By Robert Stanley | 2025-09-15

As China steps up its claims to most of the South China Sea, Sinologists and diplomatic historians say it is relying on misconstrued old documents and contentions that lack historical grounding.

Meanwhile, Chinese warships are continually confronting and harassing the vessels of neighboring states, including the Philippines.

In late August, Xinhua Institute, a think tank affiliated with China's Xinhua News Agency, published a series titled "The Truths about the South China Sea" in both Chinese and English.

The series, which foreign analysts generally consider propaganda, contends that China has "always been a steadfast advocate, promoter, and guardian of stability" in the South China Sea.

Beijing's jingoistic territorial assertions over more than 80% of the South China Sea stem in part from having 60% of its trade travel by sea, noted Priscilla A. Tacujan, an analyst with the US Department of Defense, in Proceedings of the US Naval Institute in August 2024.

China began laying those expansive claims in 2013.

Unfounded claims

Unfortunately for China, Xinhua's arguments are unfounded.

Those arguments have a thin veneer of respectability. One branch of them cites diplomatic history.

After World War II, the Spratly Islands (also known as the Nansha Islands) and the Paracel Islands (the Xisha Islands) were returned to China, Xinhua said.

However, none of the post-1945 treaties that the then-Nationalist government of China signed gave it sovereignty over the Spratly Islands or the Paracels.

The San Francisco Treaty required Japan to renounce sovereignty over the islands, but it did not specify which country would assume control.

Secondly, the Xinhua document says that the sea is China's "ancestral waters," with 2,000 years of Chinese historical presence.

In fact, China's first claim to the Paracels came only in 1909, Bill Hayton, an associate fellow at Chatham House in London, noted at a 2021 international conference in Hanoi.

"Vietnam has affirmed its sovereignty over the Paracels and Spratlys since the 15th century," Vu Hai Dang, a legal scholar at the National University of Singapore, said at the same conference.

The third leg of Xinhua's reasoning, that China discovered and occupied the islands in the South China Sea, thereby giving it control, was rejected in a 2016 ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration.

China boycotted those proceedings. It told the court, "It does not accept the arbitration initiated by the Philippines."

Concoctions

Many of China's claims are based on mistranslations in a 1930s atlas by a self-taught Chinese geographer named Bai Meichu, Hayton wrote in 2024.

Bai copied a 1918 British atlas and used a Chinese government committee's shoddy translations of English geographic terms, said Hayton.

For example, the committee indiscriminately translated "bank" and "shoal" as "tan," sandbar.

Under international law, only features that appear above water at high tide may be considered territory and have an Exclusive Economic Zone.

"These [Chinese] assertions," and others, "crumble when subjected to historical analysis," wrote Hayton. "A considerable amount of historiography has been reverse engineered to justify Chinese claims over the two island groups."

China's maritime demands are "concocted realities of communist thinking," Rommel Jude G. Ong, a former vice-commander of the Philippine navy and a professor of practice at the Ateneo School of Government at the University of Manila, said in the Japan Times in June.

China has "conveniently" used negotiations to "legitimize [its] illegal annexation" of areas like the Spratly Islands and its "illegal exercise of maritime rights," he said.

"China does not have the right to set rules based on imagined history and invented interests," Ong wrote.

Coveting access

Free access to the South China Sea would allow China to displace the United States as the regional power broker, give it free passage for its cargo ships and enable it to intimidate or invade Taiwan unhindered.

The democratic island presents an alternative that China's authoritarian leaders detest.

How China spins the history of the disputed waters and the islands, reefs and sandbars in the strategic waters could determine how neighboring states assess the legitimacy of China's assertions and how hard they are willing to fight back.

Military and economic buildup

Rather than merely spewing out documents, Beijing is busy building up the might it needs to coerce its neighbors.

After a determined buildup lasting for decades, China "now has the world's largest [navy], operating 234 warships compared to the US Navy's 219," the BBC reported in August.

Meanwhile, China is expected to have GDP growth of 4.8% this year, compared to 1.9% for the United States, according to the International Monetary Fund.