. During the twentieth century, some areas that were held to be ‘natural’ parts of the country, such as Outer Mongolia, were let go while others that had been abandoned, notably Taiwan, were reclaimed. When the Qing Empire collapsed in 1911, most of its borders were more imaginary than real. Except in a few places, where Russian, French or British empires had forced them to be demarcated, they had never been formally defined. In the decades after the revolution, the national elite in Beijing had to ‘fix’ a national territory for the first time. This was a process that had to take place on the ground but also in the national imagination. Maps had to be drawn but, just as importantly, the world-view expressed on those maps had to be inculcated in the minds of the people. Anxiety about the vulnerability of those borders was deliberately generated, right from the beginning. There were fears of foreign threats but there were also expansionist dreams and political calculations. … The last major piece of territory to be formally renounced by the Qing court was signed away on 17 April 1895. The treaty that Li Hongzhang agreed in the Japanese port of Shimonoseki ceded Taiwan, and the Pescadore Islands off its coast, ‘to Japan in perpetuity and full sovereignty’ … Just over a month later, the acting governor of the island, a mainlander, and a few other officials and merchants, declared independence in the name of the ‘Taiwan Republic’ rather than submit to Japanese rule. They hoped to elicit support from Britain and France but the Europeans saw no advantage in intervening and the Republic collapsed just eleven days after being declared. Resistance, nonetheless, continued. It took a further five months for Japanese forces to occupy all the cities and a further five years before the last vestiges of banditry were completely crushed. Throughout this long campaign the Qing court declined to offer any support to its former subjects in its former province. In fact, material support for the rebel Republic was explicitly banned by a court edict in May 1895. The fate of Taiwan was simply not important enough to Beijing to risk further conflict with Japan. Half a century after the first ‘Opium War’, the Qing court had been forced to accept the binding nature of international treaties. It had signed away its rights to the territory and that was the end of it. Taiwan’s fate did not become a cause célèbre, however. While the sundering of the island from the body of the great-state was a major blow to the prestige of the court, it barely disturbed the general population. The mainland’s relationship with Taiwan in 1895 could be described as, at best, ‘semi-detached’. Even after its partial annexation in 1684, the Qing had treated the island as a dangerous frontier, notable mainly for its wild aborigines and deadly diseases. The court only declared it to be a province 200 years later, in 1885, after the war with France. Taiwan remained a province for just a single decade, before it was ceded to Japan at Shimonoseki. In the aftermath of the treaty-signing, Qing officials almost entirely ignored developments in Taiwan. The island was lost, in the same way that other pieces of territory signed away by other treaties had been lost. In 1858 the Qing had ceded 500,000 square kilometres of land north of the Amur River to Russia through the Treaty of Aigun. They had then been forced, through other ‘unequal treaties’, to allow European powers to establish micro-colonies all around the coast. Taiwan appeared to have gone the same way; there was no feasible way of wresting it back from Japan’s clutches. The 2 million or so Qing subjects on the island, mostly speakers of the Hokkien and Cantonese topolects, along with the aboriginal population, became colonial subjects of Japan. Surprisingly, perhaps, the same insouciance about Taiwan’s fate also characterised the revolutionary movement. Sun Yat-sen and his comrades made no demands for the return of the island to Qing control. At no point, so far as we know, did Sun concern himself with the resistance to Japanese rule, even though it continued to smoulder. For Sun, Japanese- controlled Taiwan was more important as a base from which to overthrow the Qing Dynasty than as a future part of the Republic.  Unit 1 Lesson 4 3 We can see this in his behaviour during 1900. That year, Sun left Japan and travelled around Southeast Asia seeking support for a planned uprising in Guangdong province. He was disappointed: neither the established reformists nor local community leaders took him seriously. Instead, when Sun returned to Nagasaki he became part of a Japanese plot to seize the port of Amoy (modern-day Xiamen). Under Tokyo’s patronage, Sun based himself in Taiwan and ordered his revolutionary forces to mass around their main support base in Guangzhou. But, in a typically rash move, Sun changed the plan at the last minute, diverting the fighters to Amoy, where he intended to join them accompanied by a shipment of Japanese weapons. The Japanese, however, had become concerned about provoking a Russian reaction and backed out of the entire scheme. Sun’s rebel force found itself isolated and outgunned and was destroyed. Despite the betrayal in Amoy, Sun continued to regard the Japanese government as his main sponsor, and the revolutionary movement continued to ignore the issue of Taiwan. The reformists had little interest in the island either. When a leading Taiwanese activist, Lin Xiantang, met Liang Qichao in Japan in 1907, Liang advised him not to sacrifice lives in opposing Japanese rule, since the mainland would not be able to help. Since neither could speak the other’s topolect, Liang had to communicate with Lin through ‘brush talk’. This only made Liang’s message more poignant: ‘(We were) originally of the same root, but are now of different countries.’ The Qing court, the revolutionaries and the reformists all took the same view: Taiwan had been ceded by treaty and lost to China. It seems remarkable, given the passion that the island’s political status generates today, but the island virtually disappeared from political discussions in the decade before the revolution of 1911/12. Even after the revolution, when Sun had no more need of Japanese support, he and his supporters continued to ignore the fate of Taiwan. While some revolutionaries were prepared to cede the peripheral territories of the Qing Great-State in order to create a pure ‘Han’ state in the heartland, Sun and Liang shared a determination to ensure the Republic inherited all the territory of the former empire. The ‘non- Chinese’ areas (Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet and Xinjiang) made up more than half of its territory and contained vital natural resources. But in order to express their desire to defend the national territory, Sun, Liang and their supporters had to create new words with which to describe it. There were several words for ‘place’ in Chinese, but none that equated to territory, with its connotations of ownership and sovereignty. The traditional term was jiangyu, which literally meant the boundary (jiang) of the imperial realm (yu). In dynastic times the yu stretched as far as the emperor’s authority and so, in theory at least, could have included tributary and vassal states. Its meaning was vague and certainly did not imply the existence of a defined border. A new word for ‘territory’ came into Chinese from Japanese, specifically from a Japanese translation of a text by the British Social-Darwinist Herbert Spencer …. In his 1883 translation of Spencer’s Political Institutions, Sadashiro Hamano chose the two kanji characters ryo-do – literally ‘governed-land’ – as equivalents for ‘territory’. … From there, the word was picked up by one of Sun Yat-sen’s followers, Hu Hanmin. One of Hu’s roles in the revolutionary Tongmenghui movement was to provide the theoretical justifications for Sun’ s policies.... He was arguing that territorial sovereignty – lingtu zhuquan – was the foundation of international law and that, logically, the revolutionaries needed to oppose the ‘unequal treaties’ demanded by foreign powers.... The progeny of this Euro-Asian ancestry emerged in the Republic of China’s constitutional debates a decade later. The ‘Provisional Constitution’ written by Sun Yat-sen’s allies immediately after the revolution and approved by the freshly-installed president, Yuan Shikai, on 11 March 1912, set out in relatively precise detail what it believed the territory of the Republic should be. It said, in effect, that the new state inherited the boundaries of the Qing Great-State as they stood when the revolution broke out. Article 3 stated simply that ‘The territory of the Chinese Republic consists of 22 provinces, Inner and Outer Mongolia, and Tibet.’ The choice of ‘22’ provinces was highly significant since Taiwan was the twenty-third. Given that the  Unit 1 Lesson 4 4 constitution text was still laying claim to Outer Mongolia, despite its declaration of independence three months earlier, Tibet despite the ongoing insurrection there, and Xinjiang despite its de facto independence at the time, this seems to be clear proof that the Republic had formally abandoned any claim to Taiwan. However, in May 1914, when Yuan Shikai, the former Qing general who had forced Sun Yat-sen from office in 1912, imposed a new ‘Constitutional Compact’ on the country, the definition of the national territory was changed. Article 3 became the apparently tautological ‘The territory [lingtu] of the Chinese Republic remains the same as the domain [ jiangyu] of the former empire’. New words notwithstanding, the 1914 constitutional definition of territory merely begged a further question about the exact extent of the domain of the former empire. After Yuan died in 1916, the Compact was suspended and the first constitution was reinstated. So, from 29 June 1916, the definition of the national territory reverted to the ‘22 provinces, Inner and Outer Mongolia, Tibet and Xinjiang’. But seven years later, the Republic returned to tautology. The constitution approved on 10 October 1923 replaced Article 3 with the words ‘The territory [guotu– literally ‘state land’] of the Republic of China is based on its inherent domain [jiangyu]’. Once again, no definition of that territory or domain was provided. Eight years after that, the new ‘Provisional Constitution’ promulgated by the Guomindang government of Chiang Kai-shek on 1 June 1931 struck a compromise. Article 1 combined vagueness and specificity by stating, ‘The territory [lingtu] of the Republic of China consists of the various provinces and Mongolia and Tibet’, but the number of provinces was left undefined. By 1931 Qinghai had been forcibly reincorporated into the state and given the status of a province. Mongolia and Tibet had been independent of the Republic for almost two decades by this time but Chiang still claimed them nonetheless. Notably, Taiwan was still not a consideration. The last Republican constitution promulgated before the civil war doesn’t even attempt to define the national territory. The version approved on 25 December 1946 merely says, in Article 4, ‘The territory of the Republic of China according to its existing national boundaries shall not be altered except by resolution of the National Assembly.’ This constitutional back-and-forth demonstrates that throughout this period and even beyond, there was considerable difficulty in deciding exactly where the country’s boundaries should be drawn.... The Qing Great-State had constructed, in effect, a multi-ethnic federation in which five ‘script regions’ – Chinese, Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan and Turkic – were ruled separately through different structures and according to different rules. It was an approach known in Chinese as jimi– loose rein – although Qing methods of government would have varied depending on the peoples they were dealing with. The mission of revolutionaries like Sun Yat-sen, however, was to create a single unitary nation-state ruled from the centre through a single set of structures and rules. …, Yuan Shikai, who had risen to power through the old imperial system, was far more familiar with the traditional techniques of rule than with the new ideas of the Western- educated nationalists. His conservative instincts led him towards a more ‘fuzzy’ definition of the state, while the modernisers’ search for clarity on the national question led them to seek something more precise. But the more they tried to impose unity on strong local rulers, the more the warlords broke away, causing the fragmentation of the very state they were trying to unify. The Qing Empire had only formally defined its borders in places where it had been forced to do so by other powers: from the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk, which drew a line with Russia in the northeast, through to the 1894 Convention with Great Britain, partially demarcating the boundary with Burma in the southwest. Elsewhere, the situation was far from clear: how far did the boundary of the realm – the jiangyu– stretch? At the end of the Qianlong Emperor’s reign in 1796, the Qing court was accepting tribute from thirteen rulers whose territory lay even further west than Xinjiang province and also from a Gurkha ruler beyond Tibet even though none were under Qing rule. So did the jiangyu include them? On the other hand, even within the Qing domain, the court exerted control over remote and thinly populated regions through local rulers  Unit 1 Lesson 4 5 whose own control, and loyalty, were not absolute. The Kham area of eastern Tibet, for example, had long been ruled by autonomous chieftains who were only nominally subordinate to the rulers based in Lhasa and, through them, even more nominally to the emperor in Beijing. Although Qing officials were based in a few strategic places, wide areas were left unsupervised. A military campaign to impose central rule on Kham in 1745/6 was a costly failure. ‘Loose rein’ rule was reinstated. As a result, we should see the Qing’s efforts to control central Asia in the nineteenth century not so much as attempts to defend ‘their’ territory from the predations of outsiders but as moves in a constant competition (a ‘Great Game’) for territory and influence between three empires: the Qing from the east, the Russian from the north and west and the British from India in the south. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all three were battling for the support of, or domination over, dozens of local rulers, warlords and other kinds of leaders – spiritual and temporal. We can see one effect of this increased competition in the change of meaning of the Chinese word bianjiang. The Australia-based historian James Leibold has shown how, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was used to refer to an intermediate zone between two states. During the later nineteenth century, however, in certain places it came to mean the line of a defined border. The Manchu Qing court, inheritors of Inner Asian traditions of rule, had known how to play this game. They had relations with other Inner Asian peoples stretching back generations. The new Republic, however, was attempting to impose a completely different political order based upon a Western template of sovereignty and hard borders. Its leaders were obliged to find an answer for the bianjiang wenti – the border question. How were they to ‘fix’ the national territory when the state was in the process of falling apart? But there was also a bigger question: how could the new state make its citizens feel loyal to each other and to places that they had never seen, would almost certainly never visit and yet which were assumed to be vital for national survival? Both of these missions were given to a new class of special agents: the geographers. Zhu Kezhen. The man regarded as the father of the modern academic discipline of geography in China was born the youngest of six children on the outskirts of Shaoxing, a city best known for its rice wine at the mouth of the Qiantang River, south of Shanghai. The rich soils and wealthy markets of the river delta had been good to Zhu Kezhen’s family. Ancestors had worked the paddy fields for generations, but as the coastal cities expanded and the number of urban mouths rose, Kezhen’s father realised there was a better living to be made as a trader rather than a grower of rice. By the age of three, Kezhen had become his parents’ favourite child. While his siblings were prepared for lives of manual labour, Kezhen was directed towards intellectual pursuits. He was sent to a private school in Shanghai, 150 kilometres away, and then even further north, to Tianjin, to attend the Tangshan Mining College. Having benefited from the natural advantages of his local environment and the economic boom of the coastal region, Zhu Kezhen would next receive a windfall from international politics. In the aftermath of the 1900 uprising known in the west as the Boxer Rebellion, the Qing government had been forced to pay compensation of 450 million taels of silver to the Western powers. The United States government had demanded $25 million, a sum which even its own diplomats in Beijing regarded as excessive – perhaps twice as much as the actual damage suffered by American citizens and their government during the violence. Over the course of the 1900s, pressure rose on Theodore Roosevelt’s administration to do something to alleviate the huge burden of debt imposed on the Qing government. By 1909 a compromise emerged: the excess, around $11 million, was to be put into a fund to pay for the education of Chinese students. This, it was thought, would benefit both Chinese students and American universities while also diverting future members of the Chinese elite away from Japan and towards the United States. One of the first to be diverted was Zhu Kezhen, the twenty-eighth recipient of a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship.  Unit 1 Lesson 4 6 In 1910, at the age of twenty, Zhu arrived at the University of Illinois to study agronomy. But he hadn’t travelled to the United States to become a better farmer. He wanted to be a scientist and, after receiving his degree, enrolled for a PhD in meteorology at Harvard. There, his supervisor was Robert DeCourcy Ward, America’s first professor of climatology. Ward’s views went much wider than the weather, however. In 1894 he had co-founded the Immigration Restriction League and his academic opinions combined meteorology with eugenics: he believed that climate determined civilisation. He claimed that in the seasonality of the temperate zone of the planet ‘lies much of the secret - who can say how much of it? - of the energy, ambition, self-reliance, industry, thrift, of the inhabitant’. In the tropics, by contrast, the climate was enervating, and ‘voluntary progress toward a higher civilisation is not reasonably to be expected’. As a result it was entirely justified, in Ward’s view, for white people from the temperate zone to develop the tropical areas of the globe, even with slave labour if necessary. He was particularly impressed with the ability of Chinese ‘coolie’ labour to work in all conditions. Zhu lapped up all these theories, gained his PhD and returned to China in 1919 to become the first professor of geography at the Normal University of Wuchang, moving to Southeastern Normal University in Nanjing the following year. At Nanjing he passed on these ideas to the second generation of Chinese geographers, the ones who would devote their careers to helping build the new state. In the words of one historian of this period, Zhihong Chen, ‘Ward’s influence was evident in Zhu’s works.’ The American professor’s environmental determinism gave a new ‘scientific’ basis to the prevailing Han racism of the time and helped set the parameters for the emerging discipline of geography. According to Zhu, China’s temperate latitude had blessed its people (the Zhongguo-ren) with an intermediate skin colour and an unusually strong ability to adapt to all kinds of environments. In his reasoning, People who are used to tropical climates cannot bear winter in the temperate zone … Those who are used to temperate climates cannot stand tropical or frigid weather... But we Chinese are exceptional! No matter how hot or cold an environment is, there are Chinese footprints.... [W]hen the Panama Canal was excavated, only our Chinese people kept working tirelessly and efficiently, when foreign workers could not even work. This is why foreigners call the Chinese ‘the yellow peril’. This is also a ray of morning sunshine for us Chinese in the future! Zhang Qiyun. Among Zhu’s many students at Nanjing during the 1920s was Zhang Qiyun (often spelt Chang Chi-yun). Over the following three decades Zhang would personify the search for China’s national territory. He would help define it, propagate it, survey it, advise the government on securing it but then, ultimately, flee it. Over the course of an academic and then political career he would place his insights at the service of the national struggle for survival. In the process he bound his fate, and that of his political masters, to Taiwan. Zhang Qiyun joined Zhu Kezhen’s first ever geography class in 1920. He graduated three years later and joined the staff of the Commercial Press in Shanghai where the brother of one of his classmates was an established editor. The editor was Chen Bulei who would also go on to play a major role in nationalist politics. Together, Zhang, Chen and Zhu formed an influential clique at the intersection of academia, journalism and propaganda. Together, the trio brought geography into the centre of Chinese political thinking and put it at the service of the Guomindang’s nationalist mission. Zhang spent the next four years writing the geography textbooks used in most Chinese schools during the later 1920s and beyond. His memoirs show that Zhu was a strong influence on their content. Then, after Chen Bulei became the editor of the country’s third largest circulation newspaper, Shangbao (‘Commercial News’), he commissioned Zhang to write commentaries on geographical topics. In 1927, on Zhu’s recommendation, Zhang was appointed a geography lecturer at Zhongyang ( National Central) University in Nanjing.  