What’s Wrong with this Map? - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 3

Nothing, as far as I could tell at first glance. Gradually it dawned on me that
the map's liability had to do less with anything inside China than with its edges,
the places where China abutted its numerous neighbours. I knew that China had
exchanged fire with both the Soviet Union and India over disputed borders; there
mayhavebeenothersaswell.Wasthismapclaiming moreterritoryforChinathan
it had the right to occupy? Then I glanced at the South China Sea. This large and
relatively shallow body of water south of China is bounded on its other three sides
by Vietnam, Malaysian Borneo, Brunei and the Philippines. China has declared
ownership of the whole thing, minus the standard 12 nautical miles (13.8 miles or
22.2 kilometres) that international law permits every coastal nation to claim. This
is China's most egregious unilateral claim over a frontier. There it was on my map,
marked out as a series of nine dashes dipping down from the main body of the
country to enclose all of the South China Sea.
The Vietnamese know this same body of water as the East Sea. Their particular
interest is in the scattering of some thirty-odd tiny islands known to Europeans as
the Paracels. (The Portuguese broughtthe wordfromsouthern Brazil, where it was
the native term for a protective offshore reef.) Vietnamese call them the Hoàng Sa
Islands, the Yellow Shoals; to Chinese they are the Xisha, the Western Shoals, so
named because there is another, wider scattering of islands 700 nautical miles to
the south-east, off the north-west coast of Borneo. These they call the Nansha or
Southern Shoals. The rest of us know them as the Spratly Islands (named after the
English captain Richard Spratly, who sailed by them in 1843 and published an ac-
count of his voyage in London). The tiny islands clustered in these zones number
in the thousands, depending on how many outcroppings that disappear at high tide
deserve to be dignified with the name of island. Historically uninhabited, they are
uninhabitable without sustained support from elsewhere.
China's claim has put it in a decades-long stand-off with all its SouthEast Asian
neighbours. The first serious conflict blew up in January 1974, when China and
South Vietnam fought the two-day Battle of the Paracel Islands. (Vietnam lost.)
It was a useful propagandistic distraction for both sides. Unfortunately for us ex-
changestudentsinChinaatthetime,thislittleexerciseinforcemajeureresultedin
a lot of bombastic patriotic poetry, which our teachers forced us to read.
And there I was in the summer of 1976, heading for Vietnam with a restricted
nationalmapofChinainmybackpack.Thestern-faced borderguardsawmecom-
ing. He opened the backpack, looked through its contents and pulled out the map.
Barely concealing his pleasure at being a cog in the machinery of state, he asked