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While Rex Tillerson's confirmation hearing as Trump's Secretary of State was for the most part uneventful, several hours into his back and forth with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Tillerson compared China’s actions to those of Russia in Crimea, saying a failure to respond had allowed it to “keep pushing the envelope” in the South China Sea. “We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that first the island-building stops and second your access to those islands is also not going to be allowed” and that putting military assets on those islands was "akin to Russia’s taking...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Chinese Navy warship has seized an underwater drone deployed by an American oceanographic vessel in international waters in the South China Sea, triggering a formal diplomatic protest from the United States and a demand for its return, a U.S. defense official told Reuters on Friday. The incident, the first of its kind in recent memory, took place on Dec. 15 northwest of Subic Bay off the Philippines just as the USNS Bowditch, an oceanographic survey ship, was about to retrieve the unmanned, underwater vehicle (UUV), the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "The UUV was...

With main objector Philippines placated, Vietnam is taking the mantle of opposition to China’s colonization of the South China Sea, with a new report indicating that it has begun dredging land in the Spratly Island chain. Reuters reports that satellite images reveal a new dredging project in the Vietnamese Spratly Islands, apparently intended to convert Ladd Reef from a shifting tidal land mass to a sturdy island onto which Hanoi can build military and civilian assets. The reef is already home to a lighthouse, Reuters notes, but it “is completely submerged at high tide.” The dredging project appears designed to...

Engaging with China need not be a zero sum game: Obama Administration’s Pointless Confrontation with China over the South China Sea Amidst concerns over how a Trump administration will interact with China, especially with respect to trade, China’s President Xi Jinping told President-elect Trump during their recent telephone conversation that “The facts prove that cooperation is the only correct choice for China and the United States.” According to a statement from President-elect Trump’s presidential transition office, “the leaders established a clear sense of mutual respect for one another, and President-elect Trump stated that he believes the two leaders will have...

Japan will step up its activity in the contested South China Sea through joint training patrols with the United States and bilateral and multilateral exercises with regional navies, Japanese Defense Minister Tomomi Inada said on Thursday. Inada said in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, that Japan's increased engagement in the area, where Japan shares U.S. concerns about China's pursuit of extensive territorial claims, would include capacity building for coastal nations. Japan also has its own dispute with China over territory in the East China Sea. Inada said that if the world...

South China Sea disputes are turning worse. Last week, Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte had a loud and clear message for China: Stay away from our territory or else it could be a “bloody” confrontation. Philippines’s warning comes shortly before China hosts the G20 Leaders’ Summit in the eastern city of Hangzhou on 4-5 September, and one week after a Japan Times editorial revealed that China has set a “red line” for Japan in the