Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "九段线" in Chinese language version.
n March 2014, Manila officially filed a memorandum with the UN International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) to to decide if China's historical nine-dash line claim has a legal basis under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
As I document in my book, The Great Convergence, the Chinese have metaphorically hoisted an albatross around their necks by trying to defend an indefensible nine-dash line. History tells us that this nine-dash line was drawn by Japanese historians, not Chinese historians. Professor Wang Gungwu, a leading Asian historian, has written that in the 19th and 20th centuries Japanese maps included all of the South China Sea. In 1947, the Nationalist Chinese adopted the map with the Japanese nine-dotted line covering the South China sea. This map was then inherited by the Communist government, who initially did nothing about it. Today, it is ironic that the Chinese government has to defend a line first drawn by the Japanese and the Kuomintang .
