Abstract

Why does China claim an underwater feature 1,000 kilometres from its coast as its ’southernmost territory’? Why do Chinese coastguard vessels clash with Indonesia hundreds of kilometres from any land? Who drew the nine-dash line that is the cause of all these problems. In this talk Bill Hayton will explain the surprising origins of China’s claims in the South China Sea and show how they were founded on foreign charts, mistranslations and bad mapmaking. The tragedy of the South China Sea is that World War Three could be triggered by mistakes made in the 1930s.

About the Speaker

Bill Hayton was appointed as an associate fellow with the Asia-Pacific programme at Chatham House in 2015. He is a former BBC journalist, the author of four books on Asia and the editor of the academic journal Asian Affairs. He was the BBC’s reporter in Vietnam in 2006-7 and was seconded to the public broadcaster in Myanmar in 2013-14. Bill is the author of Vietnam: rising dragon (Yale 2010, second edition 2020) and A Brief History of Vietnam (Tuttle, 2022). He has written two other books: The South China Sea: the struggle for power in Asia (Yale, 2014) and The Invention of China (Yale, 2020) and numerous articles on Asian issues. In 2019 he received his PhD from the University of Cambridge for work on the history and development of the South China Sea disputes. Bill worked for the BBC for 22 years until January 2021 and he is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.