Some men who cannot see are brought to an elephant. One takes the leg and calls it a pillar. One takes the tail and calls it a rope. One takes the ear and calls it a fan. Each is right about the part he touches and wrong about the animal.
I think of them on the Johor side of the strait after dark. The drizzle has been drifting in off the water all evening, warm as breath. Across the strait, Tuas Port burns neon against the low cloud, and in the middle distance the bulk carriers sit dead in the water, hulls black and going nowhere, lit only where the glow catches the wet steel. A single yellow beacon blinks on a channel marker, slow and patient as a pulse. Nothing here looks like an argument.
The bottom layer
The argument starts lower than anything I can see. On the sea floor of the South China Sea, in the dark and cold, under more pressure than a person could survive, lie the subsea cables: fibre-optic lines carrying more than ninety-five percent of cross-border digital data. Every video call across a border rides one. So does every payment and every file sent to someone on another coast. The cloud, it turns out, is mostly a wet cable.
They are built for the cold and the pressure. What they are not built for is waiting.
Above them, the energy layer. In 2023, roughly 28 million barrels a day of petroleum and petroleum products moved through the South China Sea—more than one-third of global maritime petroleum shipments. Tankers sit low and move slowly, and I notice them mostly by the gap they leave in the lights.
Above that, the ships with boxes stacked on their decks. About $3.4 trillion in trade passed through the sea in 2016, roughly a fifth of global trade. A container ship advertises itself in colour. It is the only layer that does.
All three layers end up at one address. Singapore is a single coastal city acting as the physical terminal for trade, energy and digital connectivity at the same time. The stack is efficient because it is concentrated, and fragile for the same reason. I state both and decide neither.
Where the signature comes in
Cables sometimes break. When one does, the traffic does not stop. It takes the long way round, slower and thinner, until a repair ship reaches the fault. The repair is where the delay lives. In the South China Sea, the repair ship may first need a permit.
At the level of a phone, this looks small: a call that stutters, a transfer stuck on “pending”, a file that crawls. I cannot tell you which stutter on which screen traces back to a signature on a desk, and neither can anyone else. That is part of how the arrangement works. I have come to think the animal in the story is that permit.
The first reading: routine (China’s Case)
Chinese official statements describe permit frameworks for subsea work as routine administration under UNCLOS Article 79. The permits, on this account, protect sovereign rights in the exclusive economic zone, the coastal environment and the safety of navigation. The article does give a coastal state some room: its second clause allows reasonable measures on the continental shelf for exploiting resources and preventing pollution. It is a desk-and-stamp reading, and it needs no motive.
The second reading: lawfare (The West’s Case)
Western national security analysts, including those at the Atlantic Council and CSIS, describe the same multi-month delays as deliberate: retaliation against states that exclude Chinese vendors. A permit is pressure applied without force. The repair simply does not happen on time, and the delay carries the message.
The third reading: freedom (ASEAN’s Case)
Legal commentary from ASEAN coastal-state perspectives holds that the convention gives every state the freedom to lay and repair cables in an EEZ without coastal consent. It leans on the first clause of Article 79, which gives all states the right to lay cables on the shelf, and on the EEZ freedoms in Article 58. By that reading the permit has no footing at all. It is a request for something that was never the requester’s to give.
Where the parable gives out
The men in the story are harmless. They touch and argue, and nothing follows. These three readings each come with a party able to act on one. Two of them even reach for the same article, one stopping at its first clause and the other at its second. In practice, Chinese maritime authorities read the convention as allowing them to require environmental surveys, security clearances and domestic supervision for subsea work inside their claimed nine-dash line — recent map revisions add a tenth dash east of Taiwan, but the boundary is still most commonly cited by its original name. A reading with a patrol vessel behind it is more than a reading.
What the three share is an animal. Nobody disputes that the cable exists and carries traffic. The quarrel is over who may touch it, and on whose say-so.
