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Re-framing the South China Sea: Geographical Reality and Historical Fact and Fiction
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Abstract:
The ‘labyrinth of detachable shoals’ in the South China Sea presented mariners during the late-18th and early-19th centuries with a maritime area of considerable hazard that was best avoided. These same marine features now not only pose a problem for safe navigation within the South China Sea basin but have also challenged the minds of lawyers and politicians since the early-1980s. The basic geographical concepts and definitions of banks, cays, islands, reefs, rock, seamounts and shoals are being debated and often misinterpreted as the legal fraternity and political parties of littoral nation states dispute sovereignty claims and create potential flashpoints in this regional semi-enclosed sea. Indeed, since 12 July 2016, these features have been re-framed in the context of Article 121 of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Hydrographers from the western maritime powers, particularly, Britain, France, Spain and United States and those from Japan and to a minimal extent China had undertaken exploration and surveys and recorded and reported their findings on navigational charts and as narratives in journals and official documents since the early-1800s.
This current study, whilst alluding to these historical involvements of the national hydrographical agencies engaged in the waters of semi-enclosed South China Sea focuses on the period from about 1930 to 1980 on account of the contemporary political and security issues raised since the 1960s and the national policies of regional and external maritime powers.
The study centres on a geographical area commonly referred to on navigational charts and prose in various nautical publications as ‘Dangerous Ground’. The area is also affectionately known as ‘Archipelago of Reefs’ and ‘Reefs of the South China Sea’. This study examines the records and charts of the early hydrographic surveys and analyse the political and legal implications of the graphics and the uncertainty that has been brought to the fore by researchers of many disciplines. It offers description of the geographical marine features and bathymetry of the basin and the characteristics of the coastlines of the littoral states.
Description:
Date:
2017
Authors:
Vivian Louis Forbes
Publisher:
Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam
