Hello, I’m Zhan Qingyun.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a position paper on jurisdiction in the South China Sea arbitration in December 2014.

People sometimes mock Foreign Ministry statements as formulaic diplomatic condemnations.

This paper was not formulaic. It took a firm position while offering detailed legal argument and extensive authority.

The Philippine counsel I met in America—who preferred not to be named—candidly acknowledged the strength of China’s reasoning.

The paper grouped the Philippines’ submissions into three categories.

First, the Philippines argued that maritime rights claimed by China under the nine-dash line—including rights over waters, reefs, and islands—were inconsistent with UNCLOS.

Second, it challenged China’s claimed two-hundred-nautical-mile or broader entitlements generated by features in the South China Sea. A sovereign island generates a twelve-nautical-mile territorial sea and potentially a two-hundred-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone; a rock generates no EEZ, and a low-tide elevation generates neither entitlement in its own right.

The Philippines asked the tribunal to classify specified features claimed by China as islands, rocks, or low-tide elevations and reject maritime rights inconsistent with those classifications.

Third, it said China’s assertion and exercise of rights interfered with Philippine entitlements under the Convention.

China argued that all the many submissions fell within those three groups and were fundamentally sovereignty disputes. The nine-dash line, in China’s account, marked a national boundary.

Classifying islands and rocks concerned territorial title and the sea generated by it; alleged interference with Philippine sovereignty was still more plainly about sovereignty.

China’s simpler proposition was that title to land had to be decided before these derivative questions could be discussed.

Only territory can generate a territorial sea. Abstractly classifying a feature is pointless when classification matters because it creates maritime zones for its sovereign. No country may draw a circle in the Pacific and claim the water without land title. Deciding maritime entitlements therefore challenged Chinese territorial sovereignty, while everyone agreed UNCLOS arbitration could not decide sovereignty.

UNCLOS supplies abstract principles rather than drawing a map assigning each sea and mineral deposit to a country.