For decades, the world has been debating whether China’s rise will be peaceful or threatening, or perhaps a combination of both. This is a relevant discourse, precisely because China’s rise is perhaps the question of the century. “It’s not possible to pretend that [China] is just another big player,” Singapore’s legendary leader Lee Kuan Yew […]
KUMEJIMA (Okinawa) • Japan is growing an island in a bathtub as part of a struggle with China for control of Asia’s oceans, reported the Financial Times. The island is called Okinotorishima, or “distant bird island”; a remote, storm-wracked coral atoll 1,700km south-west of Tokyo in the Philippine Sea, where two small outcrops protrude at […]
Beijing has conveyed to New Delhi its concern over India’s growing clamour on the South China Sea dispute, particularly in reference to the row in the joint statement issued after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meeting with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe earlier this month. China is understood to have conveyed its concerns to India through […]
(CNN)China and Taiwan are expressing their displeasure with a ragtag band of Filipino activists who have waded into a regional dispute over territory in the South China Sea. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said the Chinese government is “strongly dissatisfied” with protestors from the Philippines, who landed Saturday on a small island that is a […]
Russia has expressed its opposition to the militarization of the East Vietnam Sea situation and will keep providing military assistance for Vietnam in the future. Russian Ambassador to Vietnam Konstantin Vasilievich Vnukov hosted a press conference in Hanoi on Monday to review the results of the two countries’ comprehensive cooperation in 2015. Russia has every […]
China has deployed three new ships to naval forces stationed in the South China Sea, suggesting an enhanced capability for maritime support, a media report said on Tuesday. The three ships – the transport and supply ship Luguhu, electronic reconnaissance ship Haiwangxing and pelagic survey ship Qianxuesen – began servicing the Chinese People’s Liberation Army […]
The island of Ly Son lies 32 km off the Vietnamese coast, on the edge of China’s claim to some 90% of the South China Sea. The population here of about 20,000 is so isolated that electricity was only installed last year. For as long as anyone can remember, the island’s fishing boats have worked unhindered in the open waters that stretch east […]
From China in Asia to Russia in Europe and the Middle East, and ISIS just about everywhere, 2015 has seen the flourishing of conflicts that exist in a gray zone, one which is not quite open war but more than regular competition, which is attuned to globalization, which liberal democracies are ill-equipped to deal with, […]
Exasperation with the FONOP was probably heightened by the fact that the PLA Navy had cleverly conducted its own “innocent passage” exercise through the territorial waters of the Aleutian Islands in September 2015, thereby diminishing the consequences of a close sailby of Subi Reef as a cathartic piece of defiance against PRC aggrandizement in the […]
Vietnam revealed its largest indigenous high-altitude long endurance unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) this December, IHS Jane’s Defense Weekly reports. According to local media reports, the prototype was completed at the beginning of November and will commence test flights over the South China Sea in the summer of 2016. The prototype is a joint project of […]