 And the bell has told high noon. So I think I'll kick it off. Some people are still filtering in, but it is a pleasure for CMSI to host Dr. Andrew Chubb today. He's gonna be talking about a really superb paper that he just published in the Journal of International Security on PRC Assertiveness in the South China Sea, subject that I know a lot of us here at the War College have paid a lot of attention to. And we're looking forward to Dr. Chubb sharing some of his insights on it. By way of background, Dr. Chubb is a British Academy post-doctoral fellow currently based at Lancaster University researching the linkages between Chinese domestic politics and international relations. Previously, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Columbia Harvard China in the World Program where I personally had the pleasure of being a co-fellow and have seen this impressive project under development. Andrew's a graduate of the University of Western Australia and he's currently undertaking a three-year investigation of the role of domestic public opinion in international crisis diplomacy in the Asia Pacific. More broadly, his interests include maritime and territorial disputes, strategic communication, political propaganda, and Chinese Communist Party history. I should add that he's also the author of a forthcoming CMSI red book on PRC nationalism that's role or lack thereof in Chinese actions in the South China Sea. So he is quite well versed on all things South China Sea and it's really a privilege to have him with us today. He's gonna speak for about 45 minutes about the research and then we'll take on board your questions. So without further ado, over to you, Andrew. Thanks Isaac. Thanks for the intro and also for the invitation to speak today. Thanks everyone out there for coming along. This project has really benefited really enormously from Isaac's detailed feedback when we were fellow fellows in the China and the World Program that he mentioned. And also from others at CMSI, Peter Dutton, Ryan Martinson, Andrew Erickson, of course. So there's definitely no more appropriate place to be presenting this work for the first time since it finally got published earlier this year. The paper really revolves around more or less a single word, assertiveness. And it's all about how that single word is not really all that singular as a concept. It's something that we really have to break down a bit more at least when it comes to maritime disputes if we wanna understand the kinds of dynamics of state contestation in geographies like the South China Sea. So over the past few years, this notion of Chinese assertiveness, it's almost been a kind of meme. In fact, Ian Johnston has called it a meme, I think in his 2013 paper on assertiveness in a sort of broader sense, but it's really seemed to be everywhere in China policy circles. And it seems to come in endless varieties. Think of reactive assertiveness, aggressive assertiveness, I think was Kalfaia's coinage. There was militant assertiveness, creeping assertiveness. It's not just in the media or in the think tanks, it's there in government research, in scholarly works. And of course in 2013 after Ian Johnston published that paper, it became the focus of a debate in international security involving Ian and a couple of other alumni of the postdoc program that Isaac and I have been part of in the past about whether there's varieties of assertiveness in grand strategy. I'm talking about something here, I sort of developed the concept in something much narrower that's about measuring state behavior in disputed geographies, territorial and maritime disputes. But nonetheless, this idea of assertiveness with that kind of mushrooming list of modifiers has really, I think been a reflection of how this broad community of China analysts has been kind of grasping for conceptual vocabulary to try to describe the changes that we've been seeing and trying to explain in China's behavior in recent years or maybe over a decade now. So, and when it comes to the South and East China seas, it's really, I think defined the English language discourse on China's current policy there as illustrated in the chart that's on your screen now. Obviously from the PRC party state's own perspective, this is all, there's probably a variety of assertiveness called so-called assertiveness that the PRC would refer to. Invented by hostile anti-China forces to smear China's rightful restoration of its place in the region. China probably says that it's routinely safeguarded its legitimate maritime interests and nothing has changed. And so this so-called assertiveness is really all about, much to do about nothing. But clearly it doesn't take much to see that China's behavior has in fact changed in a direction that a lot of us have been describing as assertiveness. What exactly that means will be coming to in a minute. So the chart on your screen here shows the English language media mentions of the term assertiveness in close proximity to the South China Sea. You can see that it, I don't know if my cursor, is my cursor showing? Yeah, okay. So you can see that it starts to go up in 2009 and then it really takes off from 2010 and especially from 2012 onwards. And as a result, China's been seen as becoming more assertive because of things like the global financial crisis from 2008 or the rise of popular nationalism on issues like the South China Sea or the Boisi-Lai scandal and the difficulties that the CCP had in the run-up to the 2012 party Congress. And in particular, probably the most popular, the arrival of Xi Jinping as the general secretary in 2012. And all that