Beijing has announced that it has signed or will soon sign bilateral agreements on fishing rights this year with three of its four littoral neighbors: Japan, South Korea and Vietnam. An agreement with Tokyo to share maritime resources in the East China Sea took effect in June, and Beijing reached a similar deal with Seoul over the Yellow Sea in August. Talks to demarcate the Sino-Vietnamese maritime border in the Gulf of Tonkin are essentially complete now as well. Vietnamese President Tran Duc Luong is to sign the final agreement when he visits Beijing from Dec. 25 to Dec. 29. Bilateral measures like these are fairly routine. What is curious is Beijing's apparent willingness to grant generous terms to its neighbors is curious - not a typical experience in negotiations with China. According to a Dec. 9 report in the English-language China Daily, the Ministry of Agriculture estimates that 1 million people in the fishing and fish-processing industries will lose their jobs as a result of the three new agreements, which will reduce China's annual catch by roughly 1 million tons. Despite the government's vague promises to create new jobs in the affected regions, officials openly admit that the deals risk social unrest. To understand Beijing's likely motives, some legal background is in order. All East Asian states except North Korea have ratified the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which defines the rights and duties of coastal states over seas falling within their jurisdiction. The convention gives acceding states the right to declare a 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone beyond their shores and to control fishing and mineral exploration within the zone while allowing other states to use the waters for transit. The obvious catch is that not all nations are separated by 400 nautical miles of water. In many parts of the world, including the Western Pacific, the convention raises more questions than it resolves. Where overlapping EEZ claims exist, the convention expects negotiations to settle disputes, but lays out few guidelines for resolving them. Matters are further confused when the convention's rules collide with territorial disputes over land, as is the case with several uninhabited islet groups in the South China Sea. Both China and Vietnam claim sovereignty over the Paracel Islands, while the Spratly Islands, further south, are claimed in full by both countries and in part by Malaysia and the Philippines. China also asserts sovereignty over parts of the Indonesian continental shelf, including the site of a major natural gas field at Natuna. Although China ratified the convention in 1996, it is the only East Asian state that has not yet declared or demarcated an EEZ - and with good reason. The Spratly and Paracel disputes are explosive enough already, and an EEZ reflecting Beijing's self-proclaimed sovereignty would effectively assert a monopoly over the resources of the South China Sea. The Chinese navy is too weak to enforce such a claim, which would only lose credibility if made without a strong military backup. It appears that Beijing is taking a gradual approach, setting aside confrontational territorial claims and reaching bilateral agreements on other issues, while hoping that the convention's principles - and further naval modernization - will eventually strengthen its hand. Single-purpose fisheries agreements, of the kind that China has reached with Japan and South Korea, are essentially stopgap measures between countries with undefined or controversial EEZ boundaries. The advantage of such deals is that they can be made without prejudice to disputed territorial claims, as Japan and Korea have done by agreeing to share fishing rights around the contested Tokdo islands. Beijing is in no position to go much further, since a territorial dispute between Japan and China over the Diaoyu Islands would have ruled out any possible consensus. The deal between China and Vietnam is apparently more comprehensive, as it will demarcate a full-fledged maritime boundary. The agreement marks the final normalization of relations between the two countries, which went to war in 1979 ostensibly over their disputed land border - although Hanoi's invasion of Cambodia to overthrow a Chinese client regime, the Khmer Rouge, provided the real motive for Beijing's attack. Agreement on the land boundary was finally reached last year, and next week's maritime deal will remove one more irritant from one of China's most delicate bilateral relationships. But the new agreement is limited to the Gulf of Tonkin, west of China's Hainan Island, and does not address the two states' conflicting claims to the Paracels. Not coincidentally, the Gulf of Tonkin shows few signs of economically recoverable oil or gas, while the South China Sea has been described, perhaps rather optimistically, as the Persian Gulf of Asia. From China's perspective, these deals will come at an enormous short-term cost, displacing around 300,000 fishermen in Hainan, Guangxi and Shandong provinces and another 700,000 workers in processing industries onshore. But Beijing clearly believes the agreements may offer bigger strategic and economic gains down the road. Its ultimate goal is to help strengthen the convention's legal force in East Asia, since its provisions could give China exclusive fishing and oil rights in much of the South China Sea. In this context, it's worth noting that one of China's littoral neighbors has received no mention at all in recent official press reports. North Korea has not ratified the convention on the Law of the Sea, which therefore plays no role in bilateral maritime agreements to which it is a party. That may explain why Beijing has not chosen to negotiate fishing rights with Pyongyang at this stage - or, if it has done so, at any rate sees no reason to publicize the fact. The agreements with Tokyo, Seoul and Hanoi, by contrast, exist within the framework of the convention, giving more force to its underlying principles. Once the validity of coastal states' EEZ claims is universally recognized, ownership of the South China Sea flows naturally to whichever power manages to assert sovereignty over the Spratlys. China, which already occupies the Paracels, may consider that possession is nine-tenths of the law.