Abstract
This paper focus on Chinese territorial conflicts in the South China Sea that are understood by the author as a product of hybridity of the western and eastern tradition in cartography and understanding of borders. Since the so called "Century of Humiliation" production of maps was important part of the continual self-crafting of nation's image.
Chinese maps are not reflecting reality so much as asserting a normative image of China meaning that many official Chinese maps are consisting of territories that are not under state control (yet) but they should be such as the region of the South China sea delimited by the nine-dash line. This paper presents a brief history of Chinese cartography and its transition from imperial Chinese cosmology to modern scientific geography and the implications of these tensions between these two traditions on the territorial conflicts in the South China Sea.
Maps and cartography play key role in political practices that seek to produce a geobody which does not consist just from the territory but also it refers to a component of the life of a nation. China's geobody actually emerges from the interplay of the otherwise contradictory cartographic conventions of imperial domain space and sovereign territory space.
This paper shows that case of delimiting South China Sea undermines Beijing's current positive images of the PRC as a "peacefully rising" power.