 first speaker so to speak is Bill Hayton. Who's the editor of Asian Affairs, that journal that you've all picked up copies of on your way in and hopefully won't leave on the train but will read enthusiastically. Bill's an associate fellow at the chatum house on the Asia Pacific program and he was a BBC reporter in Vietnam, Myanmar, and various other ac wedi giving four books on South Eastern Asia ac yn erbyn i'r opol. The South China Seas. Bill, thank you very much. Thank you very much indeed. So, as Adrian was saying, I edit this. After 22 years at the BBC, I left about three years ago. I'm afraid I didn't learn a language at university, I studied geography. My interests around the time led me into the Middle East. I didn't then try to pick up a bit of Arabic, I went to the West Bank in the summer of 1998 thinking this would be the moment to kickstart my journalistic career and it turned out to be the dullest summer since the Belford declaration, nothing happened. But I ended up getting a job at the BBC anyway a bit later on, but then a little later after that I went to Vietnam, lived there, spent a year reporting for the BBC and wrote a book about Vietnam which then a little bit later I then took an interest in what was happening offshore Vietnam and the South China Sea and I've written my book since called the invention of China about the birth of Chinese nationalism. So all of these things are sort of connected in my mind, thinking about nations and nationalism and how ideas about territorial claims come to exist and why they remain problems for our country. So this picture was taken in August and it's a picture taken from a Philippine boat ship that was trying to reach a little outposts that the Philippines hold in the South China Sea and you see the Chinese Coast Guard are using water cannon to try and stop them from doing so. But that's at one end of the spectrum and on the other end of the spectrum these are pictures taken from American surveillance planes over the South China Sea this one 2018 and then here you can see a Chinese warship trying to cut in front of an American warship. This is a picture taken from the bomber with a Chinese fighter jet flying uncomfortably close. And so what's what's going on? Why is all this happening? So this is the South China Sea. So China at the top, Vietnam here, Malaysia at the bottom of the Brunei, Indonesia and Ireland here, South China Sea in the middle and the world's most pathetic territorial dispute features these little tiny rocks and reefs. This is the mainly contested area for the Spratleys named after man called Richard Spratleys who came from the east end of London and became a shipping captain. How is the islands and Scarborough Shoal? And this is what all the arguments are about. These are the largest of the South China Sea island. They are pathetically small, not even long enough to get a runway in most cases. That's the largest one there which is occupied by Taiwan, Vietnamese for that one, Chinese for that one. That's the largest one held by the Philippines. These are some of the smallest. So it is somewhat of a tragic part of world politics that literally the Third World War could break out over this. Now, because this involves the US and the Philippines, which are treaty allies of one another. If the Chinese were to attack the Philippines ship in some confrontation around the Scarborough Shoal, the United States could choose to intervene on the side of the Philippines. And who knows, maybe you end up with some kind of clash between the US and China when that would go. I don't know if I'm occupied. A couple of these features, some of them back in 1988 and then another one in 1994. This one is occupied by Malaysia and Malaysia is the first to build a runway on it. But you can see how tiny small they are. But have a look at what those two look like on the right hand side there. Those Chinese held ones. This is what they look like now. The blockhouse you see is that building there? And the other one, I think, is that building there. In 2013, over the past 10 years, China has built 3,000m of runways, 3km of runways on all of them. And then we look forward to the small runways. Those are the massive features, you know, running tracks with barracks with missile silos and all the rest of it. On things which are basically tiny, tiny, tiny little islands. So why do they care? Why do they bother? What's the purpose of spending literally billions of dollars building this stuff? It kind of seems absurd. Anybody recognise this bit of sea? This bizarrely is the southernmost point of Chinese territory. And the most important thing to know about it is that there's no territory there. China has a claim to territory that doesn't actually exist. This piece of sea is down here. What's the purpose of Malaysian Warno? It's a very long way from China. So how is it that China claims this non-existent island as the southernmost point of its territory? Mainly the fault of this man. Djokorfrots, by May Chu, who in 1936 drew a map. Now, this is all about the emergence of a sense of Chinese nationalism. And China's flashes with Japanese and French evangelism. France at this time is the Imperial County of China. Britain is the Imperial County of Singapore. And in Cornio down here, the US is the Imperial County of the Philippines over here. So it's in a time when China's emergence of Chinese nationalism is a powerful force. And people like May Chu are desperately trying to define the extent of Chinese territory and to defend it rhetorically and in print against foreign powers. So he draws a map from Atlas and he decides that these pictures here should be Chinese-held islands. He's never been there. But then he draws this line around these features. And none of these features actually exist. None of them are actual islands. They are all underwater features. And the name, as I'll show, are translations. So he gives us the name Hema Tan. Hema is literally the translation of the word sea horse in English. Chanwe is literally the translation of the word Braindar. Deng Mu is the translation of the English name James. So why does he do that? It's because he copied a British map. OK, this map is produced in London in 1918. And you'll see Van Gogh of Bank, James Shaw, sea horse thing. OK, and you'll