The stronger China gets, the more important is the question of whether it will be a world power that wields its strength responsibly. Yesterday’s ruling against China by a United Nations arbitration tribunal brings this question into sharp focus. Beijing boycotted the proceedings, and has rejected the decision. By chance, the EU-China summit began the day that the judgement was handed down. It now falls to EU leaders to impress upon their Chinese counterparts that it is crucial to the future of the global order that Beijing supports the norms that it has benefited from for decades.

Two key issues are at stake. The first is the problem the Philippines brought before the tribunal – the Permanent Court of Arbitration – under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in January 2013. The gist of what the Philippines asked the court is: What counts as an island?

China initially claimed almost 90 percent of the South China Sea (bounded by the so-called Nine Dash Line), while some of the area’s land features are claimed by Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei. China qualified its claim in recent months to refer only to the land features and their surrounding Exclusive Economic Zones – amounting to an even larger area. The land features in the Sea, though usually called “islands”, in fact amount to no more than rocks and reefs, many of them partly submerged. Some have been developed by claimants. China has pursued these activities at great speed during the past two years and has already reclaimed land on 17 reefs, deploying missiles there – beginning to militarise the South China Sea.

http://www.ecfr.eu/article/commentary_law_of_the_sea_china_the_eu_and_the_global_order_7074