MCXXXX10.1177/0097700418771678Modern ChinaHayton 771678research-article2018 Article Modern China 1 –44 The Modern Origins of © The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: China’s South China sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/0097700418771678DOI: 10.1177/0097700418771678 Sea Claims: Maps, journals.sagepub.com/home/mcx Misunderstandings, and the Maritime Geobody Bill Hayton1 Abstract This article offers a new account of the development of China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. It argues that a collective Chinese belief in a “historic claim” to the reefs and rocks therein emerged in distinct episodes during the first half of the twentieth century, partly in response to perceived threats to the country’s sovereignty but mainly as attempts to shore up declining nationalist legitimacy. It situates the claim within efforts by Chinese intellectual and state elites to construct a national “geobody” in the first decades of the twentieth century. It argues that this was not a process of documenting a preexisting claim but of imagining and asserting one through the mobilization of both emotion and archival documents. Moreover, this account emphasizes the importance of the acquisition of knowledge from foreign sources and the confusion that entailed. The legacy of this confused claim-making shapes South China Sea geopolitics today. Keywords Paracel, Pratas, Spratly, sovereignty, territory, geography, U-shaped line, 9- dash line 1Asia-Pacific Programme, Chatham House, London, UK Corresponding Author: Bill Hayton, Asia-Pacific Programme, Chatham House, 10 St James’s Square, London, SW1Y 4LE, UK. Email:
[email protected] 2 Modern China 00(0) The origins of China’s claims in the South China Sea have been remarkably understudied given the amount of political attention those claims currently attract.