see the dotted lines that he draws around that the person in the stand-up has used to put up with this map around it. Now, by May Chu, Chinese photographer, misunderstood these dotted lines. They just mean a shallow area of sea. But Van May Chu thought, oh, these must be islands. And so he cut them in and claimed them as territory. And then drew his line around them. And then, a few years later, at the end of the Second World War, a couple of his students were advising the Chinese government about what land should be claimed after the defeat of Japan at the end of the Second World War. And they borrowed their geography professors' map with the same names. Then we'll turn it down here. China way turn over here. And they drew this dotted line around the South China Sea and claimed a non-existent island here as Chinese territory. Unfortunately, that claim is still with us today. And that is the root of these clashes on the South China Sea which could one day lead to the Third World War. And this line continues to animate, motivate Chinese policy today. So here I've taken a map and I've projected these dashes on this line. And this is where we've been seeing clashes recently between Chinese vessels and once I've built her, Vietnamese vessels, Philippine vessels, and occasionally Indonesian and Malaysian ships as well. And this line seems to be treated from the Chinese side as some kind of border. Now, it's important to think about the South China Sea that there are actually two sets of disputes. There are territorial disputes, which is who owns the rocks and the reefs, who first stuck their flag in it, who says they've claimed it and that's the longest history of occupation. And that just involves the countries that I've talked about, China, Vietnam, Philippine, Malaysia, Brunei. And there's a lot of certain disputes, which we call maritime disputes, which are about the spaces in between the rocks and reefs. What are the rules that provide? Who can catch the fish? Who can drill the oil and gas? Who can sail there? Who can stop them sailing there? And that involves the states around the sea but also involves companies that care about the rules that govern the world. So the US, the UK, Japan, Australia are also engaged in thinking about what we call the rules-based order. And the key rule, if you like, that affects the South China Sea is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS, which was agreed by pretty much every country in the world back in 1982, and it's supposed to set the rules for who can claim the oil and the gas and the fish and everything else that lives in the sea up to 200 nautical miles, 400 kilometres away from their coasts. So these rules, in theory, are agreed by everybody and should indicate what is right and wrong in the South China Sea. Fortunately, China doesn't accept that that's the final say when it comes to the South China Sea and that's the root of a lot of these issues. And that's because these tiny little islands exist. I think islands didn't exist. Like, for example, the North Sea. It would be fairly easy for these states to simply draw lines in the seas or the oil and gas and the fish over here. So us, on this side, belong to you. But because these islands, pathetically small as they are, exist, it complicates things. Well, let's look at it from the Chinese perspective. Why does China care about the South China Sea? So you turn the map upside down, put China on the bottom, and then you realise that the forces of plate tectonics, if you remember your geography lessons, created a whole series of islands around the South China Sea, starting from Japan here, through the New York Islands to Taiwan, to the Philippines, in the hands of Brunei and up there. So in effect, China is surrounded from the sea by these little islands. And the forces of geopolitics mean that all of these islands are controlled by countries which are in some kind of military relationship with the United States. So Japan is a treaty ally of the U.S. The Philippines is a treaty ally of the U.S. Taiwan has a strange status that we can talk about, but it's basically a treaty ally of the U.S. And then you've got Malaysia and New Zealand capital of dense relations. So there's this sense of Chinese theorists about being encircled from the sea. And when you think about where China gets its oil and gas one, although it does have some homegrown stuff, anything coming to the Middle East has to go through the straits of Malacca or one of the other straits down here through the South China Sea. And China doesn't trust the rules of the world to permit free navigation. It seems to have an idea of the world that's one where it's states need to control their sea lanes and their supply routes, which is why China has built a new base in Djibruti over here. It has a close relationship with Pakistan and was also involved in building bases in the naval ports in Sri Lanka as well. So this is the sort of world that Chinese strategists start to think about when they think about the South China Sea. This guy was one of the architects of the Chinese navy. He was a big thinker about why China needed a navy and really his main issues were about territory, about trying to get Taiwan back, about trying to recover islands that we talked about in the suited islands, so Strachnids and the Parisels and maritime resources, oil and gas and that kind of thing. And this has been a long case of China's assertiveness becoming greater as its naval capabilities have increased. So now they've got carriers and they've seen more assertiveness year-on-year here. Final element of the Chinese thinking is the idea that they could turn the South China Sea into what Sabana has called a bastion, so that they would have island bases here and potentially on Starwish Hole here and they keep out terribly other ladies and they can hide their ballistic missile submarines there. And the submarines are in effect the last line of defence for the Chinese Communist Party leadership. Also thinking about it in terms of if China decided to invade Taiwan, which is on the cards, then having bases down here in the south part of the South China Sea would prevent American warhips or other countries coming to the defence of Taiwan. So these are all kind of part of the Chinese thinking, but there