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Orange Wang

The South China Sea is claimed by almost every country in the region but its ripple effects are felt well beyond the fiercely contested waterway. In the second of a three-part series, Orange Wang investigates the meaning of China’s nine-dash line.
The U-shaped nine-dash line that outlines China’s claims in the South China Sea is a long-standing bone of contention among the other claimants over the vast waterway and has been open to several interpretations.
The conventional wisdom is that Beijing “claims almost the entire South China Sea” but this oversimplifies its position and, while it might not be entirely inaccurate, risks being interpreted as a claim over the whole area within the line as its territorial waters.
In fact, Beijing’s position is more nuanced and starts with its “indisputable” sovereignty over islands, reefs, shoals and cays in the Pratas, Paracel, Spratly and Zhongsha islands, which it says is based on history.
Under Chinese law, only the waters within 12 nautical miles seaward of the baselines of these maritime features are regarded as part of China’s territorial sea and Beijing accordingly claims the contiguous zone, exclusive economic zone, and continental shelf.
The baseline, of which the waters on the landward side are typically considered internal waters, is drawn by a state to measure its territorial sea and other maritime zones, according to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos).
The vast expanse that remains of the waters within the nine-dash line is not claimed by Beijing as its territorial waters. In the South China Sea, Beijing has only published baselines for the northern part of the Gulf of Tonkin and the Paracel Islands.
Top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi has repeatedly rejected the suggestion that Beijing claims everything “within the dotted line” as its territorial waters, characterising it as “a deliberate attempt to confuse different concepts and distort China’s position”.
“The South China Sea is one of the safest and freest maritime areas in the world where freedom of navigation has never been an issue,” Wang said in July.
Nevertheless, China has not published any coordinates for the nine-dash line since its introduction almost 80 years ago, and there have been changes in both the number and locations of its segments over the decades.
Foreign experts have also warned that the line’s segments appear to be defining the scope of Beijing’s enforcement reach in the region, leading to tensions among its neighbours.


China’s dispute with the Philippines is in the spotlight now, but it has been going on for years and reached a peak in 2016 when an international tribunal ruled in Manila’s favour – a ruling that Beijing has steadfastly refused to accept.
Other claimants have also expressed their frustrations at alleged Chinese obstruction of their development activities in the resource-rich waterway.
Has the line changed?
The lack of any official coordinates for the nine-dash line has been one of the grounds for challenges to its legitimacy, along with its shifting ambiguity across numerous maps produced over the decades.
There were 11 dashes to the line when it first appeared on an official map of the South China Sea islands in 1947 that was drawn up by the Republic of China.
When the Communist Party established the People’s Republic in 1949, it continued the approach but removed two of the line’s dashes in the Gulf of Tonkin. Beijing and Hanoi reached a boundary delimitation agreement over this body of water in 2000.
A Nanjing University study published in 2003 found that the spatial locations of corresponding line sections in the official Chinese maps of 1947 and 1983 did not entirely match.
However, the researchers said that the areas circled by the lines in both maps were largely consistent, with the 1983 version only 4.8 per cent larger than its 1947 counterpart.
Jia Yu, former party chief at the Natural Resources Ministry’s China Institute for Marine Affairs, argued in a 2005 research paper that the line’s segments were based on the halfway points between China’s outermost islets and the shores of neighbouring countries.
What’s in a name?
While the term “nine-dash line” – jiu duan xian in Chinese – is widely used outside China for the cartographic marker, it is officially referred to in Beijing as “the dotted line” or duan xu xian.
In 2019, two academics at Xiamen University’s South China Sea Institute called on Beijing to adopt the term “U-shaped line” because of its “formal and neutral” tone that could help to avoid misunderstandings.