seems logical enough. The timing seems to match up but one of the big picture findings out of this paper is that that's actually really not right. At least when it comes to the South China Sea and the South China Sea is an important part of China's overall foreign policy. So I'm not trying to explain China's, every aspect of China's foreign policy, I'm not using assertiveness in that way that has been debated before about a grand strategy. I'm using it narrowly in relation to China's maritime behavior in the South China Sea. But nonetheless, this is an important part of China's overall foreign policy in the region. And so I'm gonna try to convince you, both in the paper and in the talk today, that this really key shift in China's policy began significantly earlier, that it was well underway by 2007 and it's actually related to decisions that were made many years before that. And so as a result, it couldn't have been triggered by any of these commonly cited factors like the GFC, rising popular nationalism, and Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping, of course, being the favorite explanation of that recent George Kennan impersonator, Mr. X, in the new long telegram. So what's on the screen here, I think is a big part of the problem that this article's trying to address. And that's that the media, like everybody else, has been paying so much more attention to every little thing that happens in the South China Sea in recent years, compared to in the past. So in 1988, China sent its navy to unilaterally seize six reefs in the Spratlys in the process. They fought a fierce naval battle with the Vietnamese, sank a Vietnamese Navy ship, killed 70 Vietnamese sailors. And yet that's barely raised a ripple in the international media discourse that's here in the chart, certainly not in relation to the term assertive. You can imagine what that blip would look like if something like that happened today. So first of all, we need to get a way of trying to get clarity on when and how exactly China's behavior has changed at one that takes account of the fact that we're all looking at such a sea of information, really, compared to about recent years, compared to the information that we have about the past. So the papers analysis is really built around breaking down assertiveness into a rigorous typology of state behaviors in maritime disputes, and then applying that to a database that takes account of and tries to mitigate and offset those kinds of problems of super abundance of information on recent events and scarcity of information on events further back in the past. And so it argues that if we disaggregate assertiveness in a territorial dispute or maritime dispute into four well-defined types of state behaviors rather than this one kind of fuzzy concept of assertiveness that nobody knows exactly what it means. And if we put China's behavior in context using historical data sources that offset this huge imbalance in the information supply, then we can identify major changes that we wouldn't otherwise pick up as well as longer-term patterns of continuity and change that have implications for how we understand the drivers of China's maritime behavior. So to put it in terms of research questions, I'm asking what is assertiveness in a maritime dispute, first of all? How and when has China's policy changed in the South China Sea? And if we can shed some light on why as well? So these research questions correspond to the structure of the paper, the first part talking about assertiveness as a variable, providing a definition, a typology of assertive actions and outlining how I've applied that typology to a unique dataset. Secondly, describing to giving some descriptive findings from that exercise. So demonstrating that clear change in China's policy from 2007, which is two to five years earlier than most English language analysis recognizes. And it also shows at the same time that the key change in 2007 was not just the rapid administrative buildup, but also the introduction of regular coercive types of assertive activity. And this is the essential difference between China's policy pre and post 2007 and it's been ongoing since that time. And then putting that sort of that recent change into historical context, we can see that this post 2007 shift is the most recent of at least three major policy changes of the PRC in the South China Sea, one in the 70s, one in the 80s and one in the 90s. And then lastly, looking at the timing of these shifts in China's behavior, I'll run through what that can tell us about the causes of the changes that we can identify in China's policy in this important maritime area. So first of all, then what is assertiveness? So in the debate over assertiveness in international security, the journal into 2013, in Johnston talked about common usage of the concept of assertiveness, seeming to refer to diplomacy that explicitly threatens to impose higher costs than it would have done before. So that's basically saying that assertiveness is a more coercive or threatening quality to China's diplomacy. Now that does capture the notion that something's changed about China's foreign policy, more abrasive, but there has to be more to it than just coercion because otherwise, why aren't we just simply talking about China's coercive shift? There's much more to the state's behavior in a territorial or maritime dispute than just the coercive aspects. Obviously taking China's island building as a salient example of that or the buildup of routine maritime law enforcement patrolling activities, which I'll go into in a little bit, that can have very significant