International Law as a Driver of Confrontation? UNCLOS and China’s Policy in the South China Sea

Chubb, Andrew (2026) International Law as a Driver of Confrontation? UNCLOS and China’s Policy in the South China Sea. European Journal of International Law. ISSN 0938-5428

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Abstract

Could international law contribute to interstate maritime conflicts? A close tracing of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) policies in the South China Sea suggests so. China’s early interactions with the emerging maritime legal order in the 1970s expanded the scope of its interests from disputed island territories to comprehensive jurisdiction over vast swathes of maritime space. Ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in 1996 prompted Beijing to develop new bureaucratic and enforcement capabilities designed to realize sweeping claims inspired by, though not limited to, UNCLOS entitlements. When these capabilities came to fruition in the mid-2000s, they enabled a sustained, increasingly coercive push for control over the PRC’s maritime periphery, which has continued to the present. Four representative cases of China’s new and ongoing patterns of behaviour demonstrate in specific detail how China’s interactions with the legal regime have contributed to its confrontational on-water behaviour. In short, the PRC’s campaign to control vast swathes of East Asian maritime space was rooted in the party-state’s internalization of concepts of maritime rights through the UNCLOS process, coupled with a rejection of its corresponding limitations.