Can the United States do anything about Chinese Exceptionalism?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/30/world/asia/what-china-has-been-building-in-the-south-china-sea.html

The nine-dash line is a manifestation of contemporary Chinese security policy: Chinese exceptionalism. The nine-dash line was drawn by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to expand Chinese sovereignty to the extent of claiming 90% of the South China Sea. Presently, Beijing has continued to use naming, administrative, and legal strategies to take control over key maritime regions and land that encompass all its features, such as fisheries. In other words, to rectify Chinese exceptionalism, Beijing manipulates geographic maps to legally justify their activity and claims. However, Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea are not grounded in maritime law, which is governed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). 

China, along with 168 countries, signed UNCLOS in 1982. The agreement postulates that countries which border water are legally entitled to 12 nautical miles of territorial sea and the economic exclusion zone (EEZ). The Economic Exclusion Zone represents the zone that contains all the resources that a country legally has access to, which must be 200 nautical miles or less from its coast. When the Philippines challenged China to its unlawful claims, Beijing argued that its “transitional maritime claims” trumps UNCLOS principles despite being a signatory of the agreement. 

The transitional maritime claims, according Fernando Nunez-Mietz, professor at McGill University, is  that China claims they own the South China Sea due to historical ties with the region. China understands that this argument does not suffice due to its lack of legal nature, and thus propagates it as a political statement. Moreover, China is indifferent whether this argument holds up in the International Court of Justice. In reality, China is able to claim the South China Sea from their sheer military power. To cement control of the area, the Chinese government has built military outposts on their constructed man-made islands. As China is a signatory of UNCLOS, building artificial islands allows them to claim anything 12 miles from the islands’ coast. To that extent, China is effectively expanding their territory beyond mainland China into the ocean. Not only is China able to claim more ressources by arbitrarily building artificial islands in international waters, but they have effectively denied countries from having access to the South China Sea. A major international implication of China building artificial islands in international waters and thereby claiming ressources 12 miles from the coast granted by UNCLOS, is issues of precedent. If China is able to do this, why can't Japan or Australia engage in artificial island dredging to expand their land and territorial sea into the ocean?

Since 2013, China has been engaged in ramping up its presence through dredging and artificial island building in the South China sea. China has added 3,200 acres of land via its construction of man-made islands. Chinese President Xi Jinping reports that the objective of artificial island building are their mutual benefits to all nations at stake due to the project’s increased navigational safety for commercial shipping. However, the reality is that China has equipped the man-made islands with runways, long distance bombers, reinforced bunkers, missile batteries and military radar. Essentially creating secure military bases on their borders. The broader aim is more likely to extend Chinese power within the South China Sea and to hold the United States at bay during conflict. In the short-run, the objective is to dominate politically, economically and militarily. For example, politically, China has disallowed foreign energy companies from pursuing joint development projects with countries such as Vietnam. Alternatively, China has offered countries a chance to pursue a joint development project with itself. 

With China’s exceptionalist approach to conducting their foreign policy, how can the US respond to Chinese exceptionalism? Are their current actions enough? Mark Brawley, professor of Political Science at McGill University, argues that the United States cannot do much to avert Chinese territorial expansion. A significant approach that the US can, and has taken is to uphold the “freedom of navigation” that respects all countries’ rights to freely navigate within the South China Sea despite Chinese illegal claims to sovereignty. In addition to Brawley’s insights, the United States along with the support of its allies has supported its rhetoric of upholding the freedom of navigation by sending in aircraft and naval vessels to monitor the situation on a daily basis. In addition, the United States is able to send a message to China that it can fly and operate wherever international law permits rather than according to the arbitrary sovereignty claims made by Beijing. Lastly, the United States has imposed economic sanctions on China to penalize the federal government for its artificial island building. More precisely, the Trump administration has added a list of over 20 chinese companies that are prohibited from buying American products. 

It is clear that although the United States is very constrained in its response to China’s artificial island building and illegal sovereignty claims, Washington has taken a diverse approach in devising as many responses as possible on numerous fronts. Although the approach has remained relatively unsuccessful, hopefully the United States can continue to work with its allies in the South China Sea to ensure that it is an area of free passage as intended.