knock-on effects as well. So thinking about the words that often kind of come before assertiveness, we talk about growing assertiveness, increasing assertiveness, new assertiveness, but also others have talked about reactive assertiveness or non-confrontational assertiveness. So it's obviously broader than just outright aggression or coercion, but it definitely doesn't include cooperative actions. The APA, that's the dictionary of psychology, talks about assertiveness as being an adaptive style of communication in which individuals express their feelings and needs directly while maintaining respect for others. So the psychological definition of assertiveness isn't gonna help us too much in this case, much as it's very fashionable to bring in concepts from psychology. I wish I could, but the definition isn't particularly useful. Even the Oxford Dictionary, this is pretty unhelpful, defines assertiveness as being characterized by assertion. But the Merriam-Webster Dictionary I found was quite useful in defining it as bold or confident statements and behavior. And this is useful because it breaks down the concept into individual observable parts, observable units, that is statements and behaviors. So I've taken that part of the definition as I've adapted it into the context of disputed geographies, maritime and territorial disputes, which has basically comes out with the definition on the screen, statements and behaviors that strengthen the state's position in the dispute. The definition serves three purposes. Firstly, as I mentioned, it reduces it back to observable events, statements and behaviors. Secondly, it's broad enough to capture the whole suite of non-cooperative state behaviors in a dispute such as this. And then most importantly, it links the concept to earlier work, including by Taylor Fravel on escalation in territorial disputes, which is based around the idea of the state's position in the dispute. So Taylor Fravel defined the state's position as being the amount of disputed land that was occupied by that side in the dispute, plus its ability to control the area using military force. I make a couple of necessary definitional tweaks to this. Firstly, instead of the amount of disputed territory under occupation, it's the state's overall administrative presence, which includes sort of mobile assets in the area as well as the kind of infrastructures and kind of technical infrastructures of administration. And that's because you can't simply occupy maritime space like you can on land, where the sort of the dividing lines between the areas of control are fairly distinct in land-based disputes. Whereas in maritime spaces, there's often different degrees of intensity of overlapping administrative control. So overall administrative presence is the first element of the state's position. The second tweak is to include the viability of the claim in international law or under international law, for those with a slightly less cynical view of it. This I think is warranted to include in the state's position. Number one, because it's clear that states actually care about the legal strength of their position in these types of disputes. There's arguments about the reasons why, but one strong reason is that the costs of using force will ultimately depend on the international perceptions of the legality or legitimacy of that action. And that relates to the strength of the claim under international law. Look at the costs that Russia has paid, for example, in terms of sanctions for taking Crimea in an action that was considered to be illegitimate under international law, or indeed the Iraq invasion in 2003 is not the example of that. And then the other reason to include the viability of the claim in international law when defining the state's position would be that in the maritime space, jurisdictional claims derive largely from the Unclos regime, which enjoys very widespread international legitimacy. So the definition is deliberately broad. It aims to capture all kinds of non-cooperative behaviors. And by the way, if there are any questions, I don't know, I'm getting fairly deep into the definitional stuff here. I'm gonna move on just presently to the typology, but if there are any questions, feel free to jump in at any time, because the whole idea is to be able to really try to clarify some of these things at a pretty granular level. So by all means jump in if something's not clear. Just as an administrative note on that, please put comments in the chat and I will interpolate them for Andrew. But if there is a burning desire for clarification during it, Andrew is kindly willing to take it on, but the chat box is down at the bottom. Sorry about that, Andrew, go ahead. Yeah, okay, that's a good way of handling it. Thanks. So yeah, so a very broad definition then of assertiveness that aims to capture basically all of the types of non-cooperative problematic behaviors through which we've seen China advancing its position in this South China Sea, in the maritime space at South and East China Seas. But this being a very broad definition, we need to distinguish further between different types of actions that fit this overall definition of assertiveness in a disputed geography. Now, existing typologies out there in the international relations field don't generally recognize the kind of distinctions that I'm trying to get out here. The important variations in state behaviors below the level of the use of force. So you've got the mid database, the militarized interstate sputes, dataset, which codes all sorts of different actions above the threshold of the threat or use of military