China’s zonation strategy in the South China Sea: repurposing maritime zones for security interests

This article conceptualises zonation strategy as a state practice that repurposes maritime zones, including EEZs, straight baselines, internal waters and other administrative or quasi-legal demarcations, to produce strategic effects at sea. Existing scholarship explains how the sea came to be zoned; I ask what states do with that fact. Zonation strategy operates through three intertwined modalities: a legal-strategic modality operating both within UNCLOS and beyond it; zone-based jurisdiction that layers and proliferates claims to normalise presence and authority; and the discursive-spatial production of the sea as governable territory. Using the South China Sea as the primary site, the article traces how China combines coast-guard and maritime militia patrols, seasonal fishing bans, protected-area designations, the extraterritorial enforcement of national law, and expansive cartographic markers such as the nine-dash line to sediment authority without formal sovereignty claims or decisive escalation. Grey-zone practices and strategic ambiguity are shown not as deviations from law but as performances of this zonation logic. The argument contributes to International Political Sociology, maritime security, ocean governance, and legal geography, by foregrounding how zonation strategy techniques reconfigure sovereignty, security, and order through the everyday politics of zonal repurposing and proliferation.