Book Review: China’s Law of the Sea: The New Rules of Maritime Order

Kardon asks the right question: not whether China complies with the so-called rules-based international order but how China—like other countries—seeks to use or change international law to serve its interests. His technical but admirably clear study concerns Beijing’s approach to international maritime law, but his analysis can be extended further to other domains such as human rights and international trade law. Kardon turns from the familiar focus on the contested sovereignty of land formations to the less studied issue of who controls the water around such formations—in China’s case, those in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and the Yellow Sea. China has built a large expert bureaucracy to interpret existing rules and articulate new ones, always in ways that strengthen Beijing’s claims. It has also built an impressive range of sea-based armed units to impose these theories in action. Chinese interpretations of the law often contradict the letter of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and are seldom accepted by other states. Yet China has often still been able to impose its legal claims. In so doing, Kardon notes, “China is not so much changing the rules as it is reducing their importance.”