What This Book Is (Not) About
To start, it is appropriate to say what this book is not about: in its pages, readers will not find a discussion of the evolution of the territorial and maritime disputes in the South China Sea. Nor does it add to, and engage with, the already highly extensive academic literature on the disputes that has narrowly focused on China’s assertive or expansionist behaviour and its ‘salami-slicing’ strategy as a means to change the status quo incrementally in China’s favour.1 Instead, the empirical puzzles that have energised this study centre on why China is determined to lay claim to the barely inhabited insular features to the extent that it runs a risk of having direct confrontation with other claimant states and the US, and why the US also appears doggedly determined to contest and reject China’s territorial and maritime claims, even though it simultaneously pledges that it takes no position on the sovereignty disputes.2 In order to answer these thorny questions, the chapters in this book uncover and delve into how order is being challenged in the South China Sea. Hence, the aim of this book is to research the territorial disputes—the overlapping claims to ownership over uninhabitable rocks and features in many cases, and the resources contained in the surrounding waters—from the perspective of international order, national identity and social legitimacy. In this way, we view the territorial disputes as symptomatic of, or as a catalyst for, a bigger problem for the existing maritime order in the South China Sea. We seek to show that behind the disputes is a more complex regional picture, with major repercussions for international order and regional maritime order, since the South China Sea currently is the main site for competition between the existing regional order-builder, the US, and the aspiring and re-emerging order-builder, China.
Chinese leaders must have been aware that the ‘expansionist’ policy they implement serves to renege on their assurance to China’s neighbouring countries that it is a benign re-emerging power pursuing ‘peaceful development/rise’.3 Why do they show few signs of retreat or constraints? Instead, there are numerous reports on China’s militarisation of insular and man-made features in the South China Sea at both its south-eastern (Subi, Fiery Cross and Mischief Reefs) and north-western (Woody Island) ends as an attempt to create the equivalent of a ‘strategic strait’ in the South China Sea. Beijing allegedly seeks to transform the Sea into a ‘zone of anti-access/area denial (A2/AD)’,4 and deployed anti-ship cruise missiles and surface-to-air missiles at the outposts on the aforementioned three reefs in south-eastern South China Sea in May 2018,5 and conducted a series of anti-ship missile tests there in late June 2019.6
Rationalist accounts may attribute China’s revisionist and irredentist behaviour to the tangible material interests in the acquisition of the natural resources beneath the ocean.7 A weakness of this line of argument is that as the territorial disputes linger on, all claimant states, including China, are in effect prevented from exploring and exploiting the hydrocarbon resources in the South China Sea. It may make economic sense for China to shelve its exclusive sovereign claim to the disputed territories and to rather seek joint exploration with other claimant states. Why, therefore, has China refused to make political concessions in order to reap economic benefits?8
To address the unanswered puzzles, we propose examining them from the perspective of international order, and put forward a new argument that both China and the US are attempting to impose their respective preferred orders to the region and that the observed disputes are due to the clash of two competing order-building projects. The focus of the inquiry is on how China, as the most powerful claimant state, and the US, as the incumbent regional power, engage in practices and discourses that build, contest or defend the two major ordering projects they promote in the region.9
An ensuing question is why they are equally committed to their order-building projects. We explore how both construct stories, a narrative, to legitimise their preferred maritime order and that these stories are intimately connected to their respective identities. We hold that the projects are not only about control over space but are essential to their quest for ontological security, or, put differently, to validate their own national identities. China is driven to take actions to exercise sovereignty over the features in order to validate its re-emerging power identity. To alleviate or even possibly eliminate the trauma of the ‘Century of National Humiliation’ (c. 1839–1945),10 during which China lost territories along its periphery to imperial powers, it is crucial to restore its past glory and to re-emerge as the regional hegemon. The US, on the other hand, must at the same time be opposed to China’s order-building project so as to reaffirm its post-World War II identity as the established liberal hegemon. With the imperative to delegitimise the other’s order-building preferences as a means to secure their current identities, the two powers are driven to confront each other in the contestation over regional maritime order in the South China Sea. The outward display of this contestation is the denial of recognition of the preferred identity of the other. To mobilise support for their preferred orders from regional states as the main audience, both feel compelled to engage in a battle for social legitimacy of their respective ordering projects. The quest for legitimacy has led to legitimation based on legitimating narratives and recourse to international law, especially the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The search for social recognition inevitably initiates disputes surrounding divergent accounts of historical evidence of which country or countries possessed the islands and islets up to World War II and divergent interpretations of UNCLOS articles. In short, order-building is essential for ontological security, while order-building demands legitimacy.
The rest of this introduction proceeds in five steps in the pages that follow. The core concepts of international order, ontological security and legitimation and social recognition will be briefly outlined in the succeeding three sections (detailed treatment of them will be provided in Chap. 2).11 They are followed by an introduction to the key features of the territorial and maritime disputes in the South China Sea in the section ‘Territorial Disputes in the South China Sea: The Background’, and an outline of the main foci and arguments of the chapters of the book in the section ‘Plan for the Book’.
The International Order Perspective
At the heart of the concept of international order is that it is a hierarchical political formation formed by a social compact among member states of unequal power and status.12 In the political formation, there are settled rules and arrangements to guide the interactions of the member states in order to (re)produce stable, shared expectations for each other’s behaviours and stable behaviours with regard to each other.13 Foci are on the following. Who can lead the creation of the rules and arrangements; why do they create those rules and arrangements; how can those rules and arrangements be (un)settled and (re)negotiated and what assurances and responsibilities do the rule-making states need to provide for secondary states in order to make the social compact intact and the hierarchal rules and arrangements legitimate? We are in agreement with the claim that social or shared self-other knowledge among member states of a social compact is a key component of the production of an international order. International order itself may be cooperative, competitive or anything in between. Accordingly, states may hold intersubjective self-other knowledge of each other as either friends or foes or something in between. Disorder, which is not equated with anarchy or enmity, occurs when the social compact breaks down, that is, when states no longer have shared knowledge and conversely, feel uncertain about how to engage with one another.14
Considering that order has been almost always created and settled by leading state(s) in the wake of ‘ordering moments’ of major wars, it can be more precisely conceptualised as comprising settled hierarchical governing rules and arrangements where leading states’ norms and rules are accepted by secondary and weaker states within the international system.15 An international order can be created by leading state(s) principally through three means (known as logics of order): a balance of power based on great power restraint and accommodation, command or consent.16 However, a stable, durable and binding international order does not just arise from hierarchy.17 To be recognised as settled and legitimate, the dominant norms and rules of that order must be broadly mutually acceptable to both the leading and secondary states; they are designed not only to pre...