What Lies in the South China Sea China’s claims rely on historical fiction and face an imminent challenge from the U.S. Navy.

What Lies in the South China Sea

China’s claims rely on historical fiction and face an imminent challenge from the U.S. Navy.

The U.S. and China are headed for a showdown at sea. U.S. officials say that within days the U.S. military will conduct “freedom of navigation” patrols to challenge Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea’s strategic Spratly archipelago. That area lies more than 700 miles off China’s coast, between Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, but China’s government has warned that it is “seriously concerned” about U.S. action and “will absolutely not permit any country to infringe on China’s territorial waters.”

Now’s a good time, then, to clarify what’s going on. The U.S. and its Asian partners are trying to curb a Chinese campaign to conquer one of the world’s most vital international waterways. The South China Sea is home to rich natural resources and half of all global shipborne trade: some $5 trillion a year in oil, food, iPhones and more. By asserting “indisputable sovereignty” over its nearly 1.35 million square miles, including vast swaths of sea belonging to its neighbors, Beijing threatens to hold hostage—and to wage war over—the economic heart of East Asia.

The U.S. position is to support open seas and the peaceful resolution of disputes, while taking no stance on who owns what in disputed waters. Yet that’s not because China’s claims are as valid as those of its neighbors. On the contrary, China’s claims are dubious, often laughably so. That Beijing backs them aggressively—sending oil rigs, fishing boats and maritime militia into its neighbors’ exclusive economic zones, transforming rocks and reefs into artificial islands for military bases—only underscores the importance of deterring further such revisionism.

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“Islands in the South China Sea since ancient times are China’s territory,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping said last month at the White House, giving President Obama and the Washington press corps some typical Beijing spin. The real story is otherwise.

Beijing officially registered its South China Sea territorial claims by submitting a map to the United Nations in 2009. With a huge dashed line swooping south from mainland China in the shape of a U, the map derives from one issued in 1947, when China’s Nationalist government wanted to answer Japan’s World War II claims to dominion over the sea. In 1949 the Nationalists fell to Mao’s Communists and fled to Taiwan. But their ahistorical maritime claim based on Japanese Imperial precedent is today a sacred tenet of China’s Communist Party.

China’s U-shaped map is more an assertion of power than an exercise in cartography. Originally it had 11 dashes. Then Beijing made it nine dashes, as in the version filed to the U.N. Still other official Chinese maps have 10 dashes, with one swallowing Taiwan.

Beijing is vague about the map’s meaning. Does it claim sovereignty over just the rocks, islands and other land features within the nine-dash line, or over all the water and natural resources too? Beijing often acts as though the whole area is a Chinese lake in which foreigners can operate only with permission, but it hasn’t clarified its views to the U.N. or its neighbors. Nor has it deigned to publish geographic coordinates for the dashed line, or to explain why at different times the map has had dashes of different sizes, in different locations.

Beijing often speaks of “historical rights,” yet history shows China never ruled the South China Sea. Until the 1930s the Chinese government didn’t have maps of the Spratly archipelago, let alone control of the territory. After France occupied several of the Spratlys in 1930, it took Beijing three years just to notice—at which point China’s consul in nearby Manila had to ask U.S. diplomats for a map. The first country to object to France’s move was Japan, not China.

When the Chinese government in 1935 published a list claiming ownership of 132 pieces of land in the South China Sea, the assertion was so groundless—Beijing’s attachment to the area so imagined—that Chinese officials didn’t have Chinese names to use. So they translated or transliterated names from Western atlases, such as Antelope Reef and James Shoal. (BBC reporter Bill Hayton documents this in a recent book.)

In the case of James Shoal they made a translation error that echoes loudly today. Shoals are underwater rock or sand masses, and James Shoal lies 70 feet under water in the far southern South China Sea. But China’s 1935 list identified it as a beach or sandbank that rises out of the water. From that, Beijing now claims sovereignty over an area that is more than 1,000 miles from China yet within some 50 miles of Malaysia. What Beijing claims today as “the southernmost point of Chinese territory,” Mr. Hayton notes, “doesn’t exist.”

So China historically didn’t exercise authority over the South China Sea, and foreign states have never acquiesced to Chinese claims to the area. That disposes of Beijing’s historical case as a matter of the international Law of the Sea Treaty, to which China is a party. But of course Beijing’s essential strategy is to bully, not respect any law. As China’s foreign minister told a regional summit in 2010, “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that is just a fact.” 

Mr. Xi, who rose to power in 2012, is even more than his predecessors an ambitious revisionist keen to press Beijing’s advantage as long as its neighbors are weak and the U.S. unable or unwilling to impose costs for destabilizing behavior. A la Vladimir Putin. 

Hence the imperative for the U.S. to protect freedom of navigation, as basic a pillar of international order as there is. Any U.S. military mission in the Spratlys entails risk, as China’s diplomatic and military responses are unpredictable. But the harms of U.S. inaction are mounting. While Mr. Xi tells tales at White House press conferences, his civilian and military forces are tightening control over Asia’s most sensitive waterway.

Mr. Feith is a Journal editorial writer based in Hong Kong.