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The contested area includes the Paracel Islands, occupied by China but claimed by Vietnam; and the Spratly Islands, disputed by the Philippines, China, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Vietnam, who each claim either part or all the islands, which are believed to sit on vast mineral resources, including oil. The first widely recognized map to show a U-shaped eleven-dotted line was published in the then Republic of China on 1 December 1947. Two of the dots in the Gulf of Tonkin were later removed at the behest of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, reducing the total to nine.

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The nine-dotted line has been used by China to show the maximum extent of its claim without indicating how the dots would be joined if it was continuous and how that would effect the extent of the area claimed by China. The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia have all officially protested over the use of such a line.

Immediately after China submitted a map to the UN including the 9-dotted lines territorial claim in the South China Sea on May 7, 2009, the Philippines lodged a diplomatic protest against China for claiming the whole of South China Sea illegally. Vietnam and Malaysia filed their joint protest a day after China submitted its 9-dash line map to the UN. Indonesia also registered its protest, even though it did not have a claim on the South China Sea.

In 2013 the PRC extended their claims with a new ten-dash map, but asserted that they had control over foreign fisheries in only a subset of the region.

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The United States has also called for unfettered access to the area that China claims as its own, and accused Beijing of adopting an increasingly aggressive stance on the high seas.

While China has never used the 9-dotted line as an inviolable border to its sovereignty, this strategy together with the fact that China's authority has never officially explained the meaning of the 9-dotted line have led many researchers to try to derive the exact meanings of the 9-dotted line map in the Chinese strategy in the South China Sea.

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According to the Kyodo News, in March 2010 PRC officials told U.S. officials that they consider the South China Sea a "core interest" on par with Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang, but subsequently backed away from that assertion.

In July 2010 the Communist Party-controlled Global Times stated that "China will never waive its right to protect its core interest with military means" and a Ministry of Defense spokesman said that "China has indisputable sovereignty of the South Sea and China has sufficient historical and legal backing" to underpin its claims.

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Peter Dutton of the U.S. Naval War College agreed, saying, “The jurisdiction over waters does not have connection to history. It must observe the UNCLOS.” Dutton stressed that using history to explain sovereignty erodes the rules of the UNCLOS. It is understood that China ratified the UNCLOS in 1996.


PETER DUTTON
Professor and Director
Strategic Researcher
China Maritime Studies Institute
U.S. Naval War College

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Maritime researcher Carlyle Thayer, Emeritus Professor of Politics of the University of New South Wales, said that Chinese scholars using historical heritage to explain its claim of sovereignty shows the lack of legal foundation under the international law for the claim.


Professor CARLYLE THAYER
Emeritus Professor
Australian Defence Force Academy, University of New South Wales
Director, Thayer Consultancy

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