Unit 1 Lesson 4 7 The next ten years, the ‘Nanjing decade’, was a time of profound change in both the politics and the educational systems of the Republic of China. The Guomindang captured Nanjing and Shanghai in March 1927 and within eighteen months the party was nominally in control of the whole country. With Chiang Kai-shek installed as chairman, the Nationalist Government began to impose its vision of national unity on the country: a vision that owed more to Sun Yat-sen’s ideas of a homogenous Zhonghua minzuthan to Yuan Shikai’s toleration of difference. The ideology of ‘the nation of five races’, which had guided the state since 1912, was dropped. On 29 December 1928, as a mark of intent, the national flag was formally changed from the coloured stripes of the ‘five races’, which had flown since the birth of the Republic, to a red flag incorporating in the top left corner the Tongmenghui’s original ‘Blue Sky, White Sun’ flag favoured by Sun Yat-sen. It remains the flag of the Republic of China (on Taiwan) to this day. This new nationalism determined the Republic’s entire approach to the border question and the situation of minorities living in the frontier areas. In the view of the new government, the frontier had to be ‘saved’ by making sure its inhabitants became loyal citizens of the Republic. Although this was supposed to be the era of ‘self-determination’ – US President Woodrow Wilson had declared it to be so in 1918 – the Guomindang had no intention of offering such a choice to the inhabitants of Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia or Manchuria. In their eyes, the right of self-determination was reserved for the Chinese nation in its struggle against foreign powers. This was no mere academic debate but rather a life-and-death struggle, since one of those powers, Japan, was already deploying the ‘self-determination’ argument for its own imperial ends. Japanese officials highlighted the ethnic differences within the former Qing Great-State to argue that those groups had a right to self-determination and to secede from a Han-dominated Republic. They claimed to be upholding this principle as they, in effect, annexed Manchuria in 1931 and encouraged separatism in Mongolia and Xinjiang. Under these circumstances, the Guomindang weaponised the study of history and geography. In 1928 the director of the Nanjing government’s Ministry of Propaganda, Dai Jitao (who was simultaneously president of Zhongshan University in Guangzhou), called for the establishment of geography departments at all the country’s major universities, arguing that they would play a vital role in national defence. The first one was established in 1929 at Zhongyang University, where Zhang was already on the staff. Over the following eight years, geography departments were established at nine other major universities. Most of them were staffed by former students of Zhu Kezhen. The output of these departments was dedicated to serving the state and its frontier mission. The Chinese historian Ge Zhaoguang has described this period in academia as ‘national salvation crushing enlightenment’ (jiuwang yadao qimeng). Many experts who had spent the 1920s researching the differences between ethnic groups and the contested history of the country’s frontiers either changed their public views or went quiet during the late 1930s, as the threat from Japan grew. … Up until 1927 school education had been controlled by local elites and varied widely in content and quality. Even before they had taken power across the whole country, the Guomindang leadership had recognised the importance that education would play in their efforts to construct the new nation. The party’s Fourth Plenum in January 1928 declared that ‘education is indeed a life-or-death matter for Chinese citizens’ and must play a central role in the party’s war on ‘erroneous ideologies’ (such as communism). A few months later, in May 1928, just after the establishment of the Guomindang’s ‘National Government’ in Nanjing, the party convened the ‘First National Conference on Education’. The conference resolved to adopt a new national curriculum for schools based upon Sun Yat-sen’s ‘Three Principles of the People’: Nationalism, Democracy and People’s Livelihood. Within months, the GMD had captured Beijing and very quickly set about imposing a new ‘temporary curriculum’ nationwide. From 1929 all schools were expected to imbue their pupils with strong feelings of patriotism, mobilised in  Unit 1 Lesson 4 8 particular through the teaching of history and geography. Pupils were expected to study the various regions of the country, ‘in order to foster the national spirit’. A major contribution to this patriotic education movement was the series of textbooks written by Zhang Qiyun. In 1928 the Commercial Press published one as Benguo Dili - ‘Our Geography’. Its key message was that China formed a natural unit despite its enormous size and variety. Using his geographical training, Zhang divided up the country into twenty-three ‘natural’ regions based on their environments and the inhabitants’ ways of life. He then compared them, telling pupils that, for example, the Yangtze Delta was good for farming but had no minerals; Shanxi was rich in coal but too dry for agriculture; Manchuria was forested while Mongolia was good for grazing, and so on. He then told the young learners that this diversity was actually proof of the need for national unity, since each different part was an essential part of a coherent whole. Yet the ‘whole’ that Zhang portrayed in the textbook was a territory that, in reality, did not exist. The book contained various maps of the country drawn on blank backgrounds so that the rest of the world disappeared from view. The simple black line marking the national boundary encompassed huge areas that were not actually under the control of the government: the independent states of Mongolia and Tibet. Zhang portrayed them as a natural part of the Republic nonetheless. How reality would be reconciled with the map was not explained to the pupils. Remarkably, given present-day politics, there was a significant omission: Taiwan was not drawn in any of the national maps in the textbook. It seems that, in Zhang’s view, the ‘natural’ shape of the Republic was exactly the same as the shape of the Qing Empire at its collapse in 1911. Mongolia was included, Taiwan was not. The rocks and reefs of the South China Sea did not feature at all.... Zhang himself, in another textbook he co-wrote in 1933, Waiguo Dili – ‘The Geography of Foreign Countries’ – described the people of Taiwan as ‘orphans’ deserted by their birthmother, the Chinese nation Zhonghua minzu, and abused by their stepmother, Japan. Zhang, and the other authors of these books, were nationalists who sought to evince emotions of loyalty to a state and its territory in the hearts of their young audiences. They faced a problem that was both pedagogic and deeply political. How could they persuade a child in a big coastal city, for example, to feel any connection with a sheep herder in Xinjiang? Why should they even have a connection? The general purpose of human geography was to explain how varying environments had created groups with differing cultures. Nationalism, however, required all these different groups to feel part of a single culture and loyal to a single state. It was up to nationalist geographers to resolve the puzzle. They found two main ways to do so. One group of textbook authors simply stated that all Chinese citizens were the same: they were members of a single ‘yellow’ race and a single nation and no further explanation was needed. A second group, however, acknowledged that different groups did exist but were nonetheless united by something greater. Within this group some authors made use of ‘yellow race’ ideas, some used the idea of a shared, civilising Huaculture, while others stressed the ‘naturalness’ of the country’s physical boundaries. The textbook writers argued that the answer to the ‘border question’ was to ‘civilise’ the inhabitants. One, Ge Suicheng (who was employed by the rival, but equally nationalistic, Zhonghua Publishing Company), found himself facing the same dilemma as the Guomindang government. Both needed to emphasise the theoretical equality of all ethnic groups while simultaneously making the case for their melding into a single Chinese nation based on ‘Han’ culture. In Ge’s view, the study of geography should make the different peoples of the state love their particular home areas but also connect them emotionally to the wider national territory. But in the meantime, in the words of his textbook, ‘We should urgently promote the acculturation of the Mongols, Hui [ Muslims] and Tibetans so that they are not lured by the imperialists, [and we should] move [Han] inhabitants to the border areas for colonisation …  Unit 1 Lesson 4 9 Zhang Qiyun’s 1928 textbook was also deeply imprinted with racial chauvinism. One part of the book’s message to its millions of young readers was that the country was on a journey from barbarism to civilisation and that the wild frontier, where the minorities lived, needed to be tamed and developed. The book included a table of various ethnic groups showing how assimilated they were to the ‘main body’ ( zhuti) of the Han. In a description of the Miao people of the southwest, Zhang wrote, ‘They maintain the customs of great antiquity and are totally incompatible with the Han people. Eliminating their barbarism and changing their customs and habits is the responsibility of the Han people.’ For Zhang, the Han provided the ‘norm’ against which the other groups needed to be measured in order to judge their level of civilisation: they had to be made ‘Han’. He shared Zhu Kezhen’s opinion that climate was the determining factor in the spread of civilisation. In his 1933 textbook he observed that in southwestern Yunnan province, the native population lived in the hot and humid lowlands while the Han people (Han-ren) lived on the cooler plateaus. In the mountains of the northwest, on the other hand, the Han lived in the valleys where it was warm while the natives lived at altitudes where it was colder. It was only natural, therefore, that the ‘temperate-dwelling’ Han-ren, free of ‘degenerating’ environmental influences, should exert their influence over the minorities – the tu- ren. Other textbooks made the same point, stressing Sun Yat-sen’s arguments that the Han made up 90 per cent of the country’s population and that it was only natural that the other groups would assimilate … These arguments can be traced back to those made by Liang Qichao … created a story of continuity: the expansion of a civilised territory outwards from its cradle in the Yellow River valley. The new geographers tried to write the final chapter, its diffusion to the very edges of the Republic. They also borrowed from Liang the idea that certain rivers and mountain ranges formed ‘natural’ boundaries to the state.... The most poetic technique was simply to compare the shape of the imagined country to that of a begonia or mulberry leaf turned on its side. The port of Tianjin became the petiole of the leaf with a central ‘vein’ running west as a line of symmetry all the way to Kashgar in Xinjiang and beyond. The symmetry only made sense, of course, if Outer Mongolia and Tibet were included and Taiwan was excluded. The historians Robert Culp and Peter Zarrow have documented many examples of other geography textbooks which use different, sometimes contradictory arguments and analogies to persuade students of the ‘naturalness’ of the Republic’s putative borders. An ever-present theme in these textbooks was the threat of foreigners eating away at the country’s edges. It was reinforced through school lessons about territory ‘lost’ during the previous century. Teachers could make use of a peculiarly Chinese form of nationalist cartography – the ‘map of national humiliation’. Dozens of such maps were published by the Commercial Press, Zhonghua Publishing and other companies during the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, sometimes within textbooks and atlases and sometimes as posters for display in classrooms and public buildings. They typically portrayed, often in bright colours, land ‘conceded’ to neighbouring states over the previous century. There was a clear political purpose behind the making of these maps. They served to delegitimise the Qing Dynasty – by demonstrating its failure to ‘defend the country’ and thereby legitimise the revolution. But they also deliberately generated a sense of anxiety about the vulnerability of the nation’s border in order to promote loyalty to the new Republic. It seemed to work with a young Mao Zedong. He later told the American journalist Edgar Snow that hearing about national humiliation made him an activist. It wasn’t just Mao. This was the birth of the national territorial neurosis. On Geography and Textbooks. The geographers took the nationalist idea of ‘territory’ – lingtu – and projected it back to the time of ‘domain’ – jiangyu – when there were few fixed borders. A map of national humiliation in Ge Suicheng’s 1933 textbook showed vast areas of central Asia, Siberia and the island of Sakhalin as territory ‘lost’ to Russia. The map may have displayed different areas as ‘territory’, ‘tribute states’ or ‘vassal states’ but all were categorised  Unit 1 Lesson 4 10 as inherently ‘Chinese’, nonetheless. The idea that, at the time they were ‘lost’, these territories might have been contested are as with no clear allegiance to any particular empire was not part of the lesson. They were presented simply as ‘Chinese’ lands that had been stolen. Ge Suicheng called on the young citizens reading his textbook to do what they could to recover all this lost territory. But did this mean this ‘lost’ territory should be included within the rightful boundaries of the state, or not? Was the shape of the country at that time natural, or not? These questions were not even posed in the textbook, let alone answered. What was important for authors like Ge was to encourage students to feel the sense of loss, a collective sense of ‘national humiliation’, and thereby develop a patriotic attachment to the country. Anxiety about territorial loss was a fundamental part of the nationalist education project right from the beginning. The anxiety was compounded because no one, not even the geographers, knew where the borders actually were. The historian Diana Lary has shown how, in the southwestern province of Guangxi, the exact line of the border was almost irrelevant. Although it had been formally agreed with the French colonial rulers of Indochina in 1894, as far as the Republican officials were concerned the border was just somewhere in the mountains: high, remote and difficult to reach. The state had generally managed minority groups in southern highlands through a system known as tusi, in which local leaders were held responsible for the actions of their people. Borders were largely irrelevant. So long as they didn’t trouble the authorities, the mountain peoples were generally left alone. In Lary’s words, ‘The Chinese world stopped well before the borderlands.’ (Things would change. This is the same border that thousands of Chinese and Vietnamese soldiers died fighting over in 1979.) In 1928 the original geographer Zhu Kezhen declared that Chinese cartography was about a century behind its European counterpart. At the time, most of the publicly available maps were still based on 200-year-old surveys from the early Qing period.... In 1930 senior staff at the influential Shanghai-based newspaper Shenbao discussed organising an expedition to the frontier to celebrate the paper’s sixtieth anniversary. They asked two well-known members of the National Geological Survey of China, Ding Wenjiang and Weng Wenhao, and a cartographer, Zeng Shiying, to lead the effort. However, during the planning meeting it became clear that no one knew where the actual frontier was. Ding told the gathering: ‘If we want to organize a successful research trip of China’s frontiers, we first need a map. … No one has yet drawn a complete and accurate map of the entire country. Before we organize the trip, we should therefore first work on sketching a map of China.’ The anniversary plans therefore evolved into a project to publish a new national atlas. The result was the publication by the newspaper of New Maps of the Chinese Republic (Zhonghua minguo xinditu) in 1934. The atlas was well produced and a best-seller. In the absence of any government- produced equivalent it became the national standard until well into the 1950s. However, its depiction of the frontier areas was, in most places, a work of fiction. As was now standard in Chinese maps of this time, Tibet and Outer Mongolia were depicted as integral parts of the state while Taiwan was not. The neat black dashed-and-dotted line that ran around the Republic was more an expression of desire than reality. As Owen Lattimore, the American scholar who explored these areas in the 1920s and 1930s, wrote, ‘The linear frontier as it is conventionally indicated on a map always proves, when studied on the ground, to be a zone rather than a line.’ In the more recent words of another American historian, James Millward, the frontier was a process, not a place. Wide areas were open to disagreement and conflict. In December 1928 the government had ordered every province and county to compile a new ‘gazetteer’ – fangzhi – of the area under its administration. Gazetteers were an established tool of local government going back centuries but this new incarnation was intended to be drawn up according to modern geographic practice: produced with the help of newly trained experts  Unit 1 Lesson 4 11 using accurate maps and statistics. There was to be a particular focus on ‘frontier’ areas, where the government’s control was weak. This focus on gazetteers chimed with Zhang Qiyun. He had just co-founded a new academic journal, Dili Zazhi (‘Geography Review’) to promote human geography in secondary schools. In early 1929 Zhang authored an article in Dili Zazhiarguing that this new generation of gazetteers would help to foster ‘homeland feeling’ among the people. This, in his view, would be a positive development because, ‘Homeland feeling is the basis for nationalism.’ In another edition of Dili Zazhihe called for the middle school geography curriculum to be based on Sun Yat-sen’s Principle of Nationalism. … Zhang … on 1 November 1932 he … became one of the forty or so founding members of the government’s ‘National Defence Planning Commission’, created in response to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September 1931, and also to counter increasing unrest in Xinjiang. Its primary purpose was to advise on strategic issues such as military preparedness and the economy. Zhang was given two roles on the Commission, evidence of the dual roles played by geographers during the period. Initially, he was placed in charge of preparing the country’s geography textbooks, with a mission to inculcate the youth with the right values for national survival. Under Zhang, the geography curriculum became more explicit, emphasising the need to protect China’s territorial integrity. Then, in September 1934, Zhang was deployed as ‘head of geography’ for a two-year-long investigation of the country’s northwestern frontier: the provinces of Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia and Qinghai. It was an academic mission with strategic importance. With Tibet having achieved de facto independence and Xinjiang ruled by warlords, the Nanjing government needed to know whether the surrounding provinces might also try to break away. The geographers were also tasked with drafting a plan for the economic development of the region to connect it more closely to the heartland. … Meanwhile, the national situation was becoming ever more critical. Japan had invaded ‘China proper’ in July 1937 and by the end of the year its forces had captured Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing. As the crisis grew deeper, Chiang Kai-shek urged the use of geography and history as tools to spread Guomindang ideology among the country’s youth. On 28 August 1938 Chiang gave a speech to the first graduation ceremony for the Central Training Corps ( a paramilitary organisation intended to indoctrinate army officers and senior civil servants ) in the city of Hankou, in which he told his audience: If our people do not know the glory of our national history, how can they fully perceive our humiliation today? If they are not familiar with the geography of our nation, how can they find the resolve to restore our lost territory? From today forward, we must not tread this disastrous path any longer: we must absolutely give special emphasis to history and geography education, to stimulate the citizens’ patriotic spirit to defend the country, and launch our people’s brilliant and dazzling new destiny! Taiwan as a Separate Entity. … The Japanese invasion had, unsurprisingly, forced Chiang Kai-shek to pay more attention to geopolitics. During the early part of 1938 the Japanese started to occupy the area between Beijing and Nanjing, and on 25 March they attempted to seize the crucial transport hub of Tai’erzhuang, about halfway between the northern and southern capitals. The battle happened to coincide with an Extraordinary National Congress of the Guomindang, called by Chiang Kai-shek to approve his de facto military control of the government. On 1 April the congress did so, appointing him ‘director-general’ of the party. As the fighting raged in Tai’erzhuang, the meeting in Hankou discussed the government’s foreign policy and handling of the war. In the speeches and resolutions we see the emergence of Chiang’s geopolitical ideas. In his speech on ‘The Anti-Japanese Resistance War and the Future of Our Party’, Chiang argued, ‘We must enable Korea and Taiwan to restore their independence and freedom, and enable them to solidify the national defence of the Republic of China and consolidate the base for peace in East Asia.’ Significantly, although he noted that Taiwan had been part of China’s sovereign territory ( lingtu) in the past, he did not call for either  Unit 1 Lesson 4 12 territory to be incorporated into China. What was important was the two territories’ strategic position and their potential role as buffer states on the country’s frontier. In retrospect, what is remarkable is how uncontroversial this was at the time. The Communist Party had long supported independence for Taiwan, rather than reincorporation into China. At its sixth congress in 1928, the party had recognised the Taiwanese as a separate nationality. In November 1938 the party plenum resolved to ‘build an anti-Japanese united front between the Chinese and the Korean, Taiwanese and other peoples’, implicitly drawing a distinction between Taiwanese and Chinese. At this time, in the Communist view, the Taiwanese were a separate minzu. This continued into the early 1940s with articles by both Zhou Enlai, in July 1941, and Marshal Zhu De, in November 1941, describing the future liberated Taiwan as a separate nation-state. Even when the Communist Party declared war on Japan in December 1941, its announcement listed the people of Taiwan separately from the Chinese. This view of Taiwan’s separateness formed a consensus in Chinese politics at least until 1942. Three things seem to have changed the situation. Firstly, the United States entered the war, in December 1941, and it became possible to imagine the defeat of Japan. It was only then that the Guomindang government formally declared war on Japan and unilaterally renounced the Treaty of Shimonoseki. As a result, Chiang’s thoughts turned to post-war geopolitics. Secondly, Chiang was looking for ways to divert Japanese war efforts by promoting unrest in areas under its control, such as Taiwan. And thirdly, a tiny number of Taiwanese, who had fled Japanese colonialism for exile on the mainland, were actively lobbying the Guomindang to think of Taiwan as part of China. Dozens of small Taiwanese exile organisations had been formed in China during the 1920s and 1930s, but they only began to unite and gain political influence after the start of the war with Japan. Being able to speak Japanese made these activists very useful in both intelligence and propaganda work, something that gave them access to the military leadership. Many of them had also been trained in the latest medical methods by the Japanese and provided hospital services behind the front lines. One doctor, Weng Junming, who had joined Sun Yat-sen’s Tongmenghuiin 1912 as a nineteen-year-old student, became a key figure. In September 1940, following lobbying by Weng Junming, the Guomindang formed a ‘Taiwan Party Headquarters Preparatory Committee’ and put Weng in charge. In February 1941 an alliance of several small Taiwanese groups came together to create the Taiwan Revolutionary League which, in June 1942, was formally recognised by the Guomindang. On Claiming Taiwan. It was at this moment that the Guomindang’s discussion of Taiwan changed radically. In mid-1942 it began to use the term retrocession (guangfu), a word with particular nationalistic significance. Guangfu had been used during the Tang Dynasty (618–906) to describe the regaining of control over land previously conquered by foreigners. Comparing themselves to the Tang Dynasty gave the Guomindang a useful propaganda boost during the dark times of war with Japan and increasing hostility with the Communist Party. It is interesting to note, however, that the party felt it had to make a case for guangfu – it was by no means a logical step. Research by the historian Steve Phillips shows that they did so in several ways: by appealing to ideas of racial solidarity (that Taiwanese are of the Han bloodline ), historical precedent (the two centuries of rule by the Qing ), the illegitimacy of the Treaty of Shimonoseki and the assertion that guangfu was something that the Taiwanese population wanted. It seems from Chiang’s writings, however, that his own desire to incorporate Taiwan into the Republic was primarily driven by geopolitics. In November 1942 he began drafting his post- war manifesto, the book-length China’s Destiny (Zhongguo zhi mingyun) with the help of ghostwriters, of whom the most important was Chen Bulei. The text also shows the strong influence of geographers. Zhang Qiyun had been personal friends with Chiang for about two years by this stage and did not leave for the United States until June 1943, three months after the book had been published. China’s Destiny talks about the country forming ‘a self-contained unit’ and ‘each  Unit 1 Lesson 4 13 region [having] its own particular soil and natural resources’ and with a ‘division of labour... largely determined by their physical conditions’. The echoes of Zhang’s earlier textbooks are clear. The book then moves on to the question of national defence. ‘If even one area is occupied by a different race [yizu], then the entire nation and entire state loses the natural barriers for self- defence. Therefore Taiwan, Penghu, the four northeast provinces, inner and outer Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet are all strongholds for the protection of the nation’s survival.’ There is a chauvinistic vision of the country here: in order to defend ‘China’, the surrounding areas need to be incorporated into its defences, regardless of their ethnic composition. It appears, therefore, that during 1942 Taiwan became important to Chiang and the Guomindang both as a bulwark against foreign invasion and as evidence of its commitment to ending national humiliation. Chiang also began to press for other territories to be ‘returned’ to the Republic. He lobbied Indian nationalists to win support for his claim on Tibet and sought the early return of Hong Kong’s New Territories from Britain. The British were not prepared to concede either point, but they were willing to see Japan give back Manchuria and Taiwan. The compromise was sealed at the Cairo Conference between Chiang, Churchill and Roosevelt in November 1943. Thus it was that Taiwan’s guangfu was arranged. And so it came to pass in 1945. On 9 September, General Isayama Haruki, the Japanese chief of staff in Taiwan, flew to Nanjing to formally surrender. Guomindang forces finally arrived on the island on 25 October. However, there were many people on Taiwan who had no wish to be incorporated into the Republic. Some had benefited from the Japanese occupation, some objected to the corruption of the Guomindang, while others were simply hostile towards incomers from the mainland. To compound the problem, local feeling was ineptly handled by Chen Yi, the official whom Chiang had appointed as the island’s new governor-general, and discontent grew. Protests finally exploded on 28 February 1947 and were met with extreme violence. By the end of March, at least 5,000 Taiwanese ( some say 20,000) had been killed by Chen Yi’s mainland forces. All of this undermined the nationalist proclamations of unity that had underpinned the calls for guangfu. Nonetheless, within two years of the massacres, the island became critical to the survival of the Guomindang. As the Communist Party gained the upper hand in the civil war, Chiang Kai-shek’s thoughts turned to the question of survival. Where was the best place for his government to retreat to? He favoured the southwest, around his wartime capital Chongqing, or the island of Hainan. In late 1948 he consulted his geopolitical adviser, Zhang Qiyun. Zhang turned his understanding of the country’s regional geography into a wish-list for the party’s last redoubt. It required a place that could be easily defended but was within striking distance of the mainland; that was fertile for agriculture and large enough to feed several million people, possessed of well-developed infrastructure and an industrial base, and was largely free of Communist Party supporters. In his geographer’s opinion, the best option was Taiwan. Zhang was right. Chongqing and Hainan fell but Taiwan held out. Ultimately then, the reason why Taiwan has a different government from the People’s Republic, and why there are increasingly loud calls for the island to formally declare its independence, is because of the advice of a geography professor from Zhejiang University. Zhang himself finally departed Shanghai for Taiwan in May 1949, with Communist forces about to storm the city. His teacher and mentor Zhu Kezhen, who had fallen out with the Guomindang, opted to remain in Shanghai and live under Communist Party rule. The two never met again. Once on Taiwan, Zhang became a senior figure in Chiang’s reorganised Guomindang. He was initially put in charge of administrative and logistical matters, and became, in turn, a member of the first National Assembly, general-secretary of the Guomindang’s Central Committee and then minister of education. His final work was the establishment of the ‘Chinese Culture University’ in Taipei, dedicated to making the island more Chinese – a form of intellectual guangfu. … Borders and formally defined territories are a modern, European invention imposed on, and adopted by, Asian elites over the course of a violent century. The new Chinese  Unit 1 Lesson 4 14 nationalism that emerged from the ruins of the Qing Empire manifested itself as a desire to be a ‘normal country’, equal to the industrial powers and part of an international system. The nationalists made a choice without really realising they had done so. By choosing to exert a Chinese claim over a multi-ethnic domain, a decision predicated upon a new Han chauvinism, they obliged the Republic to extend its reach into the furthest, most marginal regions. This was, in effect, a new colonialism: expanding ‘Han’ Chinese rule into places it had never reached before. The geographers’ maps and surveys led the way and their textbooks and national humiliation maps built support for the project back in the heartland. The geographers and the Guomindang worked together to make the imaginary boundaries real and create a national territory – a lingtu– both on the ground and in the minds of the citizens. They did so by generating a fear of loss, of humiliation, that continues to animate Chinese policy to this day. The Republic of China only formally recognised the independence of Mongolia under the terms of the 1946 Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, and following a referendum in which the Mongolians nominally exercised their right of self-determination. The border between China and Russia, ostensibly agreed in 1689 with the Treaty of Nerchinsk, was only finally settled on 14 October 2008 with a deal on islands in the Amur River. The border between Guangxi province and Vietnam, although agreed in 1894, was only formally demarcated in 2009. Tibet was forcibly incorporated into the People’s Republic of China in 1950, bringing a Chinese state face-to-face with India for the first time. …  Unit 1 Lesson 5 1 China’s Invention of a Maritime Claim This lesson provides a historical background of China’s maritime claim and of her errors, which instead of having been rectified were rather reinforced by Chinese officials resulting in the current crisis in the South China Sea. Learning Outcomes 1. assess whether or not China has an undisputable maritime claim in the South China Sea 2. identify and defend one’s position in China’s claim over the entire South China Sea Key Concepts to Understand Paracel Islands Pratas Island Spratly excerpt: Hayton, B. (2020). The invention of China. London: Yale University Press. Late May 2019, the Sapura Esperanza drilling barge is at work in the southern part of the South China Sea. The barge floats about 100 metres above an area of seabed officially defined by the Malaysian authorities as exploration block SK320. Three thousand metres below the seabed lies the Pegaga gas field. Once this well, known as F14, is drilled and prepared, the gas will be pumped down a thirty-eight-inch pipeline, at a rate of half a billion cubic feet per day, to the city of Bintulu, about 250 kilometres away, where it will generate electricity for the people and businesses of the state of Sarawak. Managing a three-kilometre-long drill pipe while floating in the middle of the South China Sea is a tricky operation; the last thing the engineers want is distractions. But early that May morning, an unwelcome visitor arrived: China Coast Guard vessel CCG 35111. The ship was not passing through on its way to a friendly port; CCG 35111 had come to intrude and harass. It circled the drilling barge at high speed, impeding the passage of support vessels in clear violation of international maritime rules. For about a month, since the barge had begun drilling, the Royal Malaysian Navy had been expecting something like this. As a result, its patrol vessel, the KD Kelantan, was already on station. At the time the Chinese vessel was detected, KD Kelantan was on the eastern side of a reef known as the Luconia Breakers, part of the larger series of rock formations known collectively as the Luconia Shoals, named after a British ship that plotted their location in 1803. Malaysia calls it Beting Hempasan Bantin. Navigating carefully through the dangerous shallows, the KD Kelantan moved to put itself between the Chinese ship and the drilling barge. CCG 35111 got the message and moved away. But the next day it returned, and again the next day. For three days, the two played cat-and-mouse around the coral reef before the Chinese ship moved to a safe distance. Even then it did not move away entirely but sat on the horizon watching the drilling operation continue until CCG 35111 was replaced, three days later, by an even bigger China Coast Guard vessel. There has been at least one China Coast Guard ship on station near Luconia Shoals since the middle of 2013. On the surface it may be hard to see why: it is an inhospitable spot of the earth’s surface. Occasionally shingle builds up to form a small sandbank on one of the reefs, but it can be washed away again in a single storm. European navigators marked this part of the sea ‘dangerous ground’ on their maps and largely kept clear. Yet there are reasons for countries to covet this piece of water: the reefs are rich in fish and the rock beneath is even richer in gas and oil. That is one of the reasons why, in 1982, almost every country agreed rules for dividing up the world’s underwater resources. