“Hello, Sansha”: Cheng Gang returns, brandishes Vietnam’s name . . . and lies
Posted: August 13, 2012 Filed under: CMS (China Maritime Surveillance), CNS, FLEC & Ministry of Agriculture, Global Times | Tags: Beijing Youth Daily, Cheng Gang, Chinese journalists, Communist Youth League, 程刚, Global Times, Huanqiu Shibao, nine dashed line, Sansha, south china sea, Yongxing, Yuzheng-306, 永兴岛, 三沙 Leave a comment »
‘Hello, Sansha’ – graphic accompanying Beijing Youth Daily report on a July 2 visit to Woody Island 永兴岛. (Note superimposed nine-dash line.)
I knew it was incident season but I went anyway. A mistake i have learned from: from this point onward, until the disputes are resolved or my thesis is finished, i vow never to take a holiday in July, unless the destination is the South China Sea. Ten days after my return, i’ve only just finished properly studying all the recent action. The next few posts will sketch out in basic chronological order, recent developments as seen through the PRC’s major internet news media.
The establishment of Sansha City looms large. According to a keyword study of 15 major Chinese newspapers, it was in the top five most-mentioned domestic politics-related terms in the first 6 months of 2012 — a (suspiciously) remarkable achievement, given that its creation was only announced on June 21. There is no doubt, however, that Sansha has been very heavily covered in China’s state-controlled media since its announcement. The extent to which it has “attracted” this attention or had this attention ordered towards it is, of course, hard to say — the answer is clearly both, but in what proportions?
The flurry of first-hand accounts of visits by reporters began well before the opening ceremony on June 24. Beijing Youth Daily reporter Li Chen 李晨 visited on July 2, filing a story that ran on July 9 under the headline, ‘Hello, Sansha’. (The story was made available in English by the China Daily but the translation has since been taken down. It remains online here.) This was accompanied by the graphic above, with the nine-dashed line superimposed. It began:
Would you be surprised if I told you there was a city with an area equivalent to one quarter of China’s territory?
The graphic and the opening line show that the view of the nine-dashed line as representing China’s territorial waters, far beyond the officially-stated claim to the islands within, continues to be propagated through the official media. The apparent lack of desire to educate the Chinese public on the limits of China’s claims in the South China Sea suggests that the government sees nationalistic public opinion on the issue as more of a weapon than a threat.
Li Chen’s report also ran prominently in the July 15 edition of the Shanxi Evening News, but there were numerous other accounts of visits to Sansha around that time. Notable among them was this ‘Exclusive visit to South Sea frontline Sansha’ from the intrepid Cheng Gang 程刚 of the Huanqiu Shibao, who wrote that he was making his fifth visit to Woody Island/Yongxing 永兴岛. Some of Cheng’s reporting was made into an English-language article for the Global Times, but many of the interesting details have been left out.
The Qiongsha-3 that plies between Hainan and Yongxing (Woody) Island in the Paracels
“Ours before, still today, more so in the future”: who is claiming the whole South China Sea…and why?
Posted: March 8, 2012 Filed under: China-Philippines, China-Vietnam, Comment threads, Global Times, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, PRC News Portals, State media, Weibo | Tags: 9-dash line, china maritime dispute, Chinese media, Hong Lei, MFA, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, nine dashed line, paracel islands, south china sea, spratly islands, u-shaped line, 洪磊 2 Comments »
China’s official nine-dashed line, as attached to numerous documents submitted to the UN. China claims the islands within the 9-dashed line, not the whole maritime area contained within.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei has attracted some heat from the hot heads of China’s internet population, for daring to state [zh] that “no country, including China, has laid claim to the entire South China Sea”.
Apparently seizing upon this domestic criticism of Hong Lei, the Global Times’ English edition has published a piece positing that “public will” is increasingly influencing foreign policy on the sea disputes. While Vietnam and the Philippines have tried to “woo the public” with hawkish stances,
China uses less public will to press other countries and does not seek to present a hard stance to win people over, despite paying the price of occasional fierce criticism.
On the South China Sea issue, I think China’s claims are misunderstood by media employees, many alleged experts and, perhaps most significantly, ordinary people inside China. While opinion-page pundits like Pan Guoping may claim the entire sea for China, and international media can sneer at the outrageous ambiguity of the famous nine-dash line, the PRC’s claim has actually been quite clear for some years. As expressed ad nauseum in official statements and UN submissions over the past few years,
China has indisputable sovereignty over the islands in the South China Sea and the adjacent waters
The islands . . . and the adjacent waters. China, pretty unambiguously, does not claim the whole South China Sea, and the attachment of the above map to diplomatic notes to the UN in 2009 and 2011 indicates further that the nine-dash line does not depict China’s claimed maritime boundaries. The BBC misrepresents the PRC’s position in every report it makes on the South China Sea, to which it attaches this map:
“You cannot not support this”: the passport saga impresses China’s online nationalists
Posted: November 27, 2012 | Author: southseaconversations | Filed under: Academic debates, China's foreign relations, China-India, China-Philippines, China-Vietnam, Comment threads, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, PRC News Portals | Tags: Arunachal Pradesh, Chinese foreign policy, Chinese nationalism, Foreign Ministry, foreign policy incoherence, Hua Chunying, maps, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Public Security, new Chinese passports, new foreign policy actors, nine dashed line, online nationalism, passports, PRC foreign policy | 2 Comments »New PRC e-passport and old version
Students of PRC foreign policy constantly come up against the question of whether the actions of the Chinese state are the result of decisions made by the centralised leadership or individual state agencies.
Linda Jakobson and Dean Knox’s 2010 SIPRI report, ‘New Foreign Policy Actors in China‘ provided an excellent overview of the range of players on the Chinese foreign policy scene. Taking a similar approach in relation to the South China Sea issue, the International Crisis Group’s ‘Stirring up the Sea (I)‘ report earlier this year emphasised the incoherence that can result from individual (and sometimes competing) agencies acting according to their own priorities rather than a consistent centralized policy.
In the PRC’s latest diplomatic disaster, images embedded on the visa pages of the PRC’s new passports have managed to simultaneously provoke the official ire of Vietnam, the Philippines, India and Taiwan.
Close-up of nine-dash line depiction in new People’s Republic of China passport
The two South China Sea claimants have protested the inclusion of a map including the nine-dash line representing China’s “territory” in the disputed sea, India disputes the maps’ depiction of Arunachal Pradesh as part of Tibet, and the passports’ pictures of Taiwan landmarks prompted rare expressions of anger from Ma Ying-jeou and the ROC’s Mainland Affairs Council.
This looks to be a classic case of policy uncoordination resulting from a domestically-focused agency taking actions that directly impinge on other countries’ interests. From the FT’s report breaking the story:
The next day the Guardian quoted MFA spokeswoman Hua Chunying saying, “The outline map of China on the passport is not directed against any particular country.” Yet neither the Chinese nor the English versions of the official transcript of Hua’s November 23 press conference include the comment, suggesting that the Foreign Ministry remained disinclined to take responsibility for the move.
The SIPRI and ICG reports mentioned above didn’t focus much attention on the Ministry of Public Security as a player in PRC foreign policy, but it has certainly become one, inadvertently or otherwise.
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