Peter Dutton Examines Intersection of Law, Power, and Security in China’s Maritime Disputes

Columbia SIPA welcomed renowned China expert Peter Dutton on February 17 for a discussion on China’s approach to maritime disputes and demonstration of power in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait. The conversation, which was cosponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, the Institute of Global Politics, and the China and the World Program at SIPA, delved into China’s escalating tensions with competing states in the region. Dutton is a senior research scholar and senior fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, has over 40 years of experience working in active duty and civilian capacities for the US Navy. He spoke with Thomas J. Christensen, the China and the World Program’s director and James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations at Columbia SIPA.

At the core of the South China Sea disputes, Dutton explained, are three main areas of contention: sovereignty over the islands and features, sovereign rights over resources, and the balance of rights between “coastal states,” such as Brunei, China, Malaysia, and the Philippines, that directly border the sea and have overlapping territorial claims within it, and “user states” like the US and Japan which utilize the sea for navigation and trade. These disputes, he said, reflect a fundamental clash between China’s claims, based on historical rights, and the legal framework established in 1982 by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

China claims nearly the entire South China Sea, including islands, reefs, and banks such as the Spratly Islands, Paracel Islands, and Scarborough Shoal, on the basis of its “nine-dash line.” This line conflicts with the exclusive economic zone claims of neighboring coastal states. “China’s claiming – and this is about 1,200 miles from the mainland Chinese coast, actually – but claiming quite a bit of the water space there in contravention to the United Nations law,” Dutton said of the territory within the nine-dash line. He explained that China is making two claims: one an "outside-in" approach based on historical claims and the other a contrasting "inside-out" approach, “trying to use the language of international law to explain how China has jurisdictional rights to the South China Sea, even though their approach does not actually comply with the law.”

Dutton pointed to three key security considerations that are driving China’ aggression in the South China Sea: national security, regional stability, and party legitimacy. He explained the country is "really trying to improve its status within the regional order by attempting to set the rules about how claims can be made and how disputes will be resolved.” He added that party legitimacy plays a role as well, as Chinese leadership seeks to demonstrate the efficacy of its policies and its ability to defend China's territorial claims, which have become a key component of the "China Dream" narrative promoted by the Communist Party.

Later, speaking on the Taiwan Strait, Dutton discussed the unsettled legal status of the island in U.S. foreign policy, noting that sovereignty over Taiwan remains undetermined since Japan's renunciation of its claim in the post-World War II peace treaties. “China has been very actively engaged for decades in marginalizing Taiwan’s status and getting other countries to accept Beijing’s ‘One China’ principle explicitly as a matter of state policy,” Dutton said. “What could end up happening is that despite the way international law works and despite the American approach to the status of Taiwan, if enough countries begin to accept that the status of the territory of Taiwan is, in fact, Chinese, you may have a political solution with legal effect, enabled by the UN system.”