force, but it only counts actions that reach that threshold. It doesn't do anything with actions below that threshold. Taylor Fravel's typology, which I've mentioned before, territory of dispute behavior, so escalation, delay or compromise, basically treats all actions short of military escalation or seizure of territory as being part of a delaying strategy. So we need a way to be able to break down different ways that states might behave below the level of actually escalating or using force in their territorial disputes. And then the concept of gray zone conflict as well just bundles together everything basically up to the threshold of military force being defined by avoiding that threshold. So I distinguish in this paper four types of assertive actions that involve qualitatively different levels of escalation. So firstly, a declarative. So this is verbal only assertions that don't involve a threat. Examples being statements, diplomatic notes, domestic legislation, types of administrative measures that we've seen China involved in as well as international legal cases such as the one that the Philippines launched in 2013 and got a very positive outcome from three years later. So these are significant still because they generally stay in effect unless the state actively renounces them. So statements of claim to a particular disputed geography will stay in effect unless they're actually renounced. So other states do care about them and they can be legally significant but because they don't involve any physical actions in the disputed area, any threats of punishment then logically they should be the least likely to prompt escalation from rival states. Secondly, then there's demonstrative acts and this is unilateral administrative acts in the disputed possession or over the disputed possession. This can include things like the trolling activities that don't actively confront the adversaries, surveying, so laying the groundwork for further activities, development of resources, construction of infrastructure and importantly also cooperative actions with third parties that involve recognition by third parties of that disputed geography as belonging to the state. And so these are more significant than declarative activities because they consolidate the state's ability to operate in the disputed area or they demonstrate either effective unilateral administration or international recognition of the claim. So they compromise the position of the other states in the dispute more seriously than do declarative actions. Then coercive should be pretty familiar concept, attempts to influence the behavior of other states by the threatening or imposing costs. So this could be warning shots, it could be economic punishment, physical interference with other states' activities in the disputed area. These present a relatively narrow set of choices to the other states. They either have to change their behavior or they continue and risk incurring the touted punishment or alternatively they can escalate the situation in response. And then the highest level of assertiveness is just the use of military force, the application of direct military force against the other sides or the direct seizure of the disputed territory, a seizure and occupation of the disputed territory. This is, it probably doesn't require a lot of explanations to why this would be the most escalatory form of assertive action. And this matches Taylor Fragel's category of use of force of escalation in territorial disputes that I mentioned before. So that's the typology then. And the paper then sort of goes on to apply this typology to a set of 132 year on year changes in China's behavior since 1970 or between 1970 and 2015. So this is answering a key challenge, the one I mentioned before, of identifying changes in China's behavior really precisely because of this present-centric bias in the information supply. The bias in the information supply has emerged for really a host of reasons. They starts with the heightened scrutiny of China's behavior as its influence has grown. So China's actions actually mean more to other countries now that China is more powerful. So it's natural that it's attracted more attention but also the arrival of the internet which has put a lot more information at everybody's fingertips and the PRC's own increasing willingness to talk about what it's doing in the South China Sea has also increased the volume of information on its recent actions relative to its actions in the past. So the upshot of this is that alterations in the PRC's behavior are much more likely to have been observed in English language sources in recent years than the ones that occurred further back in the past. So to mitigate that, what I did was I started with the open source material that's out there that is subject to that bias but then also brought in historical PRC based sources. So mainly these are primary reference materials that were intended to inform Beijing policymakers about events in the disputed area each year as well as things like internal circulation, chronologies of major events in the South China Sea that appear, they've somehow been smuggled out of China and ended up in selected libraries in both in the US and I got mine from the National Library of Australia but I believe they're also in Harvard's Asian collections as well and you can get them in several other places in the US. They're basically Xerox copies of internal circulation materials. I put that together with some advisory reports on the situation in the South China Sea that covered the 2002 to 2009 period which is important because that's a period