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) allotted each state with a coast an ‘Exclusive Economic Zone’, stretching up to 200 nautical miles (approximately 400 kilometres) out from their shores. UNCLOS was supposed to prevent disputes such as the one playing out around the Luconia Shoals. And yet the China Coast  Unit 1 Lesson 5 2 Guard is there, 1,500 kilometres from Hainan Island, the nearest piece of undisputed Chinese land. China claims the Luconia Shoals as part of its national territory, even though there is no territory actually there, beyond a shifting sandbank. Its claim becomes even more surreal 120 kilometres to the southwest at a place called the James Shoal, probably named after one of the ‘White Rajahs’ of Sarawak, Sir James Brooke. There is no land there at all, just a piece of shallow sea, around twenty-two metres deep. And yet the James Shoal is officially the southernmost point of Chinese territory. Even today, a typical task in a Chinese school geography class is to measure the distance between the country’s furthest extremities: from the border with Russia in the north to a patch of sea 100 kilometres off the coast of Borneo. Teachers don’t explain to their children why this piece of non-territory should rightfully belong to China. Almost no one in China actually knows. A typical response to the question is to say that it has been Chinese ‘since ancient times’. The real story is that it only became part of China’s territorial claim in the South China Sea because of a series of screw-ups by Chinese officials in the 1930s. No Chinese government even thought of claiming the James Shoal and the Luconia Shoals before 1946. It is not just Malaysia that finds itself the subjectof unwelcome attention. China has obstructed oil and gas drilling at other underwater features, too. Off the southeastern coast of Vietnam is an area of shallow sea called the Vanguard Bank, named after a British brig which spotted it in 1846. It too is rich in oil and gas and it too has been the site of several maritime confrontations between Vietnam and China since the early 1990s. The Philippines finds itself in the same situation, near a feature called Sea Horse Shoal, spotted by a ship of the same name in 1776. The Philippines won a ruling from an International Arbitral Tribunal in 2016 making clear that it was the legitimate owner of all the marine resources in the area. China refused to accept that ruling and, according to the Philippines president, Rodrigo Duterte, his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping threatened him with the prospect of war if the Philippines tried to develop the natural gas known to be nearby. China has never made clear the exact legal basis of its claim to the marine resources so close to other countries’ coasts. All we know is that it has something to do with a line that first appeared on Chinese maps in 1948. In its original incarnation, this ‘U-shaped line’ around most of the South China Sea was comprised of eleven dashes. In 1953 two of the dashes in the Gulf of Tonkin were dropped, probably as part of a deal with the communist party in Vietnam, giving us the ‘nine-dash line’ of today’s headlines. In recent years, China has raised the status of this line to a near religious level by printing it in passports and legislating to ensure that every map published in the country includes it. Leaders vow to defend every inch of it and threaten war on anyone who tries to violate it. But how did this line come to be drawn and why did it take the shape that it did? The most tragic part of the South China Sea disputes is that the world could witness a superpower conflict simply because of poor translation and bad map-making in the middle part of the twentieth century. … The island of Pratas sits like a pearl mounted on a ring-like reef in the sea between Hong Kong and Taiwan. It is a near-perfect desert island: the highest point is just a few metres above the waves, the beaches are fringed with a few palm trees and a lagoon fills and empties with the tide; turtles and fish can be caught in the shallows. The currents are dangerous, however, and the coral is sharp. Sometimes, brave fishermen come here to rest and repair their nets but there is no fertile land and minimal fresh water. The British naturalist Cuthbert Collingwood visited it in 1867, while sailing with HMS Serpent, and reported it was ‘occasionally visited by Chinese fishermen’, and found a dilapidated wooden temple. The only other visitors are birds: millions of them. It is the birds that make Pratas an attractive prize for one Japanese entrepreneur. Japan’s industrial workforce needs cheaper rice, its rice farmers need fertiliser and Pratas is covered with it. The island is metres deep in guano, petrified bird droppings rich in  Unit 1 Lesson 5 3 nitrogen, phosphate and potassium. In 1910 the German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch will perfect their catalytic process for manufacturing ammonia. Until then, guano is what keeps the fields green in the industrialised world. The trade has already brought fleeting wealth, and permanent environmental destruction, to dozens of islands across the Pacific, and Japanese merchants are willing to take big risks for the prize. So in mid-1907, Nishizawa Yoshiji, an entrepreneur from Osaka, lands on Pratas seeking a fortune. He brings along over 100 workers, who set up accommodation, offices and railway tracks on the island to shift the guano from where the birds have dropped it, down to the beach. As the shipments start arriving in Osaka, rumours start to spread about what is really happening on Pratas. From early September 1907, worried articles appear in Western newspapers suggesting that a naval base could be under construction. The Americans are particularly concerned, given the proximity of Pratas to their recently acquired colony of the Philippine Islands. So when the United States’ secretary of war, William H. Taft, visits Shanghai in December 1907 (on his way back from attending the inauguration of the first Philippine Assembly) he receives an urgent telegram from Washington instructing him to ask the Qing government what it knows about the matter. By all accounts, the officials know absolutely nothing about the matter but apparently insist that the island ‘indisputably’ belongs to the Qing Empire. Yet, nothing was done about the presence of a foreign merchant stealing the empire’s guano resources for well over a year. The press reports dried up and the authorities turned their attention to more pressing maritime matters. Shortly before Secretary Taft’s visit, the British authorities in Hong Kong resolved to do something about the worsening piracy problem in the waters around their colony. As order slowly collapsed across Guangdong it was sometimes hard to tell which criminals were revolutionaries, which were bandits and which had official connections. There was little trust in the provincial authorities and the merchants of Hong Kong were demanding action. As a result, the British and other European powers announced they would despatch gunboats to patrol the West River, leading inland from Guangzhou. Society to Recover the Nation’s Rights. This provoked a huge reaction from sections of the citizenry. On 22 November 1907 a group of students founded the ‘Society to Recover the Nation’s Rights’ to campaign against the British operation. They were joined by the ‘Guangzhou Merchants’ Self-Government Society’ and enjoyed the tacit support of the governor-general. The crisis was only resolved in January 1908, when the governor-general appointed General Li as provincial naval commander with the rank of admiral and a mission to crack down on piracy. The British then decided to withdraw their gunboats, something that was greeted as a huge victory by the nationalists. Admiral Li became the hero of the hour. His prestige only grew higher when, the following month, he led an operation to seize a cargo of weapons being smuggled to the revolutionaries aboard a Japanese freighter, the Tatsu Maru. However, the Japanese government demanded a formal apology for the seizure of the Tatsu Maru, plus the payment of an indemnity and the punishment of the officials involved. As a result, 20,000 people joined a protest in Guangzhou on 18 March, organised by the Self-Government Society. Despite this, the Qing authorities did agree to apologise, to make a symbolic salute of the Japanese flag and to release the ship. But they refused to release the impounded guns and ammunition. Instead, they paid the Japanese government 21,400 yen in compensation. Two days later, the Self-Government Society designated the date that the Tatsu Maru was released as ‘National Humiliation Commemoration Day’. It also declared a boycott of Japanese goods, which the central government banned, under pressure from Japanese diplomats. The crisis fizzled out, but the resentment remained. Pratas Island. Li Zhun was at the heart of this episode and the Japanese wanted him punished. However, the Qing governor-general valued him as an effective commander and the British valued his efforts against piracy so he remained in post. He spent the rest of 1908  Unit 1 Lesson 5 4 suppressing unrest in Guangdong and Guangxi and became increasingly popular in both Hong Kong and Guangzhou. He was happy to give interviews to the English-language press and clearly relished the subsequent publicity. Shortly after the Tatsu Maru incident, he was asked by a journalist about the reports from Pratas. The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser reported, ‘When asked as to whether the statement Japan had seized an island to the South of Hongkong, known as the Pratas Island is true, the Admiral [Li Zhun] replied that he was making investigations and did not care to say much on that question. In fact, almost a year went by before he said anything at all. The Qing navy barely existed