Browsing by Author "Tong, Xin"

One of the main contestations during the South China Sea dispute was the legal status and possible implications of the ‘historic rights’, which were upheld by the Chinese government and since the 1990s discussed massively by Chinese scholars during the intensification of the disputes in the South China Sea. Nevertheless, there is criticism against this argument, the most popular of which is, that the historic rights discourse differs from, and is incompatible with the rules stipulated in the UNCLOS, of which China is a party. However, my argument is, that a treaty-based analysis is incomplete and somewhat misplaced if we are to comprehensively understand the argument of ‘historic rights’ proposed by China. ‘Historic rights’ discourse, from a Chinese perspective, is based on completely different traditions and understandings of the maritime order. This thesis reveals that China has its unique perception of maritime sovereignty and maritime rights. More importantly, this perception is still present in China’s imagination of the world order. This perception, even sometimes undefined and ambiguous, however makes the ‘historic rights’ arguments possible and understandable, at least in the eyes of the Chinese government and the majority of Chinese scholars. This thesis revisits the proposals and legitimacy proposed by the Chinese government and scholars in terms of the evolution of their expression and argumentative structures concerning Chinese ‘historic rights’ in the South China Sea. From the Chinese perspective, ‘historic rights’ offers another possible way of argumentations and legal surface, that weakens the cognition of the existing status quo in the South China Sea, while at the same time providing a peaceful way of challenging the unequal order and recovering China’s historical interests that had been taken advantage of when China was too weak to assert its legitimate rights in the past. On this premise, overly depending on judiciary resolution like the arbitration process and the legal rules in the UNCLOS will lead to a neglect of this peculiar Chinese perception and its possible political implications.