HONG KONG — China’s new passports — embossed with a map showing disputed territories as belonging solely to the mainland — are causing quite the diplomatic furor in Asia.
India, Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines have all objected to the new map, which puts a number of island chains and border areas under Beijing’s sovereignty.
Where some countries in the region see expansionism, many Chinese see reclamation. But some analysts and diplomats are calling the map an unnecessary escalation of already tense territorial disputes.
Beijing’s vision of a reconstituted “Greater China” is widely seen as one of the country’s core interests. Abetted by a rising Chinese nationalism that demands more forceful dominion over disputed shards of territory, Beijing is embroiled in a number of overlapping claims across the Asia-Pacific region, from a desolate chunk of the Himalayas to various half-submerged chunks of rock in the South China Sea.
“I think it’s one very poisonous step by Beijing among their thousands of malevolent actions,” Nguyen Quang A, a former adviser to the Vietnamese government, told The Financial Times, which first reported on the modified passports.
A senior diplomat based in Beijing told the paper that the new map represented “quite a serious escalation because China is issuing millions of these new passports and adult passports are valid for 10 years. If Beijing were to change its position later it would have to recall all those passports.”
Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said in a statement that Beijing was “not targeting a specific country” with the revised passport map, noting that “China is willing to communicate with the relevant countries.”
Shi Yinhong, a professor of international affairs at Renmin University, said in The Financial Times that the new map could “demonstrate our national sovereignty but it could also make things more problematic and there is already more than enough trouble” over territorial disputes.
The scale and the small size of the map in the passport does not show the tiny but hotly contested Diaoyu islands. The islets are known as the Senkakus in Japan, which controls the atoll. They are also claimed by Taiwan.
INDIA: The Times of India reported that “New Delhi and Beijing are back to bitter one-upmanship which started with China’s newly launched e-passports showing Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin” in India’s Jammu and Kashmir region as parts of China.
“We are not prepared to accept it,” said Salman Khurshid, the Indian foreign minister. “We, therefore, ensure that our flags of disagreement are put out immediately when something happens. We can do it in an agreeable way or you can do it in a disagreeable way.”
India, meanwhile, has come up with its own map, which it is stamping into the passports of Chinese citizens seeking Indian visas.
S.D. Pradhan, a former deputy national security adviser in India who also chaired the country’s Joint Intelligence Committee, said that China has for years been committing “cartographic aggression.”
Mr. Pradhan, in a Times of India commentary, charged that China has been “aggressively intruding” into Indian border areas, “indulging in bold activities like destroying bunkers or writing ‘China’ on Indian rocks or removing Indian demarcation signs.” He also noted there have been “several faceoffs reflecting dangerous dimensions of the situation.”
VIETNAM: Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, said that Vietnamese border officials — not wanting to appear to validate the new Chinese map — were refusing to stamp visas into the passports of Chinese visitors.
Instead, Vietnam was issuing visas on separate pieces of paper that are inserted into the passports.
“The map lays clear claim of China to the maritime sovereignty in the South China Seas,” the Xinhua report said. “But Vietnam is refusing to accept this.”
“When Chinese people visit Vietnam we have to accept it and place a stamp on their passports,” said Mr. A, the former Vietnamese government adviser. “Everyone in the world must raise their voices now, not just the Vietnamese people.”
China and Vietnam are among the claimants of the Paracel and Spratly island groups in the South China Sea, which are shown as Chinese territory on the new passport maps.
Hanoi also was infuriated last summer when the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, or Cnooc, a Chinese state oil company, announced it was seeking foreign bids for exploration rights in offshore areas close to the Vietnamese coast. PetroVietnam, a state-owned firm, had already licensed some of those blocks to ExxonMobil of the United States and Gazprom of Russia.
THE PHILIPPINES: Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario sent a verbal note to China’s embassy in Manila saying that “the Philippines strongly protests the inclusion of the nine-dash line in the e-passport as such image covers an area clearly part of the Philippines’ territory and maritime domain.”
The verbal note, according to the Filipino news site Rappler, was “an unsigned communication considered less formal than a note but stronger than a memorandum.”
The Philippines has been one of the most vocal countries in pushing back against Chinese claims in the region, especially Beijing’s so-called “nine-dash” map that shows virtually the entire South China Sea as Chinese territory. The map, because of its shape, is also sometimes called “the cow’s tongue.”
The countries have had some tense standoffs this year, notably at Scarborough Shoal. A good backgrounder on the Manila-Beijing squabbles can be found here, in a Rendezvous post by my colleague Didi Kirsten Tatlow.
TAIWAN: The Chinese passport map includes the popular Taiwanese tourist sites of Sun Moon Lake and Cingshui Cliffs. That did not sit well with President Ma Ying-jeou, who said in a statement that Beijing should not “unilaterally damage the status quo of the hard-fought stability across the Taiwan Strait.”
Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said: “China has ignored the truth and sparked disputes by including pictures of our territory and landscape in its new Chinese passports. It should put aside disputes and face up to reality.”
John Blaxland, a research fellow at the Strategic and Defense Studies Center at Australian National University, said the map gambit was “pretty clever.”
“It basically forces everyone who’s a claimant of South China Sea elements to acknowledge it by stamping it,” he told VOA News, calling it part of the “long game” being played by Beijing.
“We’ve just seen a major transition in China,” he said. “They can act deliberately and slowly, and slowly get their way. There’s really not very much anyone is seriously prepared to do about it.”