in the 1900s. The results of two decades of ‘self- strengthening’ policies, intended to create dockyards, skilled technicians and modern maritime forces (policies which had the unintended consequence of allowing translations of Western social and political theory to reach Chinese audiences …) were literally sunk, or captured, during the 1894/5 war with Japan. The surviving ships were too small to do more than patrol rivers or the immediate coastline. The only organisation with the ability to sail further afield was the Imperial Maritime Customs Service, which, although a government agency, was a hybrid organisation, mainly run by foreigners. … In the absence of a genuine navy, the Customs Service was given the task of investigating developments on Pratas. The trigger seems to have been complaints from fishermen chased away from the island by Mr Nishizawa’s workers. A customs cutter was despatched to Pratas, arriving on 1 March 1909 carrying a young British officer, Hamilton Foote-Carey. After a brief discussion, the ship returned to port. Two weeks later it came back, accompanied by a Chinese gunboat carrying the heroic admiral, Li Zhun. They were appalled to see over 100 labourers mining guano under a Rising Sun flag. Nishizawa, however, would not be moved. He had found the guano, and since no one occupied the island, he claimed it was his. When this news reached Guangdong, with anti-Japanese feeling already running high, crowds poured onto the streets. The main Hong Kong newspaper, the South China Morning Post (SCMP), noted drily that ‘The local Chinese mind has been agitated somewhat’ and that ‘the Chinese in the south are not taking the matter kindly’. On 19 March the paper reported that the governor-general ‘has deemed it expedient in the interests of peace, to prohibit the vernacular [Chinese-language] press making further reference to the subject of an inflammatory nature or otherwise’. The Self-Government Society and others began to revive the anti-Japanese boycott, despite its illegality. With its exports coming under pressure, the Japanese government agreed to negotiate over the fate of Pratas. If the Qing authorities could prove that they owned it, then Tokyo would recognise their claim. This set off a hunt that continues to this day: a search for evidence to prove that islands in the South China Sea belong to China. It became a passionate cause for nationalist agitators and officials alike. Some went to interview fishermen, seeking details of voyages, but Admiral Li Zhun went to the archives, seeking documents. In his own account, published many years later, he said it was not easy: ‘We searched old Chinese maps, books, and the Guangdong Provincial Gazetteer and could not find such a name [Pratas]. Observer Wang Xuecen, who reads extensively, …: “In the time of the Qianlong emperor [ 1735–1796], the general of Gaoliang, Chen Lunjiong, wrote a book titled Record of Sea Nation Observations, in which the name of that island is recorded.” … used that book to negotiate with the Japanese about the return of the island.’ In other words, the only evidence the Qing authorities could muster was a book that was at least a century old. However, the Japanese side were willing to accept it, so long as Nishizawa was compensated for having to abandon his operation. There were then five months of negotiations over the value of this compensation. In October, the governor-general agreed to pay 160,000 silver dollars to Nishizawa in exchange for him abandoning his activities and Japan recognising Qing sovereignty. Nishizawa agreed to pay $20,000 for destroying a fishermen’s temple he had found on the island. Honour was satisfied all round. The governor-general hoped to recoup the cost by taking over the guano operation and directing the profits towards Guangzhou. However, the practicalities of economic  Unit 1 Lesson 5 5 development were more difficult than he realised. Almost a year later, in August 1910, the Guangdong provincial authorities attempted to restart guano extraction on Pratas. Lacking the necessary knowledge, they contracted Nishizawa’s firm to run it on their behalf! Paracel Islands. While all this was going on, Admiral Li came to hear of another maritime territory previously unknown to him: the Paracel Islands, southwest of Hong Kong in the direction of Indochina. According to Li’s later account, he had only been informed of their existence by the commander of the ‘Left Fleet’, Lin Guoxiang, an experienced sailor. Admiral Li lobbied the governor-general to pay for an expedition to the Paracels to try to prevent any Japanese guano-miners making inroads there. However, Li’s naval forces didn’t have the ability to sail that far so, once again, the Customs Service was asked to step in. At the end of March 1909, the Customs’ cruiser Kaiban transported three of the governor-general’s officials to the islands. When it returned to Hong Kong on 15 April, it apparently ‘caused wonder in the local population by exhibiting 20 or so enormous turtles brought back from these deserted islands’, according to the French consul. The interest in these rare creatures and general atmosphere of surprise demonstrate how little Chinese officials and the general public knew about the islands before 1909. Aside from a few fishermen, almost no one had cared about their existence until the Japanese showed up. That had now dramatically changed. In the wake of this mini-success, Admiral Li persuaded the governor-general to pay for a second expedition to the Paracels. This would have two purposes: the voyage would make a formal claim of sovereignty over the islands, and the ensuing flag-waving would generate huge support for the officials seen to be standing up against the foreigners. The mission would involve three ‘small Cantonese gunboats’ (as the French consul described them) – the Fupo, Chinhao and Kwongkum – with 106 people aboard, including the admiral himself, the regional supervisor (daotai), the secretary of the provincial finance department and the provincial salt commissioner: in all, a high-status delegation. Also on board was a German radio engineer named Herr Brauns, whose job was to send back details of the flotilla’s progress to the media in Hong Kong, plus a journalist from the Hong Kong-based newspaper of Sun Yat-sen’s pro-revolution Xingzhonghui, the Zhongguo Ribao/Chung kuo jih pao. Admiral Li wanted the expedition to be front-page news. Something that wasn’t mentioned in the coverage was that the expedition was actually guided by a second German: the deputy head of the trading house Carlowitz & Co., based in Hong Kong. Europeans were generally far more familiar with the Paracels than the local officials, since they frequently sailed past them while travelling to and from home. They regarded the islands more as a threat to shipping than a nationalist cause célèbre. The three-boat flotilla left Guangzhou around 14 May 1909, and stopped in Hong Kong until 21 May. It then headed on to Hainan Island, staying close to shore, with stops in Haikou, Sama Bay and Yulinkan, where they were delayed by a typhoon. At this point, the ociety to Recover the Nation’s Kwongkum had to return to Haikou. The other two ships made a dash for the Paracels, and spent three days exploring the archipelago. Li Zhun declared Chinese sovereignty over them in a manner familiar to the imperial powers: firing cannon volleys, hoisting flags and giving the islands new Chinese names. One island was named Fubo and another Chenhang after the ships. Another was called Ganquan because of the presence of a well, and others were named after senior officials. This was remarkably similar to the actions of the British, almost exactly a century before, who had named some of the Paracel Islands after their ships (including Antelope Reef and Discovery Reef) and others after managers of the East India Company: Drummond, Duncan, Money, Pattle and Roberts. The return of the ships to Hong Kong on 9 June should have been an opportunity for Li and the Guangdong authorities to proclaim their patriotic credentials. However, the South China Morning Post reported the ‘extreme reticence’ of the officials who took part in the expedition to talk to its correspondent. It seems they were underwhelmed by what they had discovered. Rather than the land of opportunity that they had imagined, it turned out that the Paracel Islands  Unit 1 Lesson 5 6 were small and barren. By late June, expectations were so low that the Guangdong authorities were proposing ‘converting the inhabitable portions of the Paracels into a penal settlement, the convicts to be employed in agricultural pursuits and timber working on Tree Island’, according to the SCMP. Even this desperate idea failed to get anywhere. The governor-general was transferred to a new post and everyone forgot about the whole thing. However, the mission to claim the Paracels for China had served its purpose. It helped to shore up a collapsing regime in Guangdong and rally the people against the foreigners for a few weeks. That three-day public-relations exercise still forms the foundation of China’s territorial claim in the South China Sea today. But it would be the last time any Chinese official visited the islands for almost two decades. They had more important things to do. In the meantime, other Japanese guano merchants landed on the islands, completely ignoring the question of sovereignty. The ‘Southern Prosperity Industries Company’ and others extracted large amounts of fertiliser without anyone on the mainland taking any action throughout the 1910s and 1920s. … France’s Claim Over the Paracels. There was no such good fortune for the guano miners of Pratas Island, however. After taking formal ownership of the reef in 1909, the Guangdong authorities had attempted to restart production on the island. However, during the 1911/12 revolution the workers were completely forgotten about. The mainland authorities failed to resupply them and they starved to death. The French colonial authorities in Indochina had observed Admiral Li’s claim-making in the Paracels with detached bemusement. At the time, they had very little interest in the islands but that was about to change. