The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

by Daniel Yergin

While the validity of the Thucydides Trap is debated, it has become part of the vocabulary. “There is no such thing as the Thucydides Trap in the world,” said Xi Jinping on a visit to Seattle. Yet he warned, “Should major countries time and again make the mistakes of ...

From the collapse of Soviet communism in 1991 until the 2008 global financial crisis, the U.S. design for global economic management had been generally accepted. But the 2008 disaster blew up in the heart of the American economy or, as the Chinese saw it, “in the core of the capitalist world.” The “Chinese model” of a state- (and party-) managed economy offered an alternative. Moreover, China was the engine that first pulled the world economy out of the crisis in 2009 and back to recovery. China no longer felt the need to look to the United States for either guidance or role models. In the Chinese view, the financial crisis was “a watershed in the history of U.S.-China relations” that was “compelling the United States to treat China as a coequal.” In the aftermath of the financial crisis, a Chinese strategist published a book titled The China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-America Era. It argued that conflict with the United States was inevitable. It was a bestseller in China.

This shift would be reinforced by the changing balance in the world economy. China has become what Britain had been during the Industrial Revolution—the manufacturing “workshop of the world.” A few examples: China today is the world’s largest producer of steel (almost 50 percent), aluminum, and computers—as well as the rare earths necessary for electric vehicles and wind turbines. In one three-year period, 2011–13, China consumed more cement than the United States did in the entire twentieth century. It has financial heft. SAFE—the State Administration for Foreign Exchange—holds foreign reserves totaling $3 trillion—about one-third of it U.S. government debt.

It is also rapidly becoming a country of consumers, as Beijing seeks to shift the economy from export-driven to consumer-driven. In 2000, 1.9

million cars were sold in China, 17.3 million in the United States. By 2019, the number was 25 million in China and 17 million in the United States. The weight of China in the world economy was made clear by the novel coronavirus. When the SARS epidemic began in 2002, China accounted for only 4 percent of world GDP. When the coronavirus hit in 2020, it was 16 percent, meaning that the economic impact would reverberate around the world even before the coronavirus shut down much of the rest of the world.

When GDP is measured by exchange rates, the U.S. economy is still larger than China’s. By the other major measure of GDP—purchasing power parity—China is already the largest economy in the world. By that measure, it overtook the United States in 2014. (Just to note, Germany’s economy overtook Britain’s in 1910, four years before the outbreak of the First World War.) But one reality check is in order for China’s future growth—demographics, the consequence of the one-child policy and social changes. “No country has ever gone gray at a faster rate,” demographer Nicholas Eberstadt has observed. Over the next two decades, the number of older people will increase dramatically while the number of people of working age who drive economic growth will decline just as dramatically. Other challenges include the scale of domestic debt and the structure of the economy.

When it comes to oil, the difference between the two countries is stark. China imports 75 percent of its petroleum, which Beijing sees as a major vulnerability and is one of the drivers of its strategic policy. The United States used to share such concerns when its import levels were high. But owing to shale, no longer.

Over the last two decades, China’s military expenditures have grown sixfold. In the latest comparative numbers, it is $240 billion, compared to America’s $634 billion. The third and fourth spenders are far behind—Saudi Arabia and Russia—each at around $65 billion. China’s military has, in the words of a RAND Corporation assessment,

“transformed itself from a large but antiquated force into a capable modern military.” It has “narrowed the gap” with the United States. Crucially, it has the “advantage of proximity in most plausible conflict scenarios, and geographical advantage will likely neutralize many U.S. military strengths.” It has also focused on developing a “wide variety of missiles, air defense, and electronic capabilities” that could neutralize U.S. capabilities from ships to satellites.

The United States is hardly standing still. In response to the emerging capabilities of what is now called a “great power/peer level” competitor, the U.S. military is making a major shift in focus, strategy, and weapons. The U.S. Marines, for instance, are going through a transformation, in the words of its new force design, away from two decades of fighting on land against “violent extremists in the Middle East.” Instead, it is to become an agile naval expeditionary force able to move with great speed and in dispersed fashion from island to island in the Pacific in order to neutralize a Chinese navy that is capable of attacking traditional U.S. military assets.

