What the numbers can (and can’t) tell us about the South China Sea dispute
What the numbers can (and can’t) tell us about the South China Sea dispute
WRITTEN BY ANDREW CHUBB
2 February 2021
How do states contest each other’s claims to disputed maritime spaces, and how can the risk of military confrontation be assessed and minimised? Maritime disputes have rapidly moved towards the centre of world politics in the early 21st century, driven by the intensifying disputes over the South and East China Seas that have dominated strategic planning — not to mention news and commentary — in the world’s most economically vibrant region.
State leaders and international relations academics are often famously at odds on the big questions affecting politics — but find rare agreement on the increasing risks of a major conflict over maritime spaces in the Western Pacific. Against this backdrop, it’s crucial to better understand the dynamics of contestation over sea spaces, a hostile environment for humans where state presence, ways of exercising control, and even social conventions vary greatly from what we’re used to on land.
New research — but history matters
Research on maritime disputes is in its infancy. The leading quantitative source on maritime disputes is the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) dataset, which includes claim initiation, militarized escalation, and peaceful settlement attempts for maritime disputes in Europe and the Western Hemisphere between 1900 and 2001. The ICOW maritime dispute data has made clear that past militarization is a significant predictor of militarized conflict. This intuitive finding confirms, in essence, that — even controlling for a wide range of other factors — the history of the dispute matters.
Data collection and coding is still in progress, but once complete, the project will enable us to ask an array of new questions on the dynamics of maritime disputes in East Asia.
The latest ICOW data also indicate that Asia-Pacific maritime disputes have been the most likely to produce militarized confrontation. However, it doesn’t account for the ways states advance their positions below the threshold of military conflict. That’s why, in a new article in the journal International Security, I’ve put forward a new typology of the ways states advance their interests at sea without resorting to force. States’ actions may be declarative (verbal assertions); demonstrative (unilateral administrative acts in the disputed area); coercive (threatening or imposing punishment on rivals); or they may use force.
I applied this framework to a unique time-series dataset of 132 cases of change in PRC behaviour in the South China Sea each year from 1970 to 2015. It’s unique because it addresses a major skew in outside analysts’ information supply about the South China Sea — namely, the fact that there’s so much more information about events in recent years than in the past. To mitigate this ‘present-centric bias’, I looked through an array of Chinese sources on the PRC’s historical activities in the South China Sea dating back to 1970. This helped put Beijing's current policies in context, while also clarifying the timing of events, as well as some key features that distinguish present PRC policy from the past.
Decades of assertiveness
The article reveals that China’s policy in the South China Sea has been marked by near-continuous assertiveness ever since 1970, with surges in 1973, 1987, 1992. But the major shift in recent times occurred in 2007 — several years earlier than most analyses have recognised. That was when Beijing began a rapid unilateral administrative buildup — primarily patrolling and later artificial island-building — accompanied by the introduction of regular coercive measures against its rivals.
The switch, in other words, was already underway well before the Global Financial Crisis weakened US power and prestige; and it was even longer before Xi Jinping, China’s strongman commonly assumed to be responsible for its assertive maritime policy, took power in December 2012. More importantly, however, working with Zach Haver, we have managed to build a unique parallel time series comparing China and Vietnam’s assertive behaviours in the South China Sea since 1970.
Figure 1: Comparison of China and Vietnam’s intensified assertive actions in the South China Sea dispute, 1970-2014.
The picture that emerges is one of power overtaking proximity. Aided by its geographical closeness to the disputed archipelagos — the Spratlys and Paracels — and greater existing human connections to the disputed islands via fisherfolk, Vietnam generally maintained a more assertive policy than China did through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. In particular, when China’s activity levels surged in 1973-75, 1987-89 and 1992-95, Vietnam was easily able to counteract Beijing’s advances — in many cases pushing back with coercive measures and new occupations of disputed islands and reefs.
By the 2000s, however, both sides of the chart had started to level up. When Beijing began its protracted build-up and new coercive practices in 2007, Hanoi initially responded by consolidating its positions. But after three years of sustained PRC advancements, Vietnam could no longer keep up, while China’s activities only continue to increase.
New data, new questions
This brief, broad-brush picture emerges from the Maritime Assertiveness Times Series (MATS) project, which is compiling corresponding data on other states in the South China Sea, as well as an East China Sea series. Data collection and coding is still in progress, but once complete, the project will enable us to ask an array of new questions on the dynamics of maritime disputes in East Asia.
Which pairs of countries have been involved in the most clashes — and of which kind? Which issues are the most escalatory — oil, fish, or strategic control? Which kinds of actions — and in which domain, domestic, diplomatic, or physical — are the most likely to trigger which kinds of countermeasures? Do coercive actions trigger coercive responses? Can declarative statements deter? And what are the trends over time in how states prosecute their interests at sea?
For now, the key challenge lies in data collection on historical cases, due to the enormous skew in the information supply on these disputes. In 1988, when the PRC attacked Vietnam in the Spratly Islands and seized six reefs, the confrontation raised little more than a blip on the international media agenda. Today, the South China Sea dispute is regarded as one of the world’s conflict hot spots, with vast volumes of information on quotidian daily developments there.
Counteracting this bias, which tends to exaggerate the recent changes in all sides’ behaviour, requires scouring through historical sources to try to identify the changes in states’ policies back in decades past, which were not widely known or publicly announced. As with any attempt to distil social processes to numbers, it is crucial to bear in mind the context that the numbers might obscure.
For one thing, the MATS data only includes non-cooperative aspects of states’ behaviour. The assertiveness framework does capture moderations of behaviour — that is, shifts to fewer, or qualitatively less escalatory, assertive actions over a given time period. But it does not account for actively conciliatory actions such as agreements over resource exploitation or management, joint patrols, and other confidence-building measures (CBMs).
Concluding thoughts
Most of all, however — as my International Security article showed in relation to China’s policy — the behavioural changes that show up in the data might lag well behind the important political decisions that set them in motion. The lesson is that data-centred approaches always need to be complemented by close analysis of speech, text and circumstance around key cases.
While the numbers can help us see the big picture, maritime disputes are political processes, so we have to account for how the people involved understand their actions in order to detect the remote but potentially more fundamental causes of policy change.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Andrew Chubb is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University. Image credit: Wikipedia