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.
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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.