China’s preponderance in Asia continues to increase. In early 2017, just days after becoming president, Donald Trump yanked the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would have encompassed twelve nations that border the Pacific—though specifically excluding China—in a new bloc representing 40 percent of world trade. It would have asserted U.S. commitment to Asia and given other Asian nations a counterforce to the powerful magnetic field of the Chinese economy. For those nations, it was as much political as economic. Trump’s action was seen in Asia as marking a retreat from the region—and an opportunity for China to fill the vacuum. Indeed, one Chinese called the U.S. withdrawal “a huge gift” to Beijing. No longer hampered by a counterweight, China proceeded with negotiations for its own trade agreements with Asian countries—excluding the United States.

Xi demonstrated China’s new great power status when he hosted twenty-nine leaders of other countries at a Beijing forum. He made clear that China, unlike the United States, would not lecture them about human rights nor support democracy activists. “We have no intention,” said Xi, “to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, export our own social system, . . . or impose our own will.”

The rivalry of the G2 is most evident in two arenas. One—the South China Sea—involves, literally, geographic maps. The other—what is known as “Belt and Road”—represents an effort to redraw the map of the global economy. In both, energy is deeply intertwined.

There are other danger points, beginning with the fundamental issue of all—Taiwan. That Taiwan is not an independent country, and that it not move toward independence, is the oft-repeated “core interest” of China. Beijing is explicit that it would use military force and, if required, go to war to prevent any such move. Another danger point are tiny uninhabited but strategically located islands northeast of Taiwan that both China and Japan claim. North Korea and its nuclear weapons and missile program are a focus of great concern. Yet the South China Sea constitutes what has been described as “the greatest point of tension” directly between the United States and China. Or, as Admiral James Stavridis, former NATO supreme commander, put it: “The South China Sea is the most dangerous potential confrontation between the United States and China.”

Spratly Islands,

For two centuries, the area has been marked on nautical maps as “Dangerous Ground.” Even today, U.S. government sailing instructions advise that “avoidance of Dangerous Ground is the mariner’s only guarantee of safety.” Flyspecks though they may be, the Spratlys occupy crucial territory on the map; they sprawl across about 160,000 square miles—an area the size of Michigan, Iowa, and Illinois combined—several hundred miles from Vietnam and slightly closer to the Philippines. They are more or less in the center of what today is the most important waterway in the world—the South China Sea.

Today there is a growing struggle over sovereignty in the South China Sea—over who controls the Spratlys, as well as another island group closer to China and Vietnam called the Paracels, and other tiny “land features” that barely jut out from the waves—and indeed the sea itself. It is a battle over a host of critical matters—oil and gas resources, both known and purported; a substantial part of the world’s fishing resources; control of the world’s most important sea lanes and, potentially, the trade that goes through it. It is also about national identity, a shifting strategic balance, and the changing relationships of China both with its neighbors and with the United States. And, specifically, it is about whether naval warships pass freely or not through its waters. With all that comes the risk of armed clashes, whether intended or accidental.

The South China Sea, described as the “world’s most critical waterway,” stretches from the Indian Ocean to Asia and the Pacific Ocean. It is bordered by Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, Vietnam, China, and Taiwan. Singapore is just beyond its limits. Through its waters pass $3.5 trillion of world trade—two-thirds of China’s maritime trade, and over 40 percent of Japan’s and 30 percent of total world trade. The flows include fifteen million barrels of oil a day—almost as much as goes through the Strait of Hormuz—as well as a third of the world’s LNG. Eighty percent of China’s oil imports pass through it. Its waters are crucial for food security. Ten percent of the world’s entire fish catch comes from it, 40 percent of its tuna. It

provides much of the seafood consumed both in China, the world’s largest consumer of fish, and Southeast Asia. It has even been suggested that “the value and importance of the South China Sea’s fish stocks” make “fish a strategic commodity.” Conflicts over fisheries also inflame public opinion in the countries that border the sea.

Those waters are also fraught with risk. “A single irresponsible action or instigation of conflict,” warned Vietnam’s prime minister, “could well lead to the interruption of these huge trade flows, with unforeseeable consequences...

“Incident of the 9 Islets.”

First Opium War, with the Treaty of Nanking in 1842.

It required a defeated China to lease Hong Kong to Britain and grant “extraterritoriality,” which meant that British citizens would be subject to British law, not Chinese. A whole series of subsequent “unequal treaties” over the nineteenth century gave European nations, including Russia, as well as Japan, preferential commercial and extraterritorial legal rights in Chinese coastal cities, along with political control within defined concession areas. All this undermined China’s sovereignty and heralded its weakness. A climax of the “humiliation” came in 1919, when the Versailles treaty awarded Germany’s Shandung concession to Japan.