is no official explanation for the Chinese claim. Chinese officials are always very vague. They talk about, well, this is an academic or a normal official sovereignty over the features on close to the law of the sea that I was talking about. I know this vague thing called historic rights which they're very bad at telling us what it actually means. But it seems to affect things like oil and gas and as the right to sail wherever. This man, so I spoke about by made shoes, the geographer who created the non-existent but famous island, this man was an Taiwanese academic who invented this idea of historic rights. So he's caused, in some ways I think this man should have the anti Nobel Peace Prize. He's done more probably to disrupt peace in the South China Sea than any other individual. In response to some of the pushback, China has developed alternative legal explanations to why it should hang on to the South China Sea and beyond on the gas and resources. This is sometimes called lawfare, the idea that you use the law as an extension of your state manoeuvring. So what I've been going to war, you use law, these advanced legal explanations which other lawyers don't accept. So this is when we start to get into the idea of whose rules rule in the world. Why should you accept UN convention law? Why should you accept or should you be allowed to innovate yourself and assert your own claims? The implications of this has for other countries in the region can be seen from what's going on in the southern part of the South China Sea. So this is the line-dash line that I talked about back in 1947 Indonesia has an island here which under unclos it has the rights to the resources in this part of the sea up to 200 nautical miles from this nearest piece of land, but there is an overlap here. So in this zone we see clashes between Indonesia and Vietnamese and Chinese fish, Chinese coastguards. There's a massive natural gas field here which Vietnam wants to exploit because Vietnam is suffering from a crisis of electricity and it's affecting its economic growth, but Chinese are trying to stop it. You can see how they've used Coast Guard ships to try to patrol in the region since this deal was announced. Malaysia also has the same problems around some of its oil and gas fields. China often talks about joint development but the Vietnamese and everybody else are suspicious about it. They've been talking about this block for 20 years and basically the Vietnamese want to break this line longer and the Chinese want to make this joint development zone wider and so for 20 years they've been sitting in a room saying longer, wider, longer, wider and not getting anywhere at all. ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and China have been talking about having a code of conducts to regulate how their navies and coast guards behave. They've been talking about it for 25 years and they've got nowhere. The same issues keep coming up and back. But there's still all sides at least rhetorically are still talking about providing by international law the rules are still holding if you like in the south China sea and more states are taking an interest in what's going on there and this for the time being an easy compromise exists. So we're not really at the point where people are talking about a height about a real war but there's always a chance that some tiny incident some clash between fishing vessels or oil prospecting ships or whatever could end up escalating bringing in navies bringing in other navies and all the rest of it which could potentially lead to a massive confrontation between China and the US which would then inevitably drag in other countries around the region and potentially even including the UK. So I shall leave it there happy to take any questions how long do we have Adrian? 10 minutes or so very happy to take some questions on aspects of the South China Sea disputes or kind of what this means for sort of US-China relations or the bigger picture. That means the UN. Right. Well the UN is the sum of its parts. So the 180 odd or whatever members of the United Nations but the five that really counts the permanent five members of the Security Council UK, US, France China and Russia and of course each of those five countries has a veto so nothing will get through the Security Council if any one of those countries chooses to veto it. So therefore China is not going to vote for a motion that's critical of China and Russia will probably support them. But that's not to say that UN institutions are doing nothing so for example a lot of this the latest round disputes began when something called the UN commission on the limits of the continental shelf for important organisation started to collect claims that each of the countries were making under the law of the sea convention under Enclos and because all the states agreed that they would all submit their claims to the UN and then the can be some kind of process that would sort of try and sort out the claims that then became a place where these disputes could be aired could become public if you like. So things that were latent that were sort of under the under the radar if you like surfaced through this process. So really that's what the UN should be doing it should be kind of taking these claims and resolving them. The question is whether countries are willing to have an outside indicator rule on their claims. Now some of the countries in the region have been willing to do that. So so for example in back in the 90s Singapore to begin with Malaysia and Indonesia sent a couple of their claims to dispute resolution so they had a couple of islands down here on the Malaysian Indonesia found me down here which they were willing to send to the international court of justice which they ruled on which comes into the life alone and then as a couple of walks between Singapore and Malaysia down here which they also sent to an international court of justice which then ruled in that case in favour of Singapore. So there have been processes of actually sorting out some of this stuff but the problem is none of the countries concerned are willing to send the same kinds of issues to the international court of justice or any other body over the South China Sea. The Philippines initiated a court a tribunal process but