directly leading up to when China's behavior changed and also the open source yearbooks of the PRC government agencies which I know Isaac and others at CMSI make great use of the China Maritime Yearbook, Han Nianjian and the Fisheries Yearbook as well which really the older editions of these yearbooks often mention activities going back all the way to the 1970s through to the present. So basically this collection of materials helps to fill in some of the blanks about the past when everyone was paying less attention to the South China Sea and thereby to identify previously unrecognized alterations in the PRC's behavior that continue until today. So what did I find after applying the typology to this dataset? Well, the simple chart on your screen here plots the number of new or intensified assertive activities in each year since 1970. That's on the left through to 2015. And so what this shows, first of all, is it big enough to see? I can see Isaac getting very close to his screen. So hopefully the colors are at least visible. The red bars are the coercive actions. The dark red is the use of military force. You can see it occurs on four occasions since 1970. And the gray are the demonstrative actions, unilateral administrative behaviors in the disputed area. And the white are the declarative verbal only assertions. So what it shows, first of all, is that there's only actually been four years since 1970 when the PRC didn't undertake some form of intensified assertive activity in the South China Sea. It's been 1972, 81, 1990 is the most recent one. So what that means is that increasing or growing or rising intensifying assertiveness is a constant in PRC policy in the South China Sea rather than a change as it's usually characterized. And that suggests two important implications for our analyses of China's current policy in the South China Sea. But number one, if intensifying assertiveness is a constant rather than a change, then it's really all about the type of assertive actions that we need to analyze in order to understand the timing and the nature of the recent change in China's behavior. And so here again, the chart does tell the story. So within this overall trend of continuously increasing assertiveness or near continuously increasing assertiveness, that you've got a major qualitative change that occurred in the type of actions that China was taking to advance its position. And that starts from 2007 here, this cluster of red colored bars at the right-hand end of the chart indicating the introduction of regular coercive actions. That's actions that involve the threat or use of punishment against the adversaries. So that, and that starts from 2007. And that's in addition to a rapid and ongoing administrative buildup to the gray parts here above the red coercive bars. So a rapid and ongoing administrative buildup, the patrolling behaviors and latterly the island building as well as a notable increase in the use of coercive methods. Another important observation that comes out of this chart is that periods of non-assertiveness of the PRC in the South China Sea are relatively rare. And that raises potentially a fruitful line of inquiry into the causes and the conditions for moderation in a state's maritime dispute behavior. What are the circumstances under which a state will pull back or not necessarily pull back but ease up, moderate its advances in a dispute like this? That's a question for further research. And it's sort of already in the process, some data collection is already underway for expanding this data set to include other countries in the South China Sea, as well as the East China Sea. And then hopefully if the findings are interesting enough we'll also be able to get funding to collect data and apply the framework to analyze other maritime disputes in other parts of the world that don't involve China. So the charts on your screen there only shows the year on year changes in the PRC's behavior. It doesn't show what it's all added up to over time. So basically whether each dot or each block in this chart continued into subsequent years or whether it was a once off intensification of China's assertiveness in that year. So the next chart then gives you that big picture. It's adding in what's known or what could be reasonably inferred about the duration of each of these newly assertive patterns of PRC action that were observed in each year from 1970 down here on the left of the chart through to 2015 here. So if an action continued it creates a line here or a layer which subsequent assertive actions then sit on top of. So it shows first of all that even once we take into account that many changes in behavior can just be one-off incidents and not continue into subsequent years the PRC's overall quantitative level of assertiveness if you like has increased in 29 out of the 46 calendar years between 1970 and 2015. And that's reflected in just the overall curve or the overall upward curve of the chart. But then perhaps more significant is this effect that's visible in the chart of these accumulating layers. So of the 132 cases in the data set only about 42% I should say were once off incidents or temporary surges in activity that had dissipated by the following year in well over one third of cases or even nearly 40% cases the intensification of China's assertiveness in one year marked a new norm that's continued all the way through to the present day. That's these dots here that have a line that extends all the way through till 2015. So another reason for this layering effect besides the fact that many of the actions have become continuous and normalized is