China’s claim to the islands in the South China Sea has been met with stiff resistance from its neighbours as they are backed by the United States, and Philipines have taken China to court to a ruling that China has already said it will never accept because long ago, they have resolved that all problems should be solved through peaceful negotiations.
China has indisputable sovereignty over the Nansha Islands and their adjacent waters. It was China that first discovered and named the islands as the Nansha Islands and the first to exercise sovereign jurisdiction over them.
History and jurisprudence evidences support this, and the international community has long recognized it.
During World War II, Japan launched the war of aggression against China and occupied a large part of China’s territory, including the Nansha Islands. It was explicitly provided in the Cairo Declaration, the Potsdam Proclamation and other international documents that all the territories Japan had stolen from China should be restored, and naturally, they included the Nansha Islands.
In December 1946, the then Chinese government sent senior officials to the Nansha Islands for their recovery. A take-over ceremony was held on the islands and a monument erected in commemoration of it, and the troops were sent over on garrison duty. In 1952 the Japanese Government officially stated that it renounced all its “right, title and claim to Taiwan, Penghu Islands as well as Nansha and Xisha islands”, thus formally returning the Nansha Islands to China.
For quite a long period of time after WWII, there had been no such a thing as the so-called issue of the South China Sea. No country in the area surrounding the South China Sea had challenged China’s exercise of sovereignty over the Nansha Islands and their adjacent waters.
Prior to 1975, Vietnam had, in explicit terms, recognized China’s territorial integrity and sovereignty over the Nansha Islands. Before the 1970s, countries like the Philippines and Malaysia had never referred to their territories as including the Nansha Islands in any of their legal instruments or statements made by their leaders.
In the Treaty of Peace signed in Paris in 1898 and the Treaty signed in Washington in 1900 between the United States and Spain, the scope of the Philippines’ territory was expressly laid down, which did not include the Nansha Islands.
According to my research, the earliest discovery by the Chinese people can be traced back to the Han Dynasty as it was during that time they gave the name Nansha Islands during 23-220 A.D. Yang Fu of the East Han Dynasty made reference to the Nansha Islands in his book entitled Yiwu Zhi (Records of Rarities) , which reads: “Zhanghai qitou, shui qian er duo cishi”(“There are islets, sand cays, reefs and banks in the South China Sea, the water there is shallow and filled with magnetic rocks or stones”). Chinese people then called the South China Sea Zhanghai and all the islands, reefs, shoals and isles in the South China Sea, including the Nansha and Xisha Islands, Qitou.
General Kang Tai, one of the famous ancient Chinese navigators of the East Wu State of the Three Kingdoms Period (220-280AD), also mentioned the Nansha Islands in his book entitled Funan Zhuan (or Journey to and from Phnom), the name of an ancient state in today’s Cambodia. He used the following sentences in describing the islands: “In the South China Sea, there are coral islands and reefs; below these islands and reefs are rocks upon which the corals were formed.”
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