November 9, 2026

The oceans are no longer a quiet backdrop to great-power competition. Climate stress, collapsing fish stocks, plastic pollution and intensifying disputes over resources and sea lanes have made maritime governance a visible test of whether the international system can still manage shared problems. At a recent international forum on ocean cooperation and governance in China, foreign participants repeatedly noted something easily missed amid the noise of strategic rivalry: Beijing is one of the few major powers injecting a measure of continuity and practicality into a domain that is otherwise fragmenting.

That observation is worth unpacking. China's evolving approach to ocean governance is not best understood as a simple defense of its maritime claims, nor as an attempt to rewrite the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. It is closer to a deliberate effort to reframe the purpose of ocean order itself — shifting the emphasis from who controls what to whether the system as a whole can remain functional for development, ecological stability and basic predictability.

At the center of this reframing is a straightforward but consequential premise: the health of marine ecosystems is a shared condition of human survival, not an externality that individual states can treat as optional. This is not novel environmentalism. It draws on a longer Chinese intellectual habit of thinking in terms of interdependence rather than discrete rights. In practice, it has produced a consistent policy ordering: ecological limits come first, and economic activity is judged by whether it stays within the recovery capacity of the systems it depends on. China has therefore pressed for ocean carbon sinks and marine biodiversity to be integral parts of climate and development agendas, not as secondary conservation add-ons. The same logic appears in its preference for "protection first, rational use later" in deep-sea mining and distant-water fishing — positions that are easier to announce than to enforce, but that still mark a different starting point from pure resource maximization.

A second distinctive feature is the insistence that ocean governance must deliver development, particularly for countries that lack advanced maritime technology or resilient coastal economies. Absolute protection regimes and unfettered competition both risk widening the gap between those who can afford to forgo short-term extraction and those who cannot. China's practical response has been to treat capacity-building, port connectivity, joint scientific work and disaster-warning systems as core elements of governance rather than charitable side projects. The underlying claim is that reducing the development pressure on fragile marine resources is more effective over time than simply prohibiting their use. Whether this "protect while developing" formula holds depends on implementation, but it addresses a real tension that many high-standard environmental proposals leave unresolved.

On order and security, the Chinese position is more conventional and constrained. Beijing continues to assert its territorial and maritime claims on historical and legal grounds, while stating a preference for bilateral negotiation and interim arrangements that allow cooperation to continue before final settlements. It opposes the militarization of disputes and the formation of exclusive maritime blocs, and frames freedom of navigation in critical sea lanes, energy security and supply chain integrity as collective interests, rather than privileges of particular navies. The emphasis is on preventing escalation and preserving the conditions for trade, not on establishing a new hierarchy of maritime powers. How consistently this restraint is practiced will matter more than the rhetoric, especially in contested waters.

Technology is treated as both an enabler and a potential source of new inequality. Advances in remote sensing, autonomous underwater vehicles, and predictive modeling are shrinking the "unknown ocean" and making earlier intervention against ecological tipping points more feasible. China's stated position is that these capabilities should lower, not raise, the barriers to participation in governance. Open data, joint laboratories, and prior informed consent plus benefit-sharing for marine genetic resources are presented as necessary safeguards against "technological first possession". Whether major powers will accept such constraints once commercial stakes rise remains open, but the argument at least identifies the risk.

None of this constitutes a fully worked alternative order. The hardest tensions — between sovereign rights and global commons, short-term extraction and long-term resilience, efficiency and equity — remain unresolved everywhere. What China's current approach supplies is a relatively coherent set of priorities: ecological boundaries as a baseline, development as a condition for compliance, dialogue over coercive bloc-building, and technology as a public rather than purely national asset. In a period when many maritime issues are being pulled into broader strategic competition, that combination of continuity and modest pragmatism is noticeable.

The test will be whether these priorities survive contact with specific disputes and commercial opportunities. If they do, they offer one of the clearer available paths toward keeping the oceans governable rather than merely contested. If they do not, the stability that some observers currently associate with China's role will prove temporary. For the moment, the approach is at least attempting to answer a question that purely competitive framings tend to ignore: how states with very different capabilities and vulnerabilities can still share a single marine environment without steadily degrading it.

The author is the director of the Center for International and Regional Studies, National Institute for South China Sea Studies.

Link：

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202611/09/WS6af13736e4b03ebf8519b447.html