the fact that these normalized continuous actions taken at one point in time often lay the groundwork for subsequent intensifications of the state's behavior in the disputed area. So there's actually feedback loops between assertiveness at one point in time and assertiveness at a future point in time. And it would be very interesting it would get too complex but it's very interesting to imagine trying to sort of tease apart the linkages between actions perhaps down this end of the chart in more recent years and the earlier actions that are ongoing in earlier years which have actually facilitated them which were necessary to have been taken in order for the action in the later year to have even occurred. So, I mean, we've got some sort of examples here cartography and oceanographic surveys back in the 1980s to where necessary basically enabled the occupation of reefs. This is the Spratly operation here if you can see where my cursor is in the late 1980s that depended on these actions here these gray dots here scoping out the waters, mapping making sure that the military vessels and the supply ships and all the rest of it could actually operate in those waters. The occupation of the reefs in turn enabled the creation of infrastructure in the disputed area. The infrastructure in turn allowed support for expanded fishing activities which come in further down the line in the 1990s. It also enabled intensified energy exploration as well as patrolling activities because it's easier to sort of resupply your patrol ships if you have those outposts out there. Patrolling activity. So, each every time China intensified the number of patrols that creates another of these new patterns of assertive behavior takes the assertiveness to another level. Increases in patrols can then facilitate the detection and confrontation even of foreign assets in the disputed areas particularly when they're sort of geared towards detecting that China marine surveillance patrols for example in the late 2000s and early 2010s. A great example of this was the Scarborough Shoal incident in which the Philippines attempted to arrest a number of Chinese fishing militia and it was actually two CMS China marine surveillance ships that were on a regular patrol not actually aimed at Scarborough Shoal but in the general area, they were a few hours steaming. They just happened to be located on a regular patrol a few hours steaming from the area and they were able to get there and position themselves in between the Philippines Navy and the fishing militia before the Philippines Navy had a chance to complete their operation. So, you've got an increase in patrolling leading directly facilitating ultimately the seizure of a Scarborough Shoal. So, it's a good example of how certainness at one point in time has been an increase in certainness at one point in time can facilitate further increases in assertiveness in the future. So, that's a general tendency I think in these types of maritime disputes I expect to find that occurring in just about any maritime or territorial dispute. Thirdly, there's four clear periods of rapid acceleration in the PRC's assertiveness here. One in the 1970s here that starts in 1973 and lasts to 1976. So, the PRC's policy from that point forward takes off from a much higher base. Same story again in the 1980s rapid increase in assertive actions pulls back by, falls back by 1989 and the Tiananmen Square incident that the turmoil, domestic turmoil and the international sanctions. So, the PRC ceases its rapid increase but nonetheless when it starts to intensify assertiveness again from the 1990s it's starting from a much higher base here. Same story in the 1990s and then again from 2007 onwards. So, in the limited time that we have left and I see it's about 10 minutes, am I timing right? So, in the time that I've got left I'll just focus on the change that's probably of the most interest which is this one at the far right of the chart from 2007 onwards which is also the PRC's most protracted period of expanding assertiveness in the South China Sea. And I'll particularly highlight if we get time the impact of the PRC's interactions with the Enclos regime all the way back to the 1970s but I'll probably have to skip through it for time reasons. So, just very quick summation of the descriptive results rising assertiveness is a constant rather than change in China's policy in the South China Sea. Assertiveness tends to accumulate with that layering effect due to normalization of new actions as well as the fact that a new type of behavior in a disputed area enables new types of behaviors further down the line. The four turning points that I mentioned one in the 70s, one in the 80s, one in the 90s and then a clear one from 2007. And then the nature of the discontinuity after 2007 the protracted duration of the administrative buildup and the introduction of regular new coercive behaviors. So, how do we explain these results? The available explanations are probably quite familiar to most of you in the audience. The obvious sort of realist explanation that China has become more powerful we'd expect it to be expanding its control in a disputed geography like the South China Sea. And that's broadly true but it doesn't explain the surge in 2007 as I'll get to in the next slide. The value of resources and other of these common explanations as the resource values go up the incentive to contest the territory will increase. And so explains a change in the state's behavior that way. Taylor Fravel's explanation that when new challenges threaten to basically resolve the dispute in the other side's favor the