Nine Dash Line

After A-bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allies, and China was offered the Ryukyu Islands as occupied territories reverted back to their original sovereigns. China refused to take on Okinawa’s group, sensibly realizing that its relations to Japan, Korea, and North Vietnam was through cultural influence, not sovereign coverage.

In 1947, the Republic of China presented to the United Nations its Eleven Dash Line in South China Sea to show sovereign boundaries. No one batted an eye. Islands of the Xisha (west islands, aka Paracel) and Nansha (south islands, aka Spratley) groups belonged to China.

In 1949, Mao Zedong’s Gongchangdang (communist) forces prevailed over the Guomindang (nationalist) forces of Chiang Kai Shek and defined sovereign lines from Xizang (Tibet) to Xinjiang, on to Nei Menggu (Inner Mongolia) to Manchuria down the east coast including Taiwan where Chiang retreated under U.S. protection, to Hainan and circling back to the Himalayas. The 11-dash line was included territory, later becoming 9-dash line when Zhou Enlai decided to take two out from a divisive divide in the Gulf of Tonkin.

The Nine Dash Line designated sovereign borders in China’s eyes that were globally taken for granted until the ’60s when oil exploration revealed a possible pool of oil underneath the continental shelf of South China Sea. Not having the naval muscle to implement its sovereign claim, Xisha and Nansha islands stayed without permanent settlement saved as an occasional but rich fishing ground accessible to all. Western oil interests started eyeing the territory, the British through Malaysia and Brunei, the Americans through the Philippines, and French-American through Vietnam.

(A maternal uncle, an aide to Ferdinand Marcos, and other vets from the Vietnam War including Gen. Fidel Ramos who later become President, “liberated” parts of Spratley from Sino clutches, and called them Kalayaan—freedom—islands, right about the same time black gold was flowing out of the Nido fields off the Palawan shores.)

In 1982, the United Nations ratified the Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS, which defined, inter alia, maritime use of the ocean lanes and access to sea beds. After 60 nations ratified UNCLOS in 1994, it finally took effect. That’s when the South China Sea’s sovereignty, and maritime territorial use, came to fore. Nine Dash Line was added to the vocabulary of the military and the diplomatic corps.

Fossil fuel access as the source of conflicts in the last 150 years is not an ideological judgment. It is that without which no sociological explanation of the phenomenon of military machismo cannot get any hearing. Ideological rhetoric on freedom and democracy, buffered by sale of the instruments of death from above, e.g., to Brunei and Taiwan, cannot be understood without the greasy texture of oil. The technology of extracting it from the ground is the province of a select corporate few, bankrolled in our registry.

With the indelible marks of climate change affecting global climate, consequences already a matter of extent rather than intent, the two industrializing giants of India and China have shifted from oil to natural gas as an energy source for its electrical power. America has gone “fracking” on shale and tar sands, enamored with its new technology but wreaking havoc on geo-templates. The U.S. still leads the world on energy consumption. The demand for fossil fuel is the field of competition.

We are the current titleholder since post-WWII.  India and China, by sheer force of the economy of scale, are new contenders. The competition is not energy source but energy power, and China cultivates its diplomatic relations with oil producing countries for its energy supply but also generates power from sources including hydro, thermal, wind, biomass, solar, and other energy sources. It is not enough. China needs more oil, and it is not about to give up what it has long considered its sovereign right in its own backyard. It does not see itself as moving on its neighbors’ territories as it sees the fingerprints of manipulative vested interests encroaching on hers.

The U.S. has set its policies to managing energy source through crude, with a military to implement the policy. If one wants to understand how a little drilling rig on Chinese islands off the coast of Vietnam can trigger the harshest Sino phobia in the last 30 years, one needs to have a cognitive overview of the politics of black gold, of which our country is in the leading role.

Indigenes’ right to selfhood through vocational skills so one can be gainfully employed is helpful but not the main challenge. More than just enlisting into Pentagon’s roll so we can proudly honor and memorialize our young sacrificial lambs, the indigenes’ cranium tuned to the geopolitical drama of the region is the paramount challenge. Getting us to use alternative energy sources other than Big Oil’s offering bodes well on our future. So, let us set the Nine Dash Line of the sovereign regions of our minds and get cracking!