James Shoal, however, was not always regarded as such. Virtually all Chinese geographic materials throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, some officially approved for use in Chinese school classrooms, explicitly placed the border hundreds of miles to the north in Triton Island of the Paracel Archipelago. The ROC government’s acceptance of James Shoal’s southerly status, as recorded in Republican archival files, did not begin until late July/early August 1933.
What, then, is in a name? This talk seeks to answer this by examining China’s modern incorporation of the Spratly islands into its territoriality in response to France’s occupation of the archipelago in April 1933. Drawing extensively from relevant Republican Chinese archival files in Taiwan, which remain virtually unused by scholars on the dispute, this talk will demonstrate this “southernmost limit’s” dynamic character during the first half of the 20th century, and the actors, sources, and mechanisms that fueled these shifts.
Ultimately, it will conclude that we need to decenter prevalent images of the Chinese nation-state as a top-down monolithic actor in this dispute, one that exclusively created and neatly imposed its territorial imaginings of the islands onto its populace. Rather, semi-official and non-official actors at home and abroad, such as news journalists, geographers, informal advisors, and merchant, labour, political, and community organizations contributed deeply to this effort of geographically ‘knowing the nation’ through the sea.