state has more incentive to escalate now while it still has a chance of resolving the dispute in its behavior. And an interesting explanation that Isaac has also been involved in explicating the idea that interactions with international legal regimes can actually prompt confrontational state behavior not just peace as liberal institutionalists would expect. Internal explanations, sub-state actors has been a popular one when it comes to the South China Sea over zealous maritime agencies and the like. Rising nationalism, elite political contestation particularly at times like 2012 where Bo Xilai and Xi Jinping had troubles. Xi Jinping also has been a popular explanation in himself with the idea that Xi Jinping has a much more hawkish foreign policy preferences than his predecessor Hu Jintao that that would explain China's increasing assertiveness. So just to focus on the 2007 shift I've mentioned the sort of qualitative features of it but the key point here is that the distribution of power that that classic sort of realist explanation isn't really sufficient to explain that timing 2007. It's not about the GFC as I mentioned before which only really became apparent from 2008 once PRC's change in behavior was already underway but also events before that also contradict that type of idea. The PRC obviously had naval superiority within its region by the early 2000s, Bud Cole's done some work that, well, Bud Cole was talking about this 20 plus years ago once you, when you have the US out of the picture of course the US was the major balancing force in that equation but the US was clearly distracted from 2001 onwards by the global war on terror and subsequently the Iraq war and had not started to rebalance its forces towards the East Asian maritime littoral by 2007. The other interesting feature of this timing is that there's clearly no pacifying effect from the PRC's participation in the UNCLOS process. And in fact, what I find is that the UNCLOS the PRC's interactions with the UNCLOS process have been intimately related to each of the surges in the PRC's assertive maritime behavior in the South China Sea. Just watching the time here. So I won't say too much about the historical turning points except to say that it's not a coincidence that it was in 1973 when the UNCLOS negotiations began that the PRC started to take an interest in maritime spaces for the first time administering and controlling maritime spaces. Previously, the PRC's claims in the South China Sea had been specifically about the disputed islands. That's apparent from the name of course of Chiang Kai-shek's government's map of the South China Sea, the 11 dashed line which the PRC inherited and turned into the nine dashed line and then had to do that with the tool. So the location map of islands in the South China Sea very clearly about islands. But this chart here from a PRC maritime, China maritime yearbook clearly shows that this is the Paracel Islands here. Clearly shows that from 1975 onwards once they had finished surveying the Paracel Island area they started systematically surveying areas beyond the Paracels across a range of different scientific observations. Basically starting to take a clear interest in overall administration of the maritime space from 1975 onwards. And that's just a couple of years after the PRC made its first claim to any kind of maritime, expansive maritime jurisdiction. In the course of those UNCLOS negotiations this is something that Isaac has written much more extensively on than I have and I cite his work, his forthcoming book. In fact, in the 1970 section of this paper. Once again, the signing of the UNCLOS as well in 1982 prompts the PRC to kind of, the PRC maritime agencies to kind of scurry off and start to examine what they need to do in order to be able to assert the rights that they perceive that they now have the rights and interests which are of course, conflated in the Chinese term, the rights and interests that they're going to be prosecuting from this point forward. This is apparent in the expansion of surveying in the South China Sea which this is from 19, this is the 1980, these maps are from 1984 to 87. This is the nine dash line here. One, two, three, four, five. So the dashes are sort of around here and you can see this is sort of a deep irony inspired by the maritime rights and interests that the UNCLOS has started to crystallize in the PRC party states consciousness. They've started surveying an area which they don't enjoy any claims to on the basis of the UNCLOS. They've started surveying for maritime rights and interests in the area defined by the nine dash line which has nothing to do with UNCLOS whatsoever. In fact, it's a claim to the islands. So there's a deep irony there that the PRC's interests in the maritime space have been kind of triggered by an international legal regime but then triggered in such a way that they're acted upon in a way that is completely contrary to what that maritime legal regime is about. But you can see the clear pattern of following the nine dash line with the intensive surveying activities after the signing of the UNCLOS. And then the most important part here the last sort of few links in the causal chain, the PRC enshrines its UNCLOS inspired maritime rights in the easy and continental shelf law of course, reserving the right to unspecified historic rights. Then the following year, it forms China marine surveillance and gives it the specific task of upholding China's jurisdiction in all jurisdictional waters as they call it. And the following year, there's a major allocation to see the newly formed maritime agency