7 - China’s Sovereignty Disputes with Taiwan

Summary

CHINA AND TAIWAN'S maritime border conflicts are particularly complex. Taiwan has extensive territorial claims and exerts actual control over a number of islands in the SCS, including the Pratas islands and Itu Aba (called Taiping Island in Taiwan), the largest island in the Spratlys. In fact, it was the ROC that first published a map in 1947 that included the now infamous eleven-dashed line claiming the majority of the SCS, a claim that the PRC later adopted in the early 1950s in its nine-dashed map.

Taiwan is not a member of the UN and so has been unable to become a party to UNCLOS, but Taipei has defined straight baselines around not just its main islands but also to Pratas Island, Itu Aba, and the Macclesfield Bank. In line with UNCLOS, Taiwan has claimed maritime zones, including a 12 nm territorial sea, a 200 nm EEZ, and continental shelf rights. In the case of the Macclesfield Bank, the feature is permanently submerged from 7 to 82 meters below sea level, so has no capacity to claim the surrounding water even if a structure has been built on them.

Both the ROC and PRC claim that the SCS is Chinese territory, and so when promoting Chinese claims against other Asian nations the two governments tend to agree with each other and have cooperated in the past against other claimants. The PRC and ROC disagree, however, on which China should retain control in the SCS. In 1969, the United Nations published the results of a geological survey that first noted sizable petroleum deposits beneath the seabed of the SCS. Exploiting these deposits was bound to create greater ROC-PRC tensions. However, increasing levels of crossstrait investment and trade could give the two governments common ground to cooperate on exercising their joint claim to the SCS.

TAIWAN's SCS CLAIMS

After World War II, China claimed all of the SCS. In this case China meant “Republic of China,” or “Nationalist China” since it was under the sole authority of Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist party. However, the civil war was renewed in China right after World War II ended, and by 1949 the Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong were able to push southward into China proper from their base area in Manchuria.