What the argument is not about
The rocks are the obvious place to look for a prize. CNOOC’s historical 2012 claims cited up to 125 billion barrels of oil under the sea, figures that may include undiscovered or hypothetical resources. Earlier EIA assessments put proved and probable reserves near 11 billion barrels; the agency’s 2024 regional brief gives a lower estimate of about 3.6 billion barrels of petroleum liquids, with hydrocarbons hugging the coastal shelves and not the disputed Spratly centre. One number comes from a party with a claim to defend. The other comes from agencies with no rock in the contest. On the second account the middle of the sea is close to empty.
Methane hydrate is the other cold-and-pressure thing down there: gas caged inside a lattice of water molecules, stable only within a narrow band of pressure and temperature. Japan’s MH21 consortium and China’s Geological Survey have spent heavily on offshore tests, including the Shenhu trials. Commercial extraction remains uneconomic and hazardous, so I do not offer it as a prize. Engineers know it from the other side, though. In flow assurance, the discipline of keeping a pipe open, the hydrate is the classic way one closes: the cage forms where conditions are too tight and too pressurised, and it chokes the line meant to carry the power. It is a picture of a system that fails from too much grip, not too little.
The far end of the line
I do not need to decide which reading is right, because a repair ship waits the same length of time under all three. The wider pattern is a system slowly losing flow: months-long repair delays, fragmented digital corridors, and higher operational costs and extended downtimes. Any single power pressing to control the lanes and cables gets not dominance but a blockage it shares with everyone else.
Somewhere at the end of that line, someone is waiting on a message that has not arrived, a payment that has not cleared, a shipment that has not been unloaded. That person was not consulted in any of the three readings. The sea stays calm through all of it.
There is a fair objection. Calling the sea a frozen line ignores how Southeast Asian states manage these pressures. Through diplomatic hedging and flexible, non-binding arrangements, including the Code of Conduct negotiations, they try to keep the region from hardening into rigid Great Power blocs. A lattice can be stable or clogged, and from the shore the two look identical: the same grey water, the same lamps. The difference is set below the waterline, on paper, by people whose hands the ships never see.
I don’t know if the men in the story ever let go of the elephant, or if they just grew old holding their separate parts of it, each one still certain, each one still right about the piece in his hands.
Sources
Sources: This essay draws on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Regional Analysis Brief: South China Sea (2024), the CSIS ChinaPower Project, Atlantic Council and CSIS analyses of submarine‑cable security, ASEAN materials on cable resilience and the South China Sea, and academic and industry reporting on cable infrastructure, repair permits and maritime risk.
References & Further Reading
Submarine cables and the >95% statistic
- Atlantic Council, Cyber Defense Across the Ocean Floor: The Geopolitics of Submarine Cable Security (2021).
- Industry reporting (CNBC, 2025; Network Computing, 2023), summarizing the same figure for international data traffic on subsea cables.
Trade transiting the South China Sea ($3.4 trillion, ~21% of global trade)
- CSIS ChinaPower Project, How Much Trade Transits the South China Sea? (2017).
- U.S. Energy Information Administration, Regional Analysis Brief: South China Sea (2024).
Energy flows through the South China Sea (~28 million b/d, ~37% of global maritime petroleum)
- U.S. Energy Information Administration, Regional Analysis Brief: South China Sea (2024).
Oil and gas reserves: proved/probable vs. high‑end claims
- U.S. Energy Information Administration, Regional Analysis Brief: South China Sea (2024) — current proved/probable estimate.
- U.S. Energy Information Administration, Today in Energy (2013) — earlier, more widely cited baseline.
- CNOOC‑linked high‑end claims (2012), widely referenced in policy commentary but not treated as proved or probable by independent agencies.
UNCLOS legal framework (Articles 58 and 79)
- United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Part VI, Article 79.
- Academic commentary on Article 79 and EEZ freedoms under Article 58.
Permit delays, repair times, and the “lawfare” framing
- The Washington Post (2024), reporting on cable repair and construction delays in the South China Sea.
- Regional industry analyses (2023–2024) on average repair times and permitting bottlenecks.
- CSIS and Atlantic Council research on cable security and administrative controls in great‑power competition.
ASEAN hedging and the Code of Conduct
- Academic and policy overviews of the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties and the ongoing Code of Conduct negotiations.
Methane hydrates and flow assurance
- Standard petroleum engineering literature on gas hydrate flow assurance.
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