As 14 nations issued a joint statement on July 12 reaffirming the binding legal force of the landmark South China Sea arbitration ruling, Taiwan found itself in a familiar but uncomfortable position — diplomatically unwilling to endorse a verdict that strips its administered island of exclusive maritime rights, yet legally under-equipped to mount a credible international counter-argument. What is almost never part of that conversation, however, is the role Taiwan played in triggering the dispute in the first place.
A senior Taiwanese maritime law scholar who participated in the government working group at the center of the story says the roots of the entire South China Sea legal crisis can be traced to a bureaucratic decision made in Taipei in 1993 — one that Beijing would later replicate, and that ultimately gave the Philippines the legal ammunition to file for international arbitration.
The 1947 Map and What the U-Shaped Line Originally Meant
Huang Yi (黃異), former director of the Institute of Law of the Sea at National Taiwan Ocean University and author of a standard-setting textbook on international maritime law, was among the scholars who participated in the Ministry of Interior's Territorial Sea Working Group around 1989. In an exclusive interview with Storm Media, he offered a rarely heard account of how a post-war cartographic convention evolved into one of the most contested legal claims in the Indo-Pacific.
In 1947, the Chinese Nationalist government published a "South China Sea Islands Location Map" featuring a distinctive U-shaped boundary — now internationally recognized as the nine-dash line or eleven-dash line. Huang said the original intent of that boundary was strictly limited in scope: to indicate which South China Sea islands the Republic of China had taken over from Japan after World War II.
"The U-shaped line was an island demarcation line," he said.
That interpretation held largely unchallenged for decades. The South China Sea remained a geopolitical sideshow rather than a front-page flashpoint.
How Taiwan's Interior Ministry Expanded the Claim — and Beijing Followed
The shift began in 1989, when the Ministry of Interior convened the Territorial Sea Working Group to formally establish Taiwan's baseline territorial sea boundaries. During those deliberations, Huang said, an official proposed going significantly further: reclassifying the entire body of water enclosed within the U-shaped line as Taiwan's "historical waters" — a legal concept implying broad jurisdictional authority over the sea area itself, not merely sovereignty over the islands within it.
Four years later, in 1993, the ROC government made that claim official. Taiwan formally declared the waters within the U-shaped line to be "historical waters" in which it holds "all rights and interests."
The People's Republic of China took note. Beginning in 2009, Beijing began publicly asserting an identical claim — adopting wholesale the legal framework that Taipei had pioneered 16 years earlier.
"This is the actual origin of the South China Sea problem and the arbitration case," Huang said.
The Philippines filed for international arbitration in 2013, directly challenging the legality of these "historical waters" assertions under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. China refused to participate in the proceedings — a decision Huang said fatally weakened Beijing's legal standing. An arbitral tribunal constituted under UNCLOS Annex VII, administered by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, ruled against China in July 2016, finding that neither the nine-dash line nor the concept of "historical waters" had any basis in UNCLOS. Because Taiwan held nearly identical claims and was not formally invited to participate in the proceedings, the Presidential Office in Taipei declared the ruling damaging to ROC rights and "absolutely unacceptable."
On the 10th anniversary of that ruling, Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a brief press release stating that the country's sovereign claims and policies remain "unchanged." President Lai Ching-te made no special statement.
Itu Aba Is Classified as a Rock — With Significant Consequences for All Claimants
The tribunal's treatment of Itu Aba Island — the largest naturally occurring feature in the Spratly Islands, administered by Taiwan and known in Mandarin as Taiping Island — carries consequences that extend beyond the nine-dash line question.
The tribunal classified Itu Aba not as an "island" under international law, but as a "rock" — a distinction with major legal consequences. Under UNCLOS Article 121, an island is a naturally formed land area that remains above sea level at high tide. The same article specifies, however, that rocks incapable of sustaining human habitation or independent economic life are ineligible for an exclusive economic zone or continental shelf entitlement.
Under the ruling, Taiwan's maritime jurisdiction around Itu Aba extends only 12 nautical miles. No EEZ flows from it. For China, EEZ rights in the South China Sea would derive only from its mainland coast and Hainan Island — not from any of the disputed Spratly or Paracel features.
Huang noted, however, that the ruling's logic applies symmetrically across all claimants. Because no South China Sea feature administered by any party — including the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia — was classified as an EEZ-generating island, Taiwan retains the right to argue that its rivals enjoy no such entitlements from their own occupied outposts either. "This is actually quite fair," he said.
Two Separate Disputes — Governed by Different Bodies of Law
Huang drew a careful distinction between two dimensions of the South China Sea conflict that are routinely conflated in public debate.
The first is a territorial sovereignty question: who owns the Spratly Islands, the Paracel Islands, and Scarborough Shoal? On this question, Huang assessed the historical evidence as comparatively stronger for Taiwan, China, and Vietnam, whose documentary records of government activity and civilian presence in the South China Sea predate those of the Philippines and Malaysia by a considerable margin. He acknowledged that before World War II, given the limited communications technology of the era, overlapping use or genuinely unclaimed status of remote features was also historically plausible.
Taiwan and China claim the islands as "inherent territory" — as does Vietnam. The Philippines' claim rests on a different legal principle, terra nullius: the assertion that the features were legally ownerless when it began occupying them. Malaysia's argument is grounded in continental shelf extension theory.
The second dimension — the "historical waters" jurisdictional claim — is an entirely different legal question, one that Huang said neither Taiwan nor China has ever adequately articulated.
"Neither side has specified the precise geographic coordinates of the claimed historical waters, enumerated the specific maritime rights they assert within that area, or cited comparable precedents from international law," he said. Without that foundation, the claim cannot survive rigorous international scrutiny — and in the 2016 ruling, it did not.
What Taiwan Must Do Before the Next Legal Test Arrives
As the arbitration ruling enters its second decade, Huang outlined concrete steps Taiwan should take to shore up its legal positions on both fronts.
On the "historical waters" claim, he said the government must specify precise geographic boundaries, enumerate the specific rights it asserts within those boundaries, identify comparable historical waters cases from international practice, and build a structured legal argument from those precedents. The absence of this work is what left both Taiwan and China legally exposed when arbitration proceedings began.
On the territorial sovereignty disputes, he said the more urgent task is preparation: systematically gathering and cataloging historical documents, government records, records of civilian activity, and foreign archival sources. "The government should be thoroughly prepared before any genuine opportunity for negotiation arises," he said.
Huang also issued a broader warning about the political dynamics that surround these issues domestically. "Territorial disputes like the South China Sea tend to become emotionalized and over-politicized," he said. "If they become tools of political manipulation, the only outcome is conflict — and no one can clearly see what is right or wrong." He urged Taiwan's government and public to approach other countries' South China Sea claims with analytical rigor rather than reactive nationalism, and to take foreign governments' legal arguments seriously enough to study them carefully.
At the 10th anniversary of a ruling that restructured the international legal architecture of the South China Sea, Taiwan's position remains legally unresolved. According to Huang Yi, the path forward runs through law libraries and archives — not through press releases and declaratory politics.
Original Article in Chinese
