Fluid Realms: Chinese Visions of Maritime Space in the South China Sea Islands

This dissertation explores the historical convergence between modernity and maritime space in China by analyzing the formation of its island claims in the South China Sea during the early 20th century. Drawing from largely unused Qing and Republican Chinese archival sources on the islands, it examines how Chinese notions of space and sovereignty in the maritime frontier since the late 18th century intersected with global ideas of political and legal modernity to shape China’s policies and positions in the contested Pratas, Paracel, and Spratly Archipelagos. Specifically, this dissertation traces a deeper transition between two discursive frameworks that predominantly guided political understandings of maritime space and sovereignty in China. This transition, I contend, fuelled the formation of China’s island claims. The first of these spatial modes, which I term “islands of sovereignty,” prioritized political control over imperial subjects and the boats they used to traverse the seas. Maritime space was thus only ever understood within and supplementary to this goal’s fulfillment. Following the advent of foreign imperialism in China with the First Opium War, however, “islands of sovereignty” was gradually repurposed to effect a second maritime spatial mode. This framework, labelled “markers of effective occupation,” increasingly centred Chinese conceptions of maritime space and sovereignty upon precisely-defined national territory using conceptions of international law and modern geography. Maritime peoples, formerly the target of Qing efforts to order the largely non-delineated sea, instead became a means towards ‘evidencing’ the emerging Chinese nation-state’s maritime borders. This dissertation ultimately argues that non-official actors such as fishermen, geographers, and community organizations were central to this spatial transition, and thus, to the formation of China’s island claims. It details how these non-official actors compelled government adoption of their understandings of the sea by fusing disparate Qing notions of maritime space with incoming Western and Japanese ideas of geography, international law, and the nation-state. Qing and Republican government actors were accordingly forced to negotiate their political worldviews with the non-official narratives they relied on to understand the islands, their place within the emerging nation-state — and indeed, what constituted China itself.

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