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in 1976, it took Hua Guofeng four months to receive him. And in mid-1976,
Zhang Chunqiao gave a speech in which he offered to use bayonets to help the
United States solve its Taiwan problem.^14
Deng’s Return and His Demonstrated Competence at Recovering
Lost Territory
On December 22, 1973, seventeen days after the end of the Politburo criticism
session of Zhou’s “rightist capitulationist” diplomacy, Deng Xiaoping was ap-
pointed to the Politburo and the Central Military Commission to partici-
pate in leadership work.^15 A month later, Deng was appointed to a five-person
leadership small group in military affairs, headed by Ye Jianying.^16 Deng was
reportedly nominated for the group by Ye, though he was certainly approved
by Mao. Deng and Ye worked closely together to conduct the recovery of lost
territory in the South China Sea. In doing this, Deng was able to demonstrate
to senior PLA and CCP leaders—critical constituencies if Deng was someday
to succeed Zhou—that he was able to recover Chinese territory encroached
on by imperialist aggression. He was a practical leader able to get things done.
The South China Sea is a shallow but much navigated body of water, with
some 150 small islands plus many reefs, submerged and surface-breaking
rocks, sand bars, and so on. These waters and islands have been visited for
centuries by fishing and other vessels from Vietnam, the Philippines, and
China. Islands in the northern group, the Paracels, and the southern group,
the Spratlys, were used by various militaries (Japanese in the 1930s and 1940s,
the United States in the 1950s and 1960s) for meteorological, resupply, and
intelligence purposes. In the late 1960s, the region became more important
when surveys indicated that the sea floor might contain large deposits of oil
and gas. Additional international attention to maritime territories emerged
with the onset of United Nations deliberations in 1973 that would, nearly a
decade later, culminate in the Convention on the Law of the Sea.
China’s government first asserted China’s ownership of the islands in
the South China Sea during recent times in 1939, as Japan began its fateful
push into Southeast Asia. After Japan’s surrender, the ROC foreign ministry
again asserted China’s claim, this time in the form of a dashed line drawn
around the periphery of the South China Sea on a 1947 map with the ap-
parent purpose (although it was never spelled out) of illustrating the scope
of China’s territorial waters. This was the origin of China’s nine-dashed-line
which would begin appearing routinely on PRC publications (eventually in-
cluding the inside face page of Chinese passports) in the 1990s to inculcate in
Chinese minds the belief that these islands and waters were Chinese.^17 While
territorial nationalism would become strong in the 1990s, it was not publicly
expressed in the PRC circa 1974. Yet the opportunity for China’s seizure of