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Vietnamese court had licensed fishermen to salvage cannon and other valuables from ships wrecked on the reefs. But after the French occupation (which began in Saigon in 1859 and reached the Qing frontier in 1887 ) those expeditions seem to have ceased. It wasn’t until an enterprising marine biologist, Armand Krempf, sought to bolster his indifferent scientific reputation with research into coral formation that the French authorities started to take an interest. Krempf and his fellow researchers from the Oceanographic Institute of Indochina made their first voyage to the Paracels in 1925. Soon afterwards, entrepreneurs caught a whiff of guano and a few industrialists began to petition the French colonial government for permission to exploit the islands. In December 1928 the governor-general of Indochina, Pierre Pasquier, wrote to the French Minister of Colonies in Paris, calling for the islands to be annexed. Paris was unwilling to do so, afraid of a possible reaction against French interests in China. However, Krempf’s 1931 expedition to the islands included a mining engineer who estimated that the remaining guano on Roberts Island alone, even after the activities of Japanese firms, would meet Indochina’s needs for twenty years. At around the same time, the governments of both France and Britain were becoming increasingly concerned about Japan’s military interests in the islands and the potential threat to their colonies in Southeast Asia. These two motivations appear to have been sufficient for Paris to overcome its reservations and, on 4 December 1931, to formally claim sovereignty over the Paracels. The Chinese government took nearly eight months to respond but, on 27 July 1932, the Chinese legation in Paris was instructed to formally reject the French claim. Their note made the point that the Paracels were the southernmost point of Chinese territory. France’s Annexation of Six Spratly Features. Then, on Bastille Day the following year, 14 July 1933, the French government announced that it had annexed six of the Spratly Islands, a completely separate group of islets 750 kilometres south of the Paracels. There was uproar in China, but also confusion. It is obvious from newspaper reports and government documents of the time that neither Chinese officials nor the general public had any idea where the Spratlys actually were. There was a general assumption that they were the same features –  Unit 1 Lesson 5 7 the Paracels – over which France and China were already in dispute. An official telegram sent from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Chinese consul in Manila on 17 July 1933 contains the questions, ‘Where exactly are these islands? Are they the Paracels?’ A similar telegram was sent by the ministry to the navy, whose response was surprising, given present- day assertions that China has governed the islands ‘since ancient times’. Chen Shaokuan of the Navy Ministry replied, telling the Foreign Ministry: ‘There are no “nine islands” at 10°0a N 150°0 E between the Philippines and Vietnam. The nine islands between the Philippines and Vietnam are further north. These islands are the Xisha [Paracels] and are very close to Qiongzhou [ Hainan] Island.’ Further confusion was created in some quarters by mentions of another group of islands, the Qizhou, or ‘seven islands’ (known in English as the Taya Islands), which actually lie northeast of Hainan, 300 kilometres north of the Paracels. American records show that the Chinese consul in Manila, Kuang Guanglin ( K. L. Kwong), visited the US Coast and Geodetic Survey office there on 26 July and was surprised to discover that the Spratlys and Paracels were separate archipelagos. This information was transmitted back to the Chinese government, who were still in a quandary about what to do. While they deliberated, the newspapers filled with protest letters, news of demonstrations and criticism from officials unhappy with the Guomindang government’s leadership. The contrast between Chinese and foreign coverage of the issue was stark. While Chinese officials and journalists appear confused, the SCMP and other international newspapers were more familiar with the geography of the South China Sea. In several articles they pointed out that the Paracels and Spratlys were different archipelagos, a clarity that was quite absent from discussions in China. Misinformation Resulting in China’s Two Maritime Claims. At around this time, Admiral Li Zhun, who had retired, returned from obscurity to make an intervention that left a legacy of confusion that persists to this day. On 15 August, a month after news of the annexation broke, the Shanghai-based newspaper Shenbao published a long article featuring an account of Li’s original (1909) voyages to Pratas and the Paracels. A week later, on 21 August, Guowen zhoubao (‘National News Weekly’) reported that Li ‘came to our news agency and talked to the reporter about it in person’ and also printed what it claimed to be his original report in which he ‘discovered the 11 coral islands’ of the Paracels. By the end of the month, almost every Chinese newspaper had printed some version of Li’s account. As a result, almost every Chinese newspaper reader was told that the islands the French had just annexed were the Paracels (what were annexed were some features of the Spratlys ). By this time, the Republic’s Foreign Ministry had received information from its staff in Manila and Paris and was aware that the Paracels and Spratlys were different. Significantly, it decided that China had no grounds to claim the Spratlys and so would not object to the French annexation. It would settle for the Paracels. This put the government at odds with the mass of public opinion, which had already convinced itself, through the intervention of Admiral Li, among others, that China had annexed the Spratlys back in 1909. China now had two maritime claims: the government’s, which only encompassed the Paracels, and that of the angry public, which had already begun to extend as far as the Spratly Islands, even if they did not fully understand this. This confusion would have profound consequences right into the twenty-first century. Geologic Features Renamed to Chinese Names/Terms. To try to clear up this confusion, the government ordered a previously dormant body to investigate. The ‘Land and Water Maps Review Committee’ had been set up in 1930 in order to try to regularise the country’s cartography and define its borders but never actually met until June 1933, just before the French annexation of the Spratlys was announced. Once the crisis subsided, the committee was given the job of making sure that similar misunderstandings would not happen again.  Unit 1 Lesson 5 8 The committee did not have the capacity to undertake its own surveys, however. Instead, it undertook a table-top exercise: analysing maps produced by others and forming a consensus about names and locations. According to the committee’s own journal, it examined 630 Chinese maps and 120 books on national history and an unspecified number of foreign maps. When it came to the South China Sea, it is clear from the committee’s conclusions that its leading references were British, something which had far-reaching consequences. On 21 December 1934 the Review Committee held its twenty-fifth meeting and agreed on Chinese names for 132 features in the South China Sea. All of them were translations or transliterations of the names marked on British maps. In the Paracels, for example, Antelope Reef became Lingyang jiao and Money Island became Jinyin dao – both direct translations. The names that Admiral Li had given to the Paracels in 1909 were ignored. In the Spratlys, North Danger Reef became Beixian, another translation from the English. Spratly Island became Si-ba-la-tuo (a phonetic transliteration of the name of the English sea captain, Richard Spratly ), and Luconia Shoals was transliterated as Lu-kang-ni-ya. We know exactly where the committee’s list of island names came from because it contains several mistakes which are only found in one other document: the ‘China Sea Directory’ published by the UK Hydrographic Office in 1906. This British list is the origin of all the names now used by China. Some of the names on the list had Chinese origins, such as Subi Reef in the Spratlys, while others had Malay origins ( such as Passu Keah in the Paracels), but more than 90 per cent were coined by British navigators. Translating these names caused some difficulties and a legacy that disturbs the region to this day. It is clear that the committee members were confused by the English words ‘bank’ and ‘shoal’. Both words mean an area of shallow sea: the former describes a raised area of sea bed, the latter is a nautical expression derived from Old English meaning ‘shallow’. However, the committee chose to translate both into Chinese as tan, which has the ambiguous translation of ‘sandbank’, a feature that might be above or below water. Sea Horse Shoal, off the Philippines, was dubbed Haima Tan; James Shoal, just 100 kilometres off the coast of Borneo, was given the name Zengmu tan, and Vanguard Bank, off the southeastern coast of Vietnam, was given the name Qianwei tan. Zengmu is simply the transliteration of ‘James’, Haimais the Chinese for seahorse, Qianwei is a translation of ‘vanguard’ and tan, as mentioned above, is the erroneous translation of ‘bank’ and ‘shoal’. As a result of this bureaucratic mistake, these underwater features, along with several others, were turned into islands in the Chinese imagination. This screw-up, ultimately, is the reason why the Sapura Esperanza was harassed while drilling for gas near the James Shoal eighty-five years later. China is prepared to go to war over a translation mistake. As a final flourish, in April 1935 the Review Committee printed a map of the South China Sea with all the ‘new’ names included. The map had an ambiguous title, Zhongguo nanhai ge daoyu tu, which could be translated both as ‘Map of China’s Islands in the South Sea’ and also ‘Map of Islands in the South China Sea’. There is no evidence that, even at this point, the committee was actually asserting a territorial claim to the Spratlys. There was no boundary line marked on the map and no indication about which features the committee considered to be Chinese and which not. Its members chose to use the name Nansha – ‘southern sands’ – to refer to the Macclesfield Bank, a submerged feature that actually lies in the centre of the sea. The officials appear to have done this because, at the time, it was the southernmost feature claimed by China. It became the third point of a triangle marked by Dongsha (East Sand/Pratas), Xisha (West Sand/Paracels), and now Nansha (South Sand/Macclesfield Bank). The committee conferred the Chinese name Tuanshaon the Spratlys. The name vaguely translates as ‘area of sand’. In 1935 neither the committee nor the Chinese government was prepared to stake a claim to the Spratlys.  Unit 1 Lesson 5 9 Bai Meichu. The man who caused China to claim non-existent islands hundreds of kilometres from its shores was a Manchu who probably never went to sea in his life. Bai Meichu was born into relatively humble origins in 1876 in what is now Hebei province, 200 kilometres due east of the Forbidden City. Growing up in Lulong county, his early life must have been surrounded by trauma: the great famine of 1876–9, which first stirred Timothy Richard’s radical conscience; the Sino-Japanese War of 1894/5 and the Boxer Uprising of 1899–1901. Bai was part of the last generation to be trained for the old scholar-bureaucracy: his family had enough money to have him privately schooled and, at the age of fifteen, he earned the title of xiucai, the first rung on the traditional ladder to success. Before he could climb it, however, that ladder was pulled away as the Qing Great-State entered its final decline. Bai was part of a generation that was caught up in a time of extreme uncertainty. To borrow Antonio Gramsci’s phrase, the old world was dying all around him but the new could not yet be born. Bai was sent to one of the newly established ‘modern’ schools, Jingsheng College in Yongping (now known as Lulong) in Hebei, which taught both Chinese and Western subjects. He was among the first to experience the clash between traditional ideas of geography as expressed in the ancient texts and the new ideas arriving through the missionaries and the treaty ports. In later life he described reading the ‘Classic of Mountains and Seas’, the ‘Tribute of Yu’ and the ‘Shangshu’, but these 2,000-year-old documents were a poor guide to the changes that Bai was witnessing all around him. Once, he might have expec