- Hey, if we put this flag here, there’s going to be no room for my villa!
Whatever your position on what belongs to who in the South China Sea dispute (“East Sea” in Vietnam), you gotta give credit to China for creatively pushing their claim to the whole thing. Well, in their defense, not the whole thing, just around 80%.
China’s territorial claims have been infamously demarcated by what is referred to as the “Nine-Dotted Line” –which the Vietnamese call Đường lưỡi bò, “ox’s tongue line.”
I don’t want to go too deep into the history books on China’s claim, but a lot of it stems from the early 15th-century voyages of Chinese admiral Zheng He, the Muslim eunuch who, from 1405-1433, headed several voyages as far as Africa’s Somali coast as a show of Chinese status as super bad ass –the common term used before “super power.”
Had the new emperor not decided to focus resources on defending the northern borders and was able to resist his paranoia about the Chinese masses attaining too much knowledge, it is likely that Zheng He would have gone around the Horn of Africa before Vasca de Gama did in 1497 and we might all be speaking Chinese.
The Chinese “Treasure Ships” and dwarfed anything Europe had to offer and their support ships, which numbered in the hundreds, would have easily defeated a Spanish or Portuguese fleet had they been foolish enough to confront them. There are scholarly disputes as to whether the Treasure Ships were huge or “very big”, but suffice it to say, China ruled the seas and the Europeans were probably lucky their less advanced technology hadn’t gotten them around the horn of Africa until the end of the century.
The Chinese “Treasure Ships” dwarfed anything Europe had to offer. There are scholarly disputes as to whether they were huge or “very big”, suffice it to say, China ruled the seas.
Ok, I went too deep, but it’s a great story and you should check it out.
At any rate, aside of bullying its neighbors on the high seas these days, China is also employing more subtle approaches these days to getting the Nine-Dotted Line out there in the public eye. There was the recent news of printing the lines in Chinese passports –which the Vietnamese and the Philippines refuse to stamp and are instead issuing visas on a separate piece of paper.
The passports were blatant, but China’s other tacts are a growing more and more subtle. The Vietnamese media reported yesterday that Air China, the flagship carrier, now shows the Nine-Dotted Line on the route map featured in their inflight magazine.
Not the greatest image, yet all that is available with the breaking news. You can see the Nine-Dotted Line demarcated on the Air China flight route.
And if that weren’t enough, Chinese-made inflatable globes manufactured for resellers have shown up in Australia and the Philippines with the Nine-Dotted Line printed on them.
China, sneaking in the Nine-Dotted Line wherever they can. Even without customer’s knowing it.
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