A (Critical) Geopolitical Analysis of the Discourse of the People’s Republic of China Regarding the South China Sea Dispute University of Amsterdam BSc Human Geography & Urban & Regional Planning Thesis Project Critical/Political/Cultural Geography Tim De Boer – 11057424 – [email protected] Dr. Patrick Weir / Dr. Aslan Zorlu 18 June 2018 / 16796 words Table of Contents Abstract ...........................................................................................................................................................3 Introduction.....................................................................................................................................................4 Theoretical Framework...................................................................................................................................5 Critical Geopolitics as an Academic (sub)-Discipline ....................................................................................5 Political Geography ..................................................................................................................................5 The rise of Geopolitics .............................................................................................................................6 The fall of Classical Geopolitics ...............................................................................................................8 Towards Critical Geopolitics ....................................................................................................................9 Critical Geopolitics ................................................................................................................................ 12 Conceptualisation and Perspectives ........................................................................................................ 12 Criticism ................................................................................................................................................ 13 Towards the Context: the PRC and the SCS Dispute .................................................................................... 14 The PRC: The ‘new’ Hegemonic State? .................................................................................................. 14 Economy and Finance ............................................................................................................................ 14 Domestic Politics ................................................................................................................................... 15 Economics and Foreign Politics .............................................................................................................. 15 Military .................................................................................................................................................. 17 The PRC’s Geopolitical Challenge ......................................................................................................... 17 Of continued relevance: Classical Geopolitical Theory............................................................................ 18 The SCS dispute ..................................................................................................................................... 19 The Paracel- and Spratly Islands ............................................................................................................. 21 The ‘Xi Era’: From Arbitration to Artificial Islands ................................................................................ 22 Methodology .................................................................................................................................................. 24 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 24 Research Question.................................................................................................................................. 24 Discourse Analysis ................................................................................................................................. 24 Operationalization .................................................................................................................................. 24 Limitations ............................................................................................................................................. 27 Analysis.......................................................................................................................................................... 28 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 28 Sub-Question 1: The Formal Dimension ................................................................................................. 28 Sub-Question 2: The Practical Dimension ............................................................................................... 31 Sub-Question 3: The Popular Dimension ................................................................................................ 33 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................... 35 Literature ...................................................................................................................................................... 36 *Picture on front-page: (Hindustantimes, 2016). 2 Abstract The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has undergone rapid development in recent years. Part of its development strategy is expanding into the South China Sea under a discourse where peaceful development prevails. The expansion into the South China Sea causes a dispute with the other littoral states however, and this study seeks to examine the PRC’s policies through both classical geopolitical theory as well as critical geopolitical theory. 3 Introduction On 18 June 2018, Paul Maley published an opinion article in The Australian. The Defence and National Security editor argued that “Australia cannot make the same mistakes in the Pacific that it made in the South China Sea, where Beijing militarised the area quickly and without serious challenge” (Maley, 2018). To understand what Maley means, when he argues that Beijing militarised the South China Sea (SCS) without serious challenge, this thesis will develop an Analysis of what is known as the SCS dispute, which is commonly understood as one of most complex maritime disputes in the world. It will do so, through the perspective of Beijing and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is therefore studied. The PRC is currently also in a stage of rapid transitions on multiple fronts and gained a lot of international attention when Xi Jinping’s (Xi), who is the country’s 10th president and officially assumed office on 14 March 2013, power was extended on 11 March 2018. On that day, nearly 3000 members of the PRC’s parliament voted almost unanimously in favour of a Constitutional amendment that abolished the presidential term limit, meaning that Xi does not have to step down when his second term ends in March 2023 (Buckley & Meyers, 2018; Buckley & Wu, 2018; Osborne, 2018). Both Maley’s alarming statement and the abolishment of the presidential term limit trigger a tendency to speculate on the PRC’s future course. Instead of doing that, this thesis sets out an analysis to develop an understanding of why the PRC militarised the SCS in the light of one of the most complex maritime disputes of this moment. To develop that knowledge, which can in turn contribute to a better scholarly understanding of the events that reached the news recently, the PRC’s perspective on the SCS dispute is studied through both classical geopolitics and critical geopolitics. As both schools of geopolitics evolved from the fundaments of Political Geography itself, the Theoretical Framework will create an understanding of both schools of thought to show how they developed and will be used in the Analysis. Moreover, it is argued that both schools are necessary when a comprehensive understanding of the SCS dispute is to be developed. Although critical geopolitics claims to be against classical geopolitics, it studies an issue here that is fundamentally linked to classical geopolitics (Haverluk et al., 2014). Thus, the SCS dispute will be studied in this thesis and it will be done by first establishing a Theoretical Framework that introduces Political Geography itself and accordingly shows how that evolved into classical geopolitics, and gradually works towards an understanding of critical geopolitics. Having set out the theory, it is then time to describe the context. The case of the PRC will first be introduced, and the framework will do so by applying the classical geopolitical theory to the PRC’s policies after which the SCS dispute is introduced, as it gets embedded in the classical framework. After the Theoretical Framework is completed, the Methodology follows, and the method of the critical geopolitical analysis will take shape in this section. Doing so the following Research Question will be answered: What was the discourse of the institutions from the PRC in the formal, practical and popular dimension on the case of the position of the PRC regarding the South China Sea dispute during the period of Xi’s first term?