There has been a lot of discussion about the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) use of “gray zone tactics” in the South China Sea.
The term itself in no way conveys the full impact of the CCP’s aggressive and confrontational activities against regional players, including Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines.
“Gray zone” tactics can be defined as coercive actions shy of armed conflict, but beyond diplomatic, economic and other activities. Essentially, they are activities kept just short of crossing the line of behavior that might elicit a military response, but are simultaneously designed to establish “new normals” conducive to the CCP’s plans.
For such a benign term, “gray zone” tactics are pernicious. That is why US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo and Armed Forces of the Philippines Chief of Staff General Romeo Brawner named them “ICAD (illegal, coercive, aggressive and deceptive)” tactics, which more adequately signifies the concept.
That also applies to the name of the South China Sea. Despite the general international and historical consensus of the sea’s English name, the term is problematic in that it opens it up to the possibility of bias in favor of Beijing’s sovereignty claims over the entire sea. It should be noted that its Mandarin Chinese name is the South Sea (南海).
The English name is not entirely uncontested. Vietnam refers to the sea as the East Sea. In the same way, since 2011 and in direct response to an escalation of the Spratly Islands (Nansha Islands, 南沙群島) dispute, the Philippines has started referring to the parts of South China Sea within its exclusive economic zone, including the Luzon Sea, as the West Philippine Sea.
In September 2012, then-Philippine president Benigno Aquino III signed an order requiring all government agencies to use the name West Philippine Sea in official maps to refer to those parts of the South China Sea. It is important to understand why this decision was taken.
Former Philippine legislator Walden Bello, who was behind the resolution calling for the name change, has said that the move was not meant to connote a specific territorial boundary, and neither was he averse to using an alternate name such as the “Southeast Asia Sea” or “ASEAN Sea.” The point was simply to “reflect that this wasn’t China’s sea.”
The CCP is well aware of the power of the principle of names in the international arena. It is why it insists on Taiwan being represented as “Chinese Taipei” in international sporting events, and demands that Taiwan is listed as “Taiwan, province of China” in international organizations’ list of countries and areas. It is why Beijing has released maps renaming locations on the Sino-India border that it claims as South Tibet, even though they lie in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.
For the same reason, some find terms such as “cross-strait” or “both sides of the Taiwan Strait” problematic as they fail to account for the importance of the Taiwan Strait as an international waterway that is not to be understood solely from its relationship to China.
In the current legislative session, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) used its legislative majority to amend the language of a Democratic Progressive Party bill to replace the word “China” (中國) with “mainland” (大陸), effectively redefining Taiwan as an island off China’s coast and suggesting that it can only be understood in terms of its relationship with the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
The amendment coheres with the KMT’s ideological stance on the relationship between Taiwan and China, but such a seemingly inconsequential change must be seen in the light of its problematic implications and possibly its pernicious intent.
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