A map showing a huge U, submitted in 2009 with diplomatic notes sent to the Commission on The Limit of the Continental Shelf, marks China’s claims in the South China Sea. “At stake are billions of dollars in fishing and mineral rights that all of the parties to the debate each claim as their own,” writes physicist Duong Danh Huy for Asia Sentinel. He analyzes interpretations of the map – as simply targeting the islands, with appropriate territory and exclusive zones, or broader historic rights that would encompass a larger area. For “the ‘historic rights’ argument, to be valid, two...

By François-Xavier Bonnet   Irasec’s Discussion Papers, No. 14, November 2012, 42 pages, www.irasec.com Downloadable for Free://www.irasec.com/components/com_irasec/media/upload/DP14-ScarboroughShoal.pdf    Scarborough is the largest atoll in the South China Sea, located some 220 kilometers from the Philippines. The shoal is located inside the Exclusive Economic Zone of the Philippines but is claimed by China as its ancestral territory since the 13th century. The paper considers the strategic importance of the shoal for the two countries. Then, using unpublished records and documents from China, the Philippines, and the United States, the author will show that the two countries claimed Scarborough Shoal in the 1930s, each without...

Speaking to diplomats, businessmen and journalists at the British Foreign Office in November, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia emphasized the need for “norms and principles” in resolving disputes in the South China Sea. Why did President Yudhoyono, who was spending a week in London at the invitation of Queen Elizabeth II as the first leader to visit Britain during the year of her Diamond Jubilee, feel that he had to bring up the South China Sea disputes at such a time? After a member of the audience asked what Indonesia, the leading nation in the Association of Southeast Asian...