Indonesians got to Africa and colonised Madagascar more than 500 years before Zheng He. In turn, the peoples of Southeast Asia absorbed more from India and the Islamic world than China.
In the case of the current issue with Vietnam, brought about by China's movement of a drillship into waters due east of Danang, China has a small case, in that it does now own the Paracel Islands, which are closer to the drill location than to Vietnam. But the islands themselves have long been in dispute between the two, a matter settled for now by China's unprovoked invasion of them in 1974.
But as they have never had permanent settlement, they maKe a very weak case for enjoying a 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone compared with Vietnam. History also tells us that this coast was the heart of the Cham mercantile state, which for 1,000 years was the leading player in regional trade.
There should surely anyway be a case for compromise between China and Vietnam. Malaysia and Thailand managed one over a gas-rich area between them in the Gulf of Thailand. Other regional states - Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia - have put island ownership issues to the International Court of Justice and accepted the result. But China remains unwilling either to compromise or submit to arbitration. Meanwhile, joint development is impossible because China makes it conditional on acceptance of its sovereignty.
In the case of shoals off the Philippines, China's case rests on a mix of invented history and the fact that it filed claims first, a poor basis given that it had no continuous presence there and the Philippines initially inherited a treaty between two Western colonial powers. These shoals and other features claimed by China are so obviously within the Philippine exclusive economic zone and in waters long sailed by the peoples of that country that there should be no argument.
Scarborough Shoal is about 200Km from Luzon, 650km from China. The claim to Half Moon Shoal is even more outrageous. That is the reef where the Philippines arrested Chinese fishermen allegedly with a catch of giant turtles, a protected species. Knee-jerk protests have erupted from Beijing. The reef is 110km from Palawan, nearly 1,500km from China.
The fact that the absurd claims go back to the Kuomintang era is neither here nor there. Nor is the fact that previous states may have occasionally paid tribute to Beijing. For these trading states, tribute was a tax, the cost of doing business with China, which did not imply Chinese sovereignty. And if China occasionally acted as an imperial power in the region, that is surely cause for concern, not a basis for overlordship of a predominantly Malay sea. Otherwise, Turkey could claim Egypt and the Russians all of central Asia.
A revived China wants to flex its muscles and show who is boss in the region - just as it tried with Vietnam in 1979 - and remind the US of its own weakness. But there is also a basic reluctance to treat the non-Han neighbours as equals, people with their own history and cultures which, except for Vietnam, have never been subject to major Chinese influence.
China's history of assuming superiority, most especially over those with darker skins, is long. Belief in eugenics and the need to protect and enhance Han genetic characteristics was strong in the Republican era and found echoes in the opinions and social policies of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew. It has long been rejected in the West and was condemned under Mao Zedong. But it has been making a comeback on the mainland, where some academics find it hard to accept that modern man spread out of Africa and that China is thus not a separate and unique source of mankind.
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