Nine Dashes and a Tribunal

Look at a Chinese map of the South China Sea and you will see a line of dashes looping far to the south of the coast, down past Vietnam and Malaysia towards Indonesia's Natuna Islands and back up along the Philippines. It encloses most of the sea.

The line is older than the People's Republic. It first appeared, with eleven dashes, on a map published by the Republic of China in 1947, and two dashes in the Gulf of Tonkin were dropped in the early 1950s, leaving nine. For most of its life it was a cartographic habit rather than a legal argument. In 2009 China attached a map showing it to diplomatic notes at the United Nations, objecting to a submission by Malaysia and Vietnam, and the line entered the world of law.

What it claims has never been clearly stated. China has not published coordinates for it, or said whether it marks a boundary of sovereignty, a zone of historic rights, or simply the area within which China claims the islands. That ambiguity is useful: it keeps options open and makes the claim hard to challenge directly.

In January 2013 the Philippines found a way to challenge it anyway.

Both countries had ratified the Convention on the Law of the Sea, and the convention allows one party to take another to compulsory arbitration over its interpretation. China had excluded certain categories of dispute in 2006, including maritime boundaries, as the convention permits. Sovereignty over land is not covered by the convention at all. So the Philippines did not ask who owns the islands. It asked what the features are and what they could generate, and whether China's conduct was consistent with the convention.

China refused to take part, published a position paper arguing that the tribunal had no jurisdiction, and did not appoint an arbitrator. The case went ahead with five arbitrators, with the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague acting as registry.

The award was issued on 12 July 2016, and the Philippines won almost everything.

The tribunal found that any historic rights China might have had to resources were extinguished where they were incompatible with the economic zones the convention created, so there was no legal basis for claiming such rights within the dashed line. It found that none of the high-tide features in the Spratly Islands was capable of generating an economic zone of its own. It found that Mischief Reef and Second Thomas Shoal were low-tide elevations within the Philippines' zone. And it found that China had violated Philippine rights by interfering with fishing and oil exploration, by building artificial islands, and by tolerating the harvesting of endangered species by Chinese fishermen, and that the island-building had caused severe harm to the coral reef environment.

China declared the award null and void and without binding force.

China's position deserves its strongest statement. It holds that the real dispute is about territorial sovereignty and boundaries, which the tribunal had no power to decide, and that the Philippines repackaged it as a question about entitlements to get round China's 2006 exclusion. It also argues that its rights in the sea predate the convention and are not extinguished by it. The tribunal considered the jurisdictional argument and rejected it, and most international lawyers outside China agree with the tribunal. But the objection is a real legal argument, not merely a refusal.

So what can an unenforced award do?

The convention says awards are final and binding. It provides no mechanism to enforce them. Rodrigo Duterte, who became president of the Philippines twelve days before the ruling, chose to set it aside in pursuit of better relations and investment from China. His successor, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, returned to it, and since 2023 the Philippine coast guard has publicised its confrontations with Chinese vessels, with cameras and journalists on board.

The sharpest of those confrontations happen at Second Thomas Shoal, where the Philippines deliberately ran an old navy landing ship aground in 1999 and keeps a small detachment of marines aboard. Chinese coast guard vessels have repeatedly blocked the missions that resupply it and turned water cannon on them, and in June 2024 a Filipino sailor lost a thumb in a clash.

Here is the useful conclusion. The award did not change what happens on the water, where China's coast guard and fishing fleets are larger and closer. It changed the reference point off the water. In July 2020 the United States formally aligned its own position with the award, and other governments have cited it in notes to the United Nations. Every protest Manila makes is now argued against a finding by a tribunal under a treaty China ratified.

A ruling without a bailiff is still a resource for the weaker party, because diplomacy runs on records. China's strategy is to make the award irrelevant through presence. The Philippines' strategy is to keep it in the record until presence is no longer the only thing that counts. Neither has won, and the contest between them is the shape of the dispute now.