“May 4 Movement”—a landmark for modern Chine...

The Republic of China, founded in 1912, was supposed to modernize the country and regain sovereignty. But by the beginning of the 1930s, China had degenerated into a fragmented country. Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalists and heir to the Republic of China, was fighting both warlords and Communists. In 1931, the Japanese seized control of Manch...

its mapmakers.”

Various maps were promulgated between 1933 and 1935 that asserted Chinese sovereignty into the South China Sea, reaching almost a thousand miles from the Chinese mainland, and with Chinese names for the various islands (in the words of a recent government document), “reviewed and approved.” A singular cartographic combatant led the charge—Bai Meichu, one of China’s most influential and respected geographers. His work was inspired not only by longitudes and latitudes but also by nationalist passion. “Loving the nation is the top priority in learning geography,” he said, “while building the nation is what learning geography is for.” To drive home the point and educate the country, he had already in 1930 produced a “Chinese National Humiliation Map.” One of his aims, he said, was “to help the common people to be patriotic.”

In 1936, he drew a map for his New China Construction Atlas. It included a U-shaped line—some would call it a “cow tongue”—that snaked down the coastlines along the South China Sea almost to the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. Everything within that line, he asserted, belonged to China. As he put it in an annotation, the South China Sea was “the living place of Chinese fishermen. The sovereignty, of course, belonged to China.”

Almost nine decades later, Bai Meichu’s map is at the heart of today’s struggle over the South China Sea.

After World War II, in 1947 and 1948, the Nationalist government, drawing directly on Bai Meichu’s 1936 map, promulgated a new map showing China’s control over the Spratlys as well as the Paracel Islands, and going all the way down to the James Shoal, off the coast of what today is Malaysia. This delineation, said an official statement at the time, was followed by Chinese “government departments, schools, and publishers before the anti-Japanese war, and it was also recorded on file in the ministry of interior. Accordingly, it should remain unchanged.”

China at that time was engulfed in the climactic struggle between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and the Communists, led by Mao Zedong. The Communists prevailed. Late in the afternoon on October 1, 1949, from atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing, Mao proclaimed the communist People’s Republic of China.

On the mainland, the new communist government adopted Bai Meichu’s map, outlining its claims for the South China Sea. Today, the Chinese map—and its view of history—continues to be known as the 9-Dash Map.

Generations of Chinese grade-school students have been taught that the southernmost part of China is Zeng Ansha, otherwise known as James Shoal, an underwater reef about fifty miles off the coast of Malaysia. On a flight into China today, flip open the inflight magazine on Air China and you will find the long cow tongue of the 9-Dash Line imprinted in a dark line on the map of the South China Sea, reaching all the way down to Malaysia and Indonesia.

The clash over the South China Sea is about islands and “territorial waters.” It revolves around three issues: First, who owns the tiny “land features” that protrude out of the waters of the South China Sea? The importance of this question is that jurisdiction over the waters flows from “land features.” This question of sovereignty is primarily an issue between China and the nations of Southeast Asia. China says its claim to sovereignty is rooted in history, which it succinctly set out in a December 2014 paper: “China has indisputable sovereignty over the South Sea Islands and the adjacent waters. Chinese activities in the South China Sea date back to over two thousand years ago. China was the first country to discover, name, explore, and exploit the resources of the South China Sea and the first to continuously exercise sovereign power over them. From the 1930s to the 1940s, Japan illegally seized some parts of the South China Sea islands during its aggression against China. At the end of the Second World War, the Chinese government resumed exercise of sovereignty over the South China Sea islands.”

Moreover, other countries and legal scholars argue that “historic rights” is too vague and ambiguous a claim to be the basis of sovereignty. Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan all dispute various Chinese claims and assert their own claims out into the South China Sea.

None of these contested islands amount to much. All of them together add up in terms of territory to no more than three times the size of Central Park in New York City. To make matters even more complicated, there is disagreement about whether some of the “land features” in the sea even count as islands at all in international law or are only “rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own.” And “artificial islands, installations, and structures do not possess the status of islands,” and thus do not have legal rights to the waters around them. Yet they can become facts.

And that is what is happening in the South China Sea, where China is dredging millions of tons of rocks and sand to construct artificial islands atop a series of coral reefs. These new islands become “facts on the water”—and military bases that provide anchorage and missile batteries as well as runways that can handle China’s strategic bombers. While both Malaysia and Taiwan have engaged in territorial reclamation in the South China Sea, the areas involved are very small. Nothing matches the speed and scale on which China is advancing its projects—to date some thirty-two hundred reclaimed acres. These islands would enable China to maintain continuing air patrols over the South China Sea. That, in turn, could permit it at some point to implement an air defensive identification zone over the region—which would inevitably be challenged.