Translations of “nine-dash line” and “dashed line” – “informal” and “randomly scratched”, respectively – could give the impression of being undignified and hasty, and the translation of “dotted line” potentially carried the same flaw, they said.
The U-shaped line label was broadly used in the international arena until 2009, when Beijing submitted a map of its claimed territory in the South China Sea to the UN. The “nine-dash line” captured world attention and remains in popular use.
Meanwhile, the official newspaper of the People’s Liberation Army has another term for the marker, according to an article in June – chuan tong hai jiang xian, which means “traditional maritime boundary line”.
How many dashes?
A new edition of China’s standard vertical national map sparked a wave of diplomatic protests among its neighbours when it was released in August last year because it appeared to show an extra dash in the line.
The apparent “10-dash line” – with an “extra” dash to the east of the island of Taiwan – raised questions from Malaysia and other Asean nations about whether Beijing was expanding its claims in the South China Sea.
It later emerged that the “extra” dash was picked up from horizontal versions of China’s official maps that had been in use since the 1950s.
These placed the South China Sea in a cutaway box at the bottom right corner. While the nine-dash line appeared inside the box, the apparent extra dash was part of the main picture.
The visual effect was carried through to Beijing’s first standard vertical map to present the South China Sea region on the same scale as the Chinese mainland, which appeared in 2013 and was repeated in last year’s map.
What does it mean?
Many Chinese scholars have interpreted the line as representing a title to the islands and other features that it encloses. However, that would make it simply a geographic shorthand and erasing it would not necessarily hurt China’s claim, others argue.
Another viewpoint is that the line is intended to indicate a national maritime boundary between China and its neighbours.
But that notion has been challenged within China, because Beijing has confirmed it does not claim everything within the line as its territorial waters, while the line itself has never functioned as a national border.


Beijing has yet to provide a definitive or detailed explanation of the nine-dash line in any of China’s laws and official documents.
On official maps, the line follows the same format as a marker of an undetermined national boundary, rather than the continuous, unbroken depiction of a settled national border, while each segment is drawn using the symbol for a delimited boundary.
In their 2019 paper, the Xiamen University scholars, Kuenchen Fu and Cui Haoran, suggested that the line could be regarded as an “invitation to negotiate” delimitation of maritime boundaries.
Why is there a dispute?
According to other Chinese intellectuals, the line marks the geographical extent of China’s historic rights – a concept that remains cardinal to the controversies surrounding the 2016 ruling by The Hague that rejected this argument.
The tribunal concluded that China’s claims to historic rights within the nine-dash line were contrary to Unclos and have no lawful effect beyond the maritime entitlements granted under the convention.
However, Chinese scholars argued that the historic rights claims were compatible with Unclos, noting that there might be cultural and historical factors behind the differing perspectives of the concept between China and the West.
The Chinese government has not clearly defined its historic rights within the nine-dash line, nor has it officially demarcated different types of maritime zones within the line.
Even before the ruling, Chinese scholars called on Beijing to elaborate on its historical rights and secure the nine-dash line’s legal status through domestic legislation. The lack of clarity would put China in an awkward position, they warned.
In 2014, the US State Department also urged Beijing to clarify its “nine-dash line” claim.
Later that year, Fu Ying, the then-chairman of the foreign affairs committee of China’s top legislative body, and Wu Shicun, founding president of the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, co-authored an article on the issue.
“As the Nansha [Spratly] Islands dispute is still unsettled, any attempt to clarify the dash line or maritime claims would only lead to an escalation of tensions,” they wrote.


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China defines its claim to the South China Sea with a dashed line. Photo: AP

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China’s Defence Minister Dong Jun. Photo: AFP

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A Chinese coastguard ship (left) collides with the BRP Teresa Magbanua in the South China Sea on August 31. Photo: EPA-EFE/ Philippine Coast Guard/ Handout

The BRP Teresa Magbanua is seen surrounded by Chinese vessels near Sabina Shoal on August 31 in a photo released by the Philippine Coast Guard. Photo. Philippine Coast Guard

The cartographer’s mark was first drawn on official maps 80 years ago but has been the subject of numerous interpretations


The cartographer’s mark was first drawn on official maps 80 years ago but has been the subject of numerous interpretations.


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Nanjing University

Provide background, definition and detail of a specific topic, helping the reader understand how something works or what has happened in the past.  (Eg. What is Nafta? US and Mexico are on the verge of revising trade deal.)
 


Explainer

What is Beijing’s 9-dash line in the South China Sea and what does it mean?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The cartographer’s mark was first drawn on official maps 80 years ago but has been the subject of numerous interpretations

The cartographer’s mark was first drawn on official maps 80 years ago but has been the subject of numerous interpretations