Map reveals PRC’s ongoing land grab strategy

FORUM Staff

The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) release of the latest version of its professed official map drew strong rebukes from the United States, its Allies and Partners in the Indo-Pacific over what was termed a cartological land grab — Beijing’s claim to all of self-governed Taiwan, most of the South China Sea and disputed territories elsewhere.

The map is the “latest attempt to legitimize China’s purported sovereignty and jurisdiction over Philippine features and maritime zones [and] has no basis under international law,” the Philippine Foreign Affairs Department said after the map’s release in August 2023. The map encircled the South China Sea, in continued defiance of an international tribunal’s 2016 ruling dismissing the PRC’s territorial claims as legally invalid.

India and Malaysia also strongly protested after the revised map laid claim to their territories. “We reject these claims as they have no basis. Such steps by the Chinese side only complicate the resolution of the boundary question,” a spokesman for India’s External Affairs Ministry said. The PRC map claimed India’s northern state of Arunachal Pradesh, which is at the eastern end of the nations’ 3,380-kilometer disputed border known as the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

The map also absorbed most of Malaysia’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which extends 200 nautical miles from the Southeast Asian nation’s coast and where international law grants Kuala Lumpur rights to maritime resources.

Redrawing map lines is part of a broader land grab strategy by the PRC that has included building villages in Nepal and bullying and coercion, particularly in the South China Sea. “It’s not just what lines they draw on the map. It’s about their coercive behavior. It’s about the way they intimidate [their] neighbors and some of our Allies and Partners in the Indo-Pacific to try to advance these false maritime claims,” U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told Voice of America.

The PRC stealthily erected buildings on land owned by Nepal in 2020 and then refused to allow Nepali authorities into the area. Later that year, the PRC’s military buildup heightened tensions along the LAC, sparking a clash that left 20 Indian Soldiers and at least four People’s Liberation Army troops dead.

In April 2023, in another map-rewriting ploy, the PRC said it was renaming 11 mountain peaks, rivers and residential areas in Arunachal Pradesh, according to The Wire, an India-based news website.

The PRC attempts to normalize its expansion ambitions by downplaying military involvement, experts said. It used purported civilian projects to dredge artificial features in the South China Sea, where it also uses coast guard and maritime militia vessels to harass boats resupplying Philippine troops stationed on Second Thomas Shoal within Manila’s EEZ.

Such tactics, known as salami slicing, seek to “change the territorial and maritime status quo with a steady progression of small actions, none of which serves as a casus belli [act of war] by itself, yet which over time lead cumulatively to a strategic transformation” in Beijing’s favor, Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, wrote in The Japan Times newspaper.

In response, the U.S. is working assiduously to build and strengthen regional alliances, according to Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO and president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

“The U.S.-Japan security relationship is now the strongest it’s been in decades, bolstered by Tokyo’s decision to double defense spending over five years, while investing in new capabilities necessary to defend itself and enhancing deterrence throughout the region,” Daalder wrote for the U.S.-based website Politico in June 2023. “Australia has also adapted its defense strategy and posture to focus on maintaining a strong deterrent in the Pacific. And Washington has successfully prodded both Tokyo and Seoul to set aside their differences to strengthen their bilateral and trilateral relations. The Quad leaders of Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. now meet on a regular basis as well.”

With Taiwan also increasingly investing in capabilities to thwart a potential invasion from across the Taiwan Strait, the combined efforts of Allies and Partners are sending the PRC “an unmistakable message that war across the Straits would be bloody and costly — and its outcome far from certain,” Daalder wrote.