How Colonial Empires Approached the South China Sea

Most Europeans came to Southeast Asia to trade, some came to proselytize and, eventually, some came to rule. But, from the outset, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English arrivals were obliged to compete or cooperate with established states, ranging in size from empires like Majapahit or Ming China to tiny principalities. 

It was only in the late 19th century that Europeans came to dominate. The century between 1862, when the French Navy captured Saigon, and 1956, when France departed the newly independent state of Vietnam, was the era of “high colonialism,” but Europeans were present in the region from the Portuguese capture of Melaka in 1511 until the British departure from Hong Kong in 1997.

Throughout this period, the South China Sea was primarily important as a route through which the spices and porcelains that Asians supplied, and Europeans demanded, were transported. Traders were only concerned about the sea’s islands, rocks, and reefs to the extent that they were hazards to shipping, havens for pirates, or harbors for adversaries. European control was limited to a few entrepots around the coasts, including Melaka, Macau (1557), Cebu (1564), Manila (1571), Bantam (1603), Batavia/Jakarta (1619), Formosa/Taiwan (1624), Penang (1786), and Singapore (1819).

After Manchu invaders conquered Ming China and established the Qing dynasty, they imposed restrictions on maritime trade. Once they were lifted, in 1683, Chinese merchants benefited at least as much as those from Europe, Southeast Asia, South Asia, or the Middle East. As Léonard Blussé has demonstrated, the 18th century became the “Chinese century” in South China Sea trade.  The historian Wang Gungwu has called these traders “merchants without empire.”  They traded for themselves, without the protection of their state, but still outcompeted their rivals. As a result, the Dutch began to withdraw from direct involvement in the China trade after the 1680s and ceded the dominant European role to the British.

The British-owned East India Company first mapped the Paracel Islands in the 1800s. Some of the islands are still named after its managers: Pattle, Roberts, Drummond, Duncan, and Money. (The Chinese name for Money Island, Jin Yin Dao, is just a translation of this imperialist’s name.) Arguments over whether to build lighthouses on the islands lasted for a century. Everyone agreed that something should be done to stem the toll of shipwrecks and lost lives, but no one wanted to pay for them. This lack of interest in the islands, from all sides, was the major feature of the entire period.

The only other state to take an official interest in the islands was Dai Viet (present day Vietnam). When the Tay Son rebellion broke out in 1771, piracy surged. The court established a militia on an island about 20 kilometers off the coast of central Vietnam now known as Ly Son. According to contemporary records quoted by Hãn Nguyên Nguyễn Nhã and Vinh-The Lam, the militia’s purpose was to “collect things from shipwrecks: bronze swords, bronze horses, flower-shaped silver, silver coins, circle-shaped silver, bronze items, tin blocks, lead blocks, rifles, ivory tusks, beeswax, ceramics, and other items. … They were then awarded certificates.” This salvage work became an important source of both firearms and revenue.

Anxiety about pirates was almost constant. Increasing trade meant increasing opportunities for those who did not feel bound by European, or anyone else’s, laws. East India Company ships were armed; private traders were more vulnerable. In 1835 Singapore merchants petitioned the colonial authorities for protection. As a result, three warships and three gunboats were sent to patrol the shipping lanes off Singapore. 

In 1838, a former East India Company officer, James Brooke, offered his services to the Sultan of Brunei to suppress a revolt in Sarawak. As detailed by Stefan Eklöf Amirell, the Sultan granted Brooke the title of Rajah, and de facto independence. Having been loaned a warship by the (British) Royal Navy, he sailed along the coast of northern Borneo in the 1840s attacking and destroying the villages and boats of those he considered pirates and slavers. 

However, as Leigh Wright noted in his account of this period, “as late as 1862, the annual expedition of the Illanun and Balanini from Sulu around the whole island of Borneo was still considered a menace to commercial vessels, especially during the southwest monsoon.”

The political influence of the private traders in Britain led to pressure on the government to demand free access to the Chinese market. The East India Company’s monopoly on China trade was abolished in 1833, giving private traders greater freedom. Their lobbying eventually led to the Opium War of 1840 and the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, which ceded Hong Kong to Britain and opened up four more “treaty ports” for international trade. British imports from China rose from around 1.8 million pounds at the beginning of the 19th century to an average of almost 10 million pounds per year between 1854 and 1863.

Wright has argued that “During the 1840s and 1850s [British policy toward the South China Sea region] was hesitant and faltering. But after 1860 it became a definite movement toward domination of the route between Singapore and Hong Kong.” 

