China needs to take a couple of step back and develop a more conciliatory attitude and stance, least she forces all those she is offending to form an united front as strange bedfellows and allies who understand that divided they fall and are easy targets for a increasingly belligerent China.

But united, unbreakable and undefeatable!

Simply put, they need to set aside their current differences in the face of a far more hostile and dangerous potential adversary, reach an agreement they can all live with, (joint ventures) or keep arguing amongst themselves, get trampled under and lose it all!
Rhrosty.

How would we react if China claimed and developed Lord Howe Island?

A good article.

Turnbull's first major foreign policy statement criticised China "pushing the envelope" in the South China Sea. Turnbull was aiming this at sober Chinese, US and Southeast Asian government consideration rather than popular alarm making. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-21/china-is-pushing-the-envelope-in-south-china-sea-turnbull/6793102

Australia's active role in Freedom Of Navigation Operations (FONOPS) overflights in the South China Sea should not be forgotten. These are RAAF overflights over Chinese claimed seaspace surrounding key Chinese island bases. http://thediplomat.com/2016/02/nearly-all-australian-patrols-in-south-china-sea-are-challenged-by-china/

Australia is playing it low-key as is appropriate to a middle power whose main trade partner is China. Escalating to higher Australian navy ship confrontation would only play into the hands of some Chinese "rightwing" military factions who seek confrontation.

Pete

I have worked and lived in China for 5 years and do not doubt that China will "do whatever it takes" to protect? secure its own interests. The takeover or 'liberation' of Tibet is a similar scene - how long had they been 'out of the sphere' of China until they were 'colonized' by the ample bosom of Motherland China with history adroitly changed to read the 'right way'? Even the CIA got involved for a while until Nixon told them to back off and leave the Freedom Fighters to their own fate - in the national interests of 'Chamberlain-type' appeasement to the Honourable? Helmsman Mao Tzunge. Aust PM's may be 'somewhat reluctant' to upset the Chinese, particularly if they, later decide to swallow more mountains of iron ore if their economy doesn't collapse in the meantime and a good solidarity issue like the claimed island ownership diverts citizens from criticizing the Party - an old trick echoing from re-raising endlessly Japan's rape of Nanjing to divert domestic focus away from Party incompetence and corruption.

There's an enormous amount of ignorance of South-East Asian history in China's claims. Traders have been sailing across those seas for at least a couple of thousand years, while China's claim, for example to the Scarborough Shoals just off the Filipino coast rest on a visit from Cheng Ho in about 1420.

Even in those days, the Indianised kingdoms across south-east Asia were trading with the Philippines, and had been for centuries: there's reputed to be an old Hindu temple in Manila (and actually one in Canton too). Trade between Thai States and Japan at about that time was greater than China's total trade. Arabs and east-coast (Coromandel Coast) Indians traded all across that region.

After all, China had never been a maritime power before Cheng Ho, and closed its doors on that soon after his expeditions, burning all his maps. The notion that, for example, there were no links between the Philippines and the trading kingdoms of Angkor and Champa (central Vietnam) - and between Vietnam and the Philippines - is ludicrous.

And those shoals would have been fished for thousands of years by Filipino sea-living tribes, and most likely they had actually built floating villages in the Scarborough Shoals long before Cheng Ho was out of nappies.

Here's a puzzle: Cheng Ho was supposed to be Uighur, kidnapped as a young man. How on earth did he become a renowned sailor ? The answer may have something to do with his being Muslim, and being able to tap into all that rich knowledge of navigation that would have been around in Canton, not just amongst Muslims but Indians, Thais, Malays, etc., as well - in Canton, where he prayed at a mosque before he left, by the way, so there were Arab and Indian communities in Canton back in 1420.

Joe

Hi Joe

You've done some great research undermining China's claims.

China also claims that the name alone "South China Sea" means the Sea belongs to China.

Pete

Hi Pete,

Hey, what if our government re-named the Pacific the 'Great Australian Ocean' - yeah, that might do it, we could claim right up to the 12-mile zone of places like Chile and Canada, that all of the GAO was our national waters.

After all, isn't that what China is clumsily manoeuvring to do - to claim all of the South Vietnamese Sea as its own national waters ? Or the West Filipino Sea. Or is it the Great Northern Indonesian Sea ? What a pity they couldn't have called it the Loudmouth Sea from the outset ......

China can build up all the reefs and shoals it likes, but that will give it not a shred of legality. After all, imagine if Australia started to concrete over a shoal just off New Zealand's northern tip, and then built a runway on it, claiming all of the waters up to 200 miles around it, forbidding any New Zealand ships from sailing in that region, or planes to fly over it ? Wouldn't that be so piss-easy ? And completely illegal.

Cheers,

Joe

Citizens Initiated Action,
I am a Japanese. Do you know, as I do not know, how many Chinese people Australian newspapers reported were killed in Nanjing City by the Japanese in December, 1937? I understand Life, an American pictorial magazine reported it was about forty thousand. It seems mass media in Paris reported it was about thiry thousand.

When the Japanese army entered the city, Chinese soldiers took off their uniforms, and wearing civilian clothes, mingled themselves into the civilian people. They did not stop fighting; many of them went on taking aim at the Japanese from among the innocent Chinese. The Japanese got panicky, and it started atrocities. (I do not say that the Japanese should be pardoned, on account of this, for everything they did. The Japanese found a good number of Chinese already slain by the Chinese soldiers.)

If the numbers, thirty or forty thousand as reported, were correct, the number of Chinese killed in battle should be subtracted because the Chinese and Japanese soldiers were in hostilities.

About twenty thousand Chinese soldiers ran away into the Western settlements which had extraterritoriality. The Japanese respected it and did not chase them into the Western quarters.
The Japanese did not forbid entry or exit of people, Western or Chinese or whoever, during the "carnage." Western people were free to contact or report to the outside world.

A little over ten years ago, the two governments agreed that a joint team should be set up to investigate the Nanjing atrocities. When the team came to details of how the work should be conducted, the Japanese said that the as accurate number of victims as possible should be studied, but the Chinese said that there was no need to do it. The joint team ended without doing anything.

I posted a comment, It Is Not China's Fault, Nov. 16, 2015, on Michael Pillsbury/The Hundred-Year Marathon, amazon usa.
I (Yoshimichi Moriyama) also sent a comment on YaleGlobal Online, Joji Sakurai/Abe and Blair: Political Apologies, East and West.
I would like you to read them if interested.
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/abe-and-blair-political-apologies-east-and-west.

I understand that as far as known by specialits, Malays were the first people that went jammingly in the South China Sea. We can easily know from Chinese history that the Chinese had been immersed in their own continental affairs and paid little attention to the sea.

The US is annoyed that its China sea is now China's.
.. The war and occupation by the U.S. would change the cultural landscape of the islands, as people dealt with an estimated 34,000 to 220,000 Philippine casualties (with more civilians dying from disease and hunger brought about by war), disestablishment of the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines , and the introduction of the English language in the islands as the primary language of government, education, business, industrial and increasingly in future decades among families and educated individuals.
--
By law there is a 12 mile zone around existant land. After Australia , NZ, Alaska, Hawaii , Guam and US Samoa were seized (along with Chinese ports for pushing opium )by HM and US naval power where is the credibility ? In south Vietnam - remember that ?

Hi Nick,

Yeah, and what did the Hittites ever do for us ?

How far back do you want to go, to demonstrate that one evil can be properly countered by another ? That we shouldn't oppose whatever China does now because of what others have done in the past ?

As Michi points out, the south seas region has been the scene of traders and fishermen going back thousands of years. The Austronesians, the Coromandel Coast Indians, Arabs, Thais, Champa, even the Japanese, traders from all the Indian states across what is now Indonesia - these seamen would have been criss-crossing those southern seas long before the Chinese dared to stick their tow in the waters - and then, after Cheng Ho, pulled it back out again, burning his maps. If they could have, they probably would have castrated him a second time.

So any claim by the Chinese to any shoals or reefs across that area are quite absurd. BUT they may try to keep using force majeure and bluff. Frankly, I don't think the Chinese have much more than ten or fifteen years to go before their economic and military strength starts to wane. Their demographics are against them.

Joe

It's not the evil , it's the credibility . Everyone claimed the islands , no-one had a McDonalds on any of them.
Oz had planes at Butterworth 1988 and still uses it. US had Subic Bay until 1992.
Falklands are a southern beach off Cornwall. Diego Garcia is in the American Indian Ocean.

Hi Nick,

No, they're not islands (though the ABC and SBS seem to have adopted that misnomer), but reefs and shoals, under water at high tide, so they can't be legally claimed by anyone.

Obviously, if it were at all possible to persuade the Chinese to see reason, and not to keep chancing their arm against smaller nations, those shoals should be internationalised, with all countries in the region, particularly those closest, being able to develop their resources jointly, perhaps under international supervision. A bit like the situation between East Timor and Australia.

People forget that New Zealand was nominally administered from Sydney until 1840, so any shoals around New Zealand which their government has not claimed, could be just as easily claimed by New South Wales as the Chinese claims on those south sea shoals.

Hmmmm .... should we build runways and missile sites on one of our historic shoals, on our own beloved territory ?

Ludicrous nonsense.

Joe