The graphic above illustrates the absurdity of China’s claims in the South China Sea, on which I commented earlier. In the article at CNN from which the graphic was sampled, law prof William Burke-White observed:
To a large degree, international legal efforts to accommodate the rise of China have been based on avoiding direct legal conflict where possible and allowing politics and diplomacy to take their natural course. Had the court accepted the Chinese position on jurisdiction, the conflict between law and power that now arises could have been put off to another day.
The court’s findings — both that it has the power to decide the case and that China’s claims are illegal — mark the first significant international legal confrontation with a rising China. It is a bold move by the court, one that pits the authority and legitimacy of the legal institutions created by the post-World War II international order against the political and economic might of China. The question now is how both sides will respond. The answer will be more significant than the ruling itself.
Will China accept the legal principles on which the decision is based? These principles are, in fact, in China’s long-term interests, as they offer the best prospect for the avoidance of a military conflict in the region consistent with China’s peaceful rise. China need not accept them openly or publicly, but it can do so through a gradual change in its rhetoric and behavior.
I can’t help but think that Mr. Burke-White imagines a China different from the one that actually exists. The real China is chafing under real and imagined past and present slights. Respect is as real an interest to that China as the Phillippines’s exclusive economic zone is to the Phillippines or freedom of navigation is to the United States. The failure to recognize non-economic interests is a weakness of not just U. S. foreign policy but Western foreign policy more generally.