While primarily focused on protecting commerce, London’s policy evolved into wider concerns about political advantage and the relative position of Britain versus rival powers. In response, the Dutch moved to consolidate their territories in the “Netherlands Indies,” as did the Spanish in the Philippines. France, or rather the leadership of the French Navy, became determined to acquire a base of its own along the trade route to China. On their way home from the Second Opium War in 1860, they attacked and occupied Saigon.

Britain became the first colonial power to claim any of the features in the South China Sea, but did so more by accident than design. The initial impetus was the search for guano – bird poop – then a valuable agricultural fertilizer. As Stein Tønnesson has shown, the British authorities on the island of Labuan issued a license in 1877 for a group of businessmen to plant the British flag on two of the Spratly Islands near Borneo, Spratly Island and nearby Amboyna Cay, and to use them for commercial purposes – primarily guano mining. This venture resulted in a fight between the British managers and their Chinese laborers, resulting in two of the workers being shot dead. Although the enterprise was then abandoned, the British claim was not. The British were not particularly enthusiastic about the territorial claim, however, and took no action to enforce it.

No one saw any value in administering the “desert islands” of the South China Sea. In the late 1890s, the insurers of two ships wrecked on the Paracels, the Bellona and the Himeji Maru, demanded compensation from the Qing Chinese authorities. They alleged that local officials had facilitated the looting of the wrecks and the smuggling of its stolen cargo. In response, the Zongli Yamen (in effect the Qing foreign ministry) denied responsibility for the Paracels, describing them as a part of the “high seas.”

Japan’s entry into the South China Sea was equally haphazard and was also prompted by the search for guano. In 1909, a Japanese entrepreneur, Nishizawa Yoshiji, was found to be mining on Pratas Island, a remote atoll between Hong Kong and Taiwan (known as Dongsha in Chinese). This prompted nationalist outrage in southern China, even though few, if any, of those involved in the protests had ever heard of Pratas. In the context of rising national feeling and resentment against Japan, the fate of the island became a powerful rallying point. A boycott of Japanese goods was organized.

For the first time, Qing Chinese officials used documentary evidence to prove a territorial claim. They discovered a gazetteer dating from 1730 that mentioned the island.  Japan, eager to see the boycott ended, agreed that this was sufficient. Compensation was paid to Nishizawa and Pratas was recognized as part of Qing China. 

Meanwhile, public attention had been alerted to the fate of the Paracel Islands, equally unknown, isolated, and apparently at risk from foreign predation. The official who had led the response to the Pratas incident, Li Zhun, then led an official expedition to the Paracels to forestall any plans by foreigners to occupy them. 

French diplomats debated whether to protest this claim and assert a rival one for its protectorate in Indochina, based upon the activities of the Nguyen Dynasty a century earlier. In a fateful decision, officials decided not to protest. Having seen the anti-Japanese boycott earlier, they feared that asserting their own claim might provoke a new round of anti-foreigner feeling directed at French interests. 

While Qing officials spoke of grandiose development plans for the island, nothing actually happened. After the nationalist revolution of 1911-12, the new Republic of China paid little attention to the islands, despite calls from shipping companies to establish a lighthouse. Ships continued to wreck on the reefs and even in 1920 newspapers still described the Paracels as a “death trap.” 

Japanese entrepreneurs were more enthusiastic. Ulises Granados has shown how, following the Japanese occupation of Taiwan in 1895, entrepreneurs scoured the region in search of new guano deposits, setting up operations on the Paracels and the Spratlys during the 1910s and 1920s. They petitioned the Japanese Foreign Ministry to claim the islands, but officials in Tokyo declined the opportunity.

Newspaper reports from the time suggest that the islets were heavily used by smugglers of all kinds. Weapons, gold, opium, people, and other contraband were trafficked through the Paracels and Spratlys, sometimes under the cover of more legitimate mining and fishing operations. Piracy continued to be a danger in coastal waters. There are reports of occasional patrols by the Chinese Maritime Customs and by the Indochina Customs services, but the overall picture is of the absence of state authority. Land-based officials did not have the means or the desire to police or administer the archipelagos.

In July 1925, the ambitious director of the French-run Oceanographic and Fisheries Service of Indochina, Armand Krempf, began to take an interest in the Paracels and organized an expedition. Once there, he discovered how extensive Japanese guano-mining activities had become. By then, a very small lobby among the French colonial class had begun calling for the annexation of the Paracels, but their view remained marginal. 

