A Rock and China’s Three-Sea Problem
-->
-->
-->
When the world's at stake,<br>go beyond the headlines.
National security. For insiders. By insiders.
National security. For insiders. By insiders.
Join War on the Rocks and gain access to content trusted by policymakers, military leaders, and strategic thinkers worldwide.
BECOME A MEMBER
BECOME A MEMBER
A Rock and China’s Three-Sea Problem
Shuxian Luo
August 21, 2026
Commentary
A Rock and China’s Three-Sea Problem
#Indo-Pacific
#International Law
#U.S.-Chinese Competition
Shuxian Luo
August 21, 2026
Two rocks surrounded by coral, with a total land size of less than 10 square meters (approximately 108 square feet) at high tide, are the entire basis on which Japan claims a 150,000-square-mile exclusive economic zone, an area nearly the size of Japan itself. The uninhabited feature, located more than 1,000 miles south of Tokyo, is called Okinotori.In late July, Japan protested Sino-Russian live-fire drills held within the exclusive economic zone it claims around Okinotori. Tokyo cited the safety risks the drills posed to nearby vessels, but its broader objection was to Beijing’s claim that Okinotori is merely a rock entitled to no exclusive economic zone or continental shelf, as opposed to the island Japan claims it is.<br>While looking like a narrow dispute over the legal status of a tiny offshore feature, this episode is better understood as a point where East Asia’s legal and strategic contests intersect. Legally, this quarrel is a miniature of the region’s ongoing contest over maritime order: the 2016 arbitration ruling that China vehemently rejects is, ironically, what most undermines Japan’s claim that Okinotori is an island, and Tokyo, Beijing, and Washington each invoke the law of the sea where it suits them.<br>Strategically, China now confronts a simultaneity of tensions across the East China Sea, South China Sea, and the Taiwan Strait, heightened by deepening Japanese-Philippine coordination and an emerging alignment between Tokyo, Manila, and Taipei. Beijing’s response to this landscape has settled into an increasingly discernible pattern, with Okinotori being one of its nodes. At each point of contention, China pairs legal instruments with expanded physical presence: it delegitimizes its rival’s position, dresses its own in legality, and backs its position with intensified drills and patrols tailored to boost deterrence in each theater.
BECOME A MEMBER
What Is Disputed and What Is Not<br>The legal status of Okinotori is at the core of the recent quarrel, but this issue is neither new nor loud: it has smoldered quietly for two decades. Japan insists that Okinotori — or, its preferred name, Okinotorishima (shima means “island”) — is an island. Under the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea Article 121, a naturally formed feature that stays above water at high tide and can sustain human habitation or economic life of its own qualifies as an island entitled to a 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone and a continental shelf. On that basis, Japan claims an exclusive economic zone around Okinotori and, in its 2008 submission to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, a continental shelf.<br>China, South Korea, and Taiwan all reject Okinotori’s status as an island. Beijing first objected in 2004, and since 2009, China and South Korea have each filed notes verbales with the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf in response to Japan’s submission, contending that the feature is a “rock” incapable of sustaining human habitation or economic life of its own and therefore generating no exclusive economic zone or continental shelf. Because the Commission has no mandate to decide whether Okinotori is an island or a rock, this question has remained unresolved. Rather than endorse a continental shelf premised on the feature, the Commission’s 2012 recommendation deferred any decision on the portion of Japan’s submission based on Okinotori until the objections in China’s and South Korea’s notes are resolved.<br>Taiwan, though not a party to the U.N. Convention on Law of the Sea, likewise objects to Japan’s position. Its dispute with Tokyo has arguably been the most prominent of the three, centering on fishing rights within Japan’s claimed exclusive economic zone. In spring 2016, after the Japanese coast guard seized a Taiwanese fishing vessel near Okinotori, the Ma Ying-jeou (Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party) government protested Japan’s claim and dispatched coast guard vessels to protect Taiwanese fishing operations, straining ties with Tokyo. Since the Democratic Progressive Party took power later that year, Taipei has kept a lower profile on Okinotori but has not changed its official position that “the rights to the waters near Okinotori will remain in dispute.”<br>One point needs emphasis: None of the...