The second question is whether the South China Sea itself—that is, the water—constitutes international waters, high seas, or is part of the national territory of China. That is a matter of concern to the countries in the region, those nations whose trade passes through those waters, and the commercial shipping companies and navies of the world. Does the 9-Dash Map assert that 90 percent of the entire South China Sea itself is territorial waters of China?

Many nations make their marine claims on the basis of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea,

China’s assertion that

the 9-Dash Line is a national boundary, which encompasses the sea itself, rests not on this convention, but rather, Beijing says, on the “historic claim” with “a foundation in international law, including the customary law of discovery, occupation, and historic title.” Other nations reply that the international law “does not recognize history as the basis for a maritime jurisdiction.” To affirm its position, in this view, China would have had to exercise effective sovereignty over the South China Sea for a long and sustained period of time in a “well-kn...

The third question is about the EEZ—Exclusive Economic Zone. The concept of the EEZ was established by the Convention on the Law of the Sea. The EEZ is different from territorial waters, which generally extend twelve miles from shore. The EEZ reaches out two hundred miles from shore. For most countries the EEZ entails only “economic” rights—to the fish in the waters and the oil and gas and minerals below in the seabed. The Chinese contend that the EEZ also gives it control over who passes through those waters. That directly pits the United States and China against each other. For the key question, very much at the heart of the dispute, is, as the international lawyer Robert Beckman puts it, not “freedom of navigation” in itself, but “freedom of military activities in open ocean.”

But on the question of “freedom to navigate,” the United States takes a firm stand. For it regards freedom of the seas and open navigation as fundamental to the law of the seas—including “freedom of military activities in open seas.” It is on that basis that the U.S. Navy operates around the world.

China, however, asserts that foreign navies must have its permission to sail in China’s EEZ—whether the claimed EEZ in the South China Sea or off the coast of China directly. According to the U.S. position, which is generally accepted by most other nations, the U.S. Navy can, for example, operate just

beyond the twelve-mile limit off Shanghai without asking “by your leave” of China. Beijing rejects that premise, although, ironically, it would afford China the right to do exactly...

In 2012, 123 miles off the coast of the Philippines, China took control of the Scarborough Shoal (named for an unfortunate British tea clipper shipwrecked there in...

The Philippines hardly had any military of its own with which to respond. So it used the only weapon available to it—the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. It brought a case challenging the 9-Dash Line to an international tribunal established in The Hague. Vietnam associated itself with the claim. In 2016, the tribunal delivered its verdict—wholly in the Philippines’ favor. It rejected the legal and historic claims of the 9-Dash Line. China denounced the decision and made cl...

At this point, there seems to be no definitive means to resolve the differences among the different countries. The gulf is too wide. For instance, Vietnam, relying on the same argument formerly used by the French colonial administration, says its rights go back to 1816, when the Vietnamese kingdom claimed sovereignty over the Spratlys. The Chinese reply that this claim is invalid because at the time, Vietnam was a “tributary” state to the Chinese empire, not an independent country, and thus was in no position to assert sovereignty over anything. The struggle over the South China Sea has turned into what Robert Beckman, whose specialty is the law of the sea in Southeast Asia, calls “the game of maps.” He adds, “The maps tell you everything.”

The 9-Dash Map may be the starting point and the defining document for the game. But there are other maps. Hanging on the wall in the chambers of Judge Antonio Carpio in the Supreme Court of the Philippines on Padre Faura Street in Manila is a map published by a Jesuit in 1734. It identifies the Scarborough Shoal with the Tagalog word Panacot for “threat” or “danger.” That matters because Tagalog is the main native language of the Philippines.

In 2014, Vietnam mounted its own map exhibit to support its claims in what it calls the East Sea. That same year, another player made its entry—rather, reentry—into the “game of maps”: Taiwan. After all, the 9-Dash Line had started with the Nationalists. Taiwan decided to put some of its original maps on public display. They were consistent with the People’s Republic’s 9-Dash Line. But, said Taiwan’s president, Ma Ying-jeou, the maps demonstrated that what the Nationalist government was claiming in 1947 with its dashed map were the islands in the South China Sea, but not all the waters.