A different view was emerging in Japan. Having been somewhat indifferent, by the late 1920s the Japanese government became interested in the potential strategic advantages of possessing the reefs. This prompted greater concerns from both the French and the Chinese authorities.

In October 1929 the governor-general of Indochina, Pierre Pasquier, ordered a mission to annex not the Paracels but the Spratlys. This was done on April 13, 1930, by the commander of the French warship Malicieuse. When the British government heard about it 10 days later, they quietly protested against the vague way the French claim was worded. They objected to the attempt to claim large numbers of islands without specifying their names or locations.

In September 1931, the Republic of China found itself facing a far more dangerous threat than disagreements over tiny islands: Japan invaded Manchuria. With Japanese belligerence and Chinese vulnerability now obvious, the French government chose this moment, December 4, 1931, to formally claim sovereignty over the Paracels on behalf of their Indochina protectorate, which they termed Annam. They justified the claim based on the actions of Dai Viet in the early 19th century. 

It was not until July 27, 1932, that the Chinese legation in Paris was instructed to formally reject the French claim. Its reply, authored by Ambassador Wellington Koo, was finally delivered on September 29. The French government debated its response internally for many months.

While it considered what to do about the Paracels, Paris ordered a more precise annexation of the Spratlys. A formal announcement was made on Bastille Day, July 14, 1933. It formally placed six named islands under French (not Annamese) sovereignty. The annexation caused both public outrage and total confusion within the Republic of China. Neither the Chinese government nor the general public understood which islands were being annexed – the Spratlys were conflated with the Paracels. Within a few weeks, however, it was made clear to the Chinese central government that the Spratlys were different from the Paracels and, as a result, the authorities in Nanjing decided not to issue a protest against the French move. Instead, the only formal objection came from Japan.

By the end of 1936, the international situation in Asia had changed for the worse. At the end of December 1934, Japan gave two years’ notice of its intent to withdraw from the 1922 Washington Treaty, allowing it to expand its navy. As a result, the other powers became increasingly anxious over Japanese intentions toward the South China Sea.

The French authorities deployed French and Annamese police to the Paracels in June 1938 with instructions to build a lighthouse and radio station. Confirming the Indochina authorities’ fears, they met Japanese troops already installed on Woody Island and Lincoln Island. Despite this, they installed their own garrison on Woody Island (cohabiting with the Japanese) and also on Pattle Island where there was no Japanese presence. 

In February 1939, Japanese troops occupied Hainan Island and, on March 31, Japan formally annexed the Spratlys. This was a prelude to the Japanese occupation of Tonkin (northern Vietnam) in August 1940, and the rest of French Indochina the following year. 

By May 1942, after British forces in Malaya and Singapore and American forces in the Philippines had all surrendered, almost the entire coast of the South China Sea, fell under the control of a single power for the first time in its millennia-long history. It became a “Japanese lake” and would remain so until January 1945. 

After Japan’s surrender, the sea remained quiet for about a year before the Republic of China and France decided to renew their contest over the islands. France reached the Spratlys first, but China occupied the eastern half of the Paracels and then planted a flag in the Spratlys – for the first time ever – in December 1946. A few weeks later, France grabbed the western half of the Paracels. A newly independent Philippines also began to talk about its own claim.

At this point, the disputes over the islands began to transition from a struggle between a single China and two imperial powers (France and Japan) into one between two rival Chinas and four independent states. Japan formally relinquished its claims at the San Francisco Peace Conference in 1951 and, in 1954, France began to depart Indochina. Its troops finally left in early 1956 just before the South China Sea disputes erupted once more. 

In May 1956, the Philippine entrepreneur Tomas Cloma decided to stake a personal claim to the Spratlys. That prompted the Republic of China (now based on Taiwan), the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), and France to respond, either with visits by warships or statements in newspapers. The end result of the little spat was that France and Britain quietly walked away from their claims to the islands, but without telling anyone. In 1958, the parties to the disputes were joined by independent Malaysia and then, in 1984, by Brunei.

Having once been a symbol of anti-imperialist struggle for Chinese nationalists, by the 1970s, the struggle for the tiny rocks and reefs of the South China Sea had become a symbol of nationhood for young states in Southeast Asia. And that is the tragicomedy that we face today. Arguments about which country’s flag should fly over which tiny desert island could, if things go wrong, tip the whole region, perhaps the world, into catastrophic conflict.