to equip it with long range, high endurance patrol boats. There's white holes, which have been at the frontline of China's maritime expansion. These took a long time to be developed and delivered. It was only in 2004 that they got the first one and we're talking about a new agency here that doesn't have any experience operating them. So for the first couple of years, the patrolling was not regular and they were basically finding their sea legs and recruiting appropriate personnel who would be able to stay at sea on these ships for 30, 40 days at a time on these regular rights defense patrols, which eventually start from 2006 in the East China Sea and then from 2007 in the South China Sea. And it's once they've got their sea legs and they've engaged in those kind of regular patrolling activities, the non-coercive aspects of China's assertiveness, that then they build off from that and start to engage in this, what they call special operations, this Zhuanshan Xindong, special operations against other countries' operations in the disputed area. Alternative explanations, so just to sort of sum up that, I've gone through it a little bit quickly, but the point is that the change in behavior that we observed from 2007 really relates back quite fundamentally to decisions that were made in the late 1990s to create this new maritime agency that'd be at the forefront of the expansion of trying to realize the nine-dash line, as well as the allocation of resources and new capabilities that would even make this possible. Without these long-range patrol boats, it was never an option for the PRC to try to unfold comprehensive control over the nine-dash line area. Alternative explanations, I won't go into too much detail here. The charts in particular show that the PRC's energy imports did actually increase in values significantly in the three years prior to 2007 and the behavioral shift. But if you look at the specific aspects of the specific nature of the incidents, not that many of them were directly related to the pursuit of oil and gas resources, then in terms of the rising nationalism explanation, we can see here the Baidu Search Index is basically a proxy for the level of interest in the issue among Chinese domestic audiences really only starts to increase from 2009 onwards. It's very flat, conspicuously flat all the way through 2007 and 2008. And the reason is that the issue hasn't been publicized heavily by the state propaganda organs. It only starts being publicized heavily after the impeccable incident in early 2009. And you can see public attention on the issue starts to rise from that point forward. And then it really takes off in 2011 with the rise of tensions with Vietnam where people started thinking that maybe a war was going to happen. I've already mentioned Xi Jinping and the fact that Xi Jinping's rise does not in fact coincide with the PRC's expansion of its assertiveness. But the interesting observation here is that it actually does coincide with the height of Hu Jintao's policy agenda and at the 2007 17th party Congress. And it was Hu Jintao who started talking about the need for to build China into a maritime power. And it was Jiang Zemin before that but it was Hu Jintao who started taking it seriously. So the idea that a hawkish, that a dovish Hu Jintao was unable to restrain the sort of sub-state actors from expanding their activities in the South China Sea doesn't hold a lot of water once we consider both that timing and also the policy statements. So just to very quickly wrap up, I've already mentioned the descriptive findings so I won't go over those again. But this sort of central role that I briefly alluded to and which again, CMSI researchers have been at the forefront of highlighting really has a couple of important implications both for researchers and for policymakers. Firstly, the timing, the time lag between the observed behavioral change and the critical policy decisions really puts the onus on researchers to go beyond simply the observations that we might make immediately. And we basically need to retrace the kind of facilitate the decisions that may have facilitated changes in behavior that we observe at a given time. They can be a lot, they can be many years before than the sort of open manifestations of the change in behavior. And then for policymakers, it also suggests that the PRC's expansion of administrative control over the South China Sea has probably had much less to do with kind of recent events or the US's lack of demonstrations of resolve or even other states sort of provocations than it might appear. On the one hand, obviously, we need to be skeptical about the PRC's claims that its assertiveness is responsive to external provocations like the time that Beijing claimed that it was deploying anti-aircraft missiles, I think or anti-ship missiles, I think in 2018 to the Spratly Islands as a result of freedom of navigation operations by the US Navy, obviously there's no support for that. But it also suggests that we need to be cautious in attributing sort of other oriented motivations to assertive behaviors, especially when they just sort of consolidate the state's control in a way that's been unfolding for many years. So what might appear or feel to a policymaker like a targeted move might actually be just another bold or confident step towards, you know realizing a kind of long-term goal. So with that, I will hand it over back to Isaac for questions and I will look forward to the discussion. Hopefully I've come in not too much over time. Yeah, thanks a lot. Thank you, Andrew, a tremendously clear and informative presentation.