On 26 May, CNN broadcast an unusual clip of a US navy intelligence flight over the South China Sea. The P-8A Poseidon surveillance plane – one of the newest weapons in the Pentagon’s arsenal – had taken off, with a CNN reporter on board, from Clark airbase in the Philippines, once part of America’s largest […]
China said it conducted air and sea drills in the South China Sea on Tuesday as it stakes an increasingly assertive claim to virtually the whole sea despite rival claims by neighbours. The live-ammunition drills involved more than 100 ships, dozens of aircraft, information warfare units as well as the nuclear force, the state-backed China […]
China’s construction of oil rigs and artificial islands in the East Sea were illegal, an international seminar was told in Ho Chi Minh City on Saturday. About two hundred Vietnamese and foreign experts from international institutes and universities in the United States, Russia, Japan and the Philippines attended the function. They said China’s actions had […]
Your July 17 editorial “The South China Sea, in Court,” about the arbitration case raised by the Philippines over rights to the South China Sea, is not fair. China, a latecomer to land reclamation, has been exercising utmost restraint. But the status quo has long been broken by the Philippines and some other claimants, which […]
The Philippines v. China case before the arbitral tribunal set up under Annex VII of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has attracted worldwide attention for a number of reasons, one of which being China’s refusal to participate in the proceedings, which were initiated by the Philippines. The non-appearance […]
The Commander of United States Pacific Command Admiral Harry B. Harris reiterates US call to immediately halt land reclamation in West Philippine Sea. “These activities are harming the environment and will not strengthen any country’s legal claims to disputed areas in the South China Sea,” the top American military officer in the Pacific said at […]
China is a country with more than a billion people, but as Ross Terrill observed, when we ask what China wants, we are really attempting to discern the goals of the seven “male engineers” who make up the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party. This clarification makes the answer straightforward: Like […]
A host of Chinese landing crafts and assault vehicles were unable to breach the defenses and establish a beachhead on an island during a recent amphibious assault drill conducted in the South China Sea due to “effective measures” by the defending forces, Chinese Central Television (CCTV) lamented, according to defenseworld.net. All hopes of victory were […]
Philippine presidents have come and gone since the maritime dispute over the South China Sea began as far back as the 1970s but it was only under President Benigno Aquino III that the dispute was formally brought to an international court to settle the legal issues. Aquino has mentioned the dispute twice in his previous […]
Thank you for inviting me to testify today. For the United States, the South China Sea is an important area of the Asia-Pacific region for three reasons: 1) it is part of a major transit route for maritime commercial traffic to and from East Asia and for the United States Navy; 2) disputes over the […]