Structural militarisation in South China Sea: How colonial legacies and resource geopolitics fuel regional instability
Original framing: “China’s military creating ‘pressure’ in region, Australian defense chief says” — The Japan Times
The South China Sea’s disputes ignore the **Cham people’s oral maps** of the Paracel Islands, recorded in *cham lu* (wooden tablets) since the 15th century, which predate both Vietnamese and Chinese claims. The **Yami (Taiwanese Indigenous) navigation charts**, used for centuries to traverse these waters, treat the sea as a network of sacred routes (*tawuy*), not a resource to be partitioned. Marginalising these knowledges erases the fact that the region’s ecological health—critical for fisheries that feed 60 million people—has long been managed through Indigenous rotational fishing practices, now criminalised by militarised borders. The **Palawan Lumad’s** *pantawon* (traditional maritime law) codifies shared access, offering a blueprint for demilitarisation rooted in reciprocity rather than exclusion.
The South China Sea conflict is not a clash of civilisations but a **collision of incompatible governance models**: the **Westphalian state system**, which treats borders as fixed and resources as extractable; **Indigenous relational ontologies**, where land and sea are living kin; and **Asian mercantilist traditions**, where economic interdependence should dictate security.
The militarisation obscures that the region’s **ecological and cultural integrity**—managed for millennia by Cham navigators, Yami fishermen, and Palawan weavers—is the only sustainable 'sovereignty' worth defending. Historical precedents like the **1931 Mukden Incident** and **1974 Paracel Battle** show how great powers have repeatedly used 'defensive' militarisation to redraw borders, while **climate models** reveal that the real crisis is the **60% collapse of fish stocks** and **10 million climate refugees** by 2050—both consequences of treating the sea as a battleground rather than a commons. The solution lies in **trickster diplomacy**: using **Indigenous MPAs, gamified conflict resolution, and reparations commissions** to expose the absurdity of borders drawn by colonial maps, not tides. The actors—**ASEAN nations, Indigenous leaders, and climate scientists**—must disrupt the **US-China security industrial complex** by reframing the sea not as a resource to be controlled, but as a **living ancestor** whose boundaries are defined by **reciprocity, not rifles**.