The South China Sea Dispute: Navigating Diplomatic and Strategic Tensions

by Ian Storey (Editor), Cheng-yi Lin (Editor)

Increasing tensions in the South China Sea have propelled the dispute to the top of the Asia-Pacific’s security agenda. Fuelled by rising nationalism over ownership of disputed atolls, growing competition over natural resources, strident assertions of their maritime rights by China and the Southeast Asian claimants, the rapid modernization of regional armed forces and worsening geopolitical rivalries among the Great Powers, the South China Sea will remain an area of diplomatic wrangling and potential conflict for the foreseeable future. Featuring some of the world’s leading experts on Asian security, this volume explores the central drivers of the dispute and examines the positions and policies of the main actors including China, Taiwan, the Southeast Asian claimants, America and Japan. The South China Sea Navigating Diplomatic and Strategic Tensions provides readers with the key to understanding how this most complex and contentious dispute is shaping the regional security environment.

320 pages, Paperback

Published May 31, 2016

Reviews

[Neil H · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're into the South China Sea disputes, this is a book that arranges essays from national and continental views and how the disputes have risen as China asserts itself economically on coercion and militarily via the PLA - Navy. How its increasing denial to clarify its nine dash line of the SCS has the respondents of ASEAN and the US befuddled by its hot and cool approaches. Where China proclaims and washes off SCS as one of its core interests. The international institutions UNCLOS earmarked and with whom China has signed on and doesn't adhere to doesn't leave much to imagination that China is blaming the claimants and their futility for recognition of its sovereign rights. Its like you see the invisible giant like only I can and pay homage accordingly. If China chooses to be part of the international laws and process like a legitimate giant, she has to behave like one. There is much to like in the essays. But pick and choose as there are way too many overlapping facts which can get your eyes glazed.