it wasn't about who owned the beaches it was a maritime dispute back in 2013 and the Philippines won that hands down but China has refused to accept the ruling so that's where a lot of the current issues begin from. Any other questions please? China's navy has grown rapidly at a time last year before it was adding the equivalent tonnage to the navy each year of the entire world navy so that's a lot of ships aircraft carriers submarines and smaller vessels they're still very hateful so China's navy is perfectly capable of squashing the navies of every other country around the region but you got Japan just out of the shop on the top right there then you got the US who may have similarly sized navies what we don't know of course is who would prevail in a war and we're in this different period of history up until 10 years ago it was clear that the US would win any kind of confrontation but now China's got to this point where there's at least an area of doubt in the minds on both sides who would win so is it therefore worth having a crack pushing further because you think the other side will blink first and back down or do you think that somehow you've got some technology which will be better for their technology and the other side thinks that they've got some technology which is better than the technology that you think is better and so in this very difficult situation where potentially both sides think they might win a confrontation which then leads them into a whole line of thinking about whether it's actually worth pushing this forward and when someone on the American side who sort of think well China's getting stronger and relatively we're not do they think well should we do it now because it's going to get worse for us in the next 10 or 20 years do we provoke a confrontation in the South China Sea or over Taiwan potentially this is the sort of maybe some of the thinking that goes on behind the scenes in the Pentagon or the Chinese equivalent thinking about military planning ahead so and of course the other thing is that the Chinese haven't fought a naval battle since they fought the Vietnamese down here in 1988 so nobody knows whether the Chinese Navy would actually work in wartime or whether it would it's an experience would mean it was rapidly defeated so no one really knows and frankly nobody wants to find out so you kind of end up with this sort of this sort of cockpit of confrontation down here which comes to the surface every now and then you know in Taiwan or over these islands or lovely Japan or potentially a scenario involving North Korea or another one that spills over and everybody knows what's at stake everyone's trying to make sure it doesn't happen but at the same time they're all with strong resolve and strong force to try to encourage the other side to back down and not push it to the ultimate level of a confrontation yes a good point so it's a fair enough physical occupation so some of the islands are physically occupied and some of them are not so this Scarlport Shell is not occupied but the Philippines and China are both sort of intending around it if you like whereas although this one is now a runway and even a diving resort built with sort of Malaysians and stuck that flag in it you can see that Chinese started with very small beaches on theirs which then became much larger so the most difficult time on this was in the 1970s so at the very end of the Vietnam War when southern Vietnam still existed it claimed the Paris island and occupied half of them and China occupied the other half at that time in 1974 there was a brief battle war between the natives of the two sides and China occupied the eastern side of the Paris island and took them and in 1988 there was a confrontation between China and what was then communist Vietnam after the end of Vietnam War over Peskel-Johnson League there which in 64 Vietnamese Marines were killed so those have been the only balance confrontations in terms of bullets and people dying but you had a lot of jockeying, ships bashing into each other that kind of thing in general all the country's concerns have respected the presence of the other states so they haven't really ever tried to evict them apart from those two instances that I mentioned so in the first picture I showed you with the water cannon incident this is taking place around Scarborough which is unoccupied but there's also another feature called the second Thomas Shoal the second Thomas Shoal and in 1999 the Philippines was concerned that China was thinking of occupying this feature so it took ship actually a second world war ship that the Americans have given it many years before and it rammed it rammed this ship onto this reef and it's had a little outpost of five or six Philippine Marines living on this ship obviously they changed the natural Marines in that time to claim it and the ship is literally rusting apart it's very dangerous to live on being 25 years at sea without being painted it's falling apart and the Philippines are trying to restore this ship stop it completely decaying because they think that if these five Marines leave then about 30 minutes later Chinese forces will land on the same feature and occupy it eternally but China could easily given it's the size of its navy and all the rest of it could easily push them off or shoot them or blow them up but it chooses not to because it doesn't want to be seen as that kind of space that pushes people around it likes to do the pushing around but in a way that's kind of below the level of actual outright military confrontation hostility so water cannon or bumping into ships that kind of thing so at the moment the states generally respect the occupations of the other in practice if not in law so they don't say yes we think you're right piece of land belongs to you but they don't want to do anything that kind of steps up the confrontation to the point of actual bullets and conflict Bill, thank you very much I think we better call a halt there before the questions get even harder but thank you very much indeed we've got a break now and then as I said if you can sort out where you want to go for your language tutorials Hannah will be out there too to direct people to the first rule for Arabic and Vietnamese and everybody else back Bill, thank you very much