The End of "Null and Void"

For a decade, China's response to the 2016 South China Sea arbitration award was a piece of diplomatic furniture. Every anniversary, every press conference, every foreign ministry statement landed on the same three words: illegal, null, void. When a reporter asked about the ruling on July 10 this year, spokesperson Mao Ning delivered the line without a syllable out of place — the award was, once again, a "destabilising force" that should not obstruct the Code of Conduct negotiations. The words had been repeated so many times they had ceased to carry information. They were a ritual, not a response. Then the ritual broke. In the week surrounding the award's tenth anniversary, China deployed a set of instruments it had never used before against the ruling — not a louder version of the old boilerplate but a qualitatively different campaign. The shift is visible not in what China said but in what it built: a multi-venue international operation, a formal institutional publication, a direct diplomatic warning to European capitals, and a domestic legal tool advancing through the legislature. Each is new. Together they mark the end of passive dismissal. The most visible instrument was the recruitment of non-Chinese scholars. On July 14, China's National Institute for South China Sea Studies and the Huayang Center for Maritime Affairs co-hosted roundtables in Hong Kong and Jakarta, bringing together academics from the UK, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia to condemn the 2016 award ^[1]. UK-based professor Anthony Carty told the Jakarta forum, hosted by Indonesia Strategic and Defense Studies, that the arbitral tribunal "was biased and unprofessional in its interpretation and application of the law of the sea convention" ^[1]. The strategy is plain: rather than rely solely on its own foreign ministry statements, China is lending non-Chinese voices to its delegitimization case, giving the argument an external authority it cannot supply itself. Alongside the roundtables, the two institutes released a formal report titled "A New Critique of the South China Sea Arbitration Award" — an institutional product, not a press-conference talking point ^[1]. The foreign ministry reinforced the message with a new framing: respecting and abiding by international law never means accepting "illegal jurisdiction that is manifestly a political setup" ^[1]. This is a step beyond the old boilerplate. It does not merely reject the ruling; it argues that accepting it would itself violate international law. The sharpest escalation came the same day in Beijing, where the foreign ministry summoned European diplomats to protest a joint US-Philippines-European statement asserting that China's maritime claims lack legal basis ^[2]. Spokesperson Lin Jian delivered a warning that fused the legal and economic fronts into a single sentence:

We urge the European side to exercise caution in its words and actions and stop endorsing and lending support to the illegal 'award,' so as to avoid harming China-Europe relations and cooperation. — Lin Jian

The threat was explicit: continued endorsement of the award "could harm China-Europe relations and cooperation" ^[2]. A ten-year-old arbitration ruling, in China's own words, now carries an economic price. Lin Jian returned to the point later in the same briefing, warning that European countries should not "send any wrong signals to the Philippines or provide any form of support for its illegal claims" ^[2]. Quietly, a fourth instrument was advancing through China's legislature. A draft law on procuratorial public-interest litigation, which received its second reading in June, would for the first time empower Chinese prosecutors to sue foreign individuals and organizations for acts infringing on China's interests. The law does not mention the South China Sea, but its timing places it alongside the diplomatic campaign unfolding the same week — a domestic legal tool that could project Chinese jurisdiction over foreign actors who endorse or act on the arbitration ruling. These instruments did not appear in a vacuum. On April 7, the United States and thirteen allies — including the UK, Japan, Australia, and the Philippines — issued a joint statement explicitly reaffirming that the 2016 Arbitral Tribunal found no legal basis for China's expansive maritime claims. It was the first time a multilateral coalition, not just Washington and Manila, had collectively cited the award as binding. Since then, Japan has independently accused China of South China Sea violations on July 14, drawing a Chinese rebuke of "groundless interference" ^[3]. The pro-Award coalition has expanded from a bilateral position to a widening multilateral front — and China's response has escalated in parallel. There is a quiet irony in the language China now deploys. When Japan and the Philippines announced maritime boundary delimitation talks in May, China declared them "completely illegal and null and void" ^[4]. The words are the exact legal formula China has spent a decade rejecting from the 2016 award — now turned outward against two sovereign states conducting their own bilateral negotiations. On July 12, the day the Philippines commemorated the award's tenth anniversary — with Foreign Secretary Lazaro calling the ruling a "lighthouse" and an "unshakable permanent anchor" for the rules-based order — China test-fired a JL-3 submarine-launched ballistic missile into the Pacific, a weapon capable of reaching the United States. The legal campaign and the military signal arrived on the same day. Whether any of this persists beyond the anniversary week is the question the evidence cannot yet answer. China's rejection of the award has been consistent boilerplate since 2016; the scholars' roundtables and the EU summoning could be read as the tenth anniversary prompting a standard rhetorical surge rather than a genuine strategic shift ^[1]. The test is whether the scholar recruitment and the published report continue after the anniversary recedes. The counter-evidence cuts both ways: on June 8, Lin Jian had urged the EU to resolve trade disputes through dialogue in a cooperative tone ^[5] — a register entirely different from the July 14 threat. And the EU is not backing down: EU leaders agreed on June 18 to strengthen trade defenses against China even as Beijing was preparing to summon their diplomats ^[6]. Beijing may be running a carrot-and-stick strategy that treats the legal and trade fronts as a single negotiation, or it may be discovering that the stick has limited reach. The record does not resolve the tension. What it does show is that after ten years of "illegal, null, void," China has decided the old words are no longer enough.