Mô tả
"...The South China Sea is the subject of competing territorial claims that have proliferated since discovery of potentially richundersea resources in the 1970s. The disputes intensified after the creation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982. China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines all actively contest sovereignty over some or all of the islands in the South China Sea and maintain competing claims to jurisdiction over the vast expanses of water that accompanies these island claims. In addition, other states have strong commercial interests. Indonesia, for instance, has major offshore facilities there, Japan receives 75% of its oil through its waters, and the U.S. maintains a formal defense treaty with the Philippines and growing relationships with other regional states. At roughly the same time as the discovery of hydrocarbon deposits in the South China Sea, the international community began to come to grips with how to manage offshore and undersea resources via the UNCLOS negotiations. Once the international community settled on the creation of the EEZ as the means by which coastal states could assert jurisdiction over off-shore resources, China soon emerged as a vociferous and muscular claimant. The Chinese government resurrected the "U-Shaped Line," claimed by the former Republican government, in support of the P.R.C.'s "indisputable" claim to historic rights to all of the South China Sea's islands and nearly all of its water space and its resources. Beijing further developed its historic rights claim by citing the voyages of Chinese vessels in and across it beginning 2,000 years ago, interrupted by Western subjugation of China and other Asian states. Indeed, Chinese scholars and officials often point to the colonization of Asia as the primary source of its competitors' claims to islands in the South China Sea. In addition to political and legal maneuvering, China continued to press its claims with military power, forcibly taking the Paracels from Vietnam in 1976, and in 1988 firing on Vietnamese boats in the Spratlys, occupying Fiery Cross Reef within the Philippines' EEZ. In 1992, Beijing consolidated its military gains by codifying its control over the islets in its Law on the Territorial Sea and the Contiguous Zone..."
