S China Sea different from Pearl Harbour or Manchuria

I refer to the commentary “China should heed the lessons of Pearl Harbour” (Dec 8).

The writer is welcome to exhort everybody to learn from the mistakes of Pearl Harbour, but he is mistaken to compare China’s assertions on the South China Sea to the Manchurian Incident in 1931.

That incident was nothing more than Japanese aggression on foreign soil as confirmed by the League of Nations. So were Japan’s other aggressions in Asia.

Conversely, China has formal territorial claims in the South China Sea; while its military deployments and constructions are new, its claims have existed at least since 1958. The main issue is the basis for its claims.

China is unique as an entity with thousands of years of unbroken sovereignty. Other countries have had revolutions and had been conquered by others. Hence China is able to access claims made by all its governments from the beginning in a way that other governments around the world cannot.

Singapore, for instance, cannot lay claim to Penang because the Republic is a different sovereign authority from the administration of the Straits Settlements.

On the other hand, the People’s Republic of China regards itself as having inherited the authority of the Qing empire, which inherited the authority of the Ming Dynasty and so on, all the way back to the legendary Xia Dynasty.

China claims rights to the contested territories in the South China Sea based on the holdings of the Song Dynasty in the 11th century. But none of the other entities exist now, having been overthrown by revolutions and invasions.

Even Japan was reconstituted under American supervision after World War II. There are thus no sovereign entities in the region to verify China’s centuries-old territorial claims.

The question is whether the world can provide an objective appraisal of China’s claims with scant other references on which to rely. As long as that does not happen, there will not be peace in the South China Sea.

And this is unlike Pearl Harbour and Manchuria, which Japan never had any claims to in the first place.