This area is a simmering cauldron for conflict between China and its neighbours – and the US. Mark J Valencia makes sense of the situation. Chinese People’s Republic soldiers patrol the Paracel Islands, also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan. The US asserts its military dominance via naval patrols and bases in the region. Credit: […]

  Beijing has deployed a new oil rig in the disputed waters of the South China Sea. Photo: WeiboBeijing has deployed a new oil rig in the disputed waters of the South China Sea. China has deployed a deepwater oil rig in the South China Sea, according to a state media report. The ‘Haiyang Shiyou […]

  As I write this, the Bahamas is reeling from the aftereffects of Hurricane “Dorian”—similar to Tacloban when Supertyphoon “Yolanda” hit and devastated the city. On the other side of the planet, the Amazon forest in South America, the lungs of the earth and the last and biggest rainforest on the planet, is burning. The […]

  SANYA, China/SINGAPORE (Reuters) – China’s national offshore producer CNOOC Ltd expects its major deepwater gas field Lingshui 17-2 in the South China Sea to start its first gas production at the end of 2021, a company executive said on Tuesday. Chinese state-run energy producers are raising spending on domestic oil and gas drilling to […]

  MANILA, Philippines — BBC journalist and book author Bill Hayton, urged the Philippine government to raise the arbitral ruling before the United Nations (UN). In an exchange on Twitter with Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr., Hayton, who authored the book The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia, said the options […]

  WASHINGTON – What happens to small states on the front lines of a decaying international order? We can get a good sense by looking at the Philippines. The last three years have seen a depressing erosion of Manila’s relationship with the United States and a weakening of its resistance to Chinese expansionism in the […]

  MANILA, Philippines—Malacañang said Monday that it was “objectionable” that a Chinese warship blocked Philippine vessels on a resupply mission to BRP Sierra Madre in Ayungin (Second Thomas) Shoal in the West Philippine Sea. The Department of National Defense (DND) last week submitted a report to Congress during its budget deliberations, revealing that a Chinese […]

  MANILA criticized China on Monday after a coast guard ship allegedly blocked three Philippine civilian vessels trying to bring supplies to a navy ship that was deliberately run aground at the Second Thomas Shoal in 1999. “Of course, it’s objectionable,” presidential spokesman Salvador S. Panelo said in mixed English and Filipino at a briefing. […]

  THE UK will send its new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth to the volatile South China Sea region, while France has already sent its Frigate, Dixmude, to the Spratly islands, which are a contested group of islands within the Nine Dash Line. China hit back at the news of the European nations ordering key […]

  Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific is hardly a new development. But what was once confined to the construction of artificial islands in the hotly contested waters of the South China Sea near the Philippines has expanded into new fronts as China eyes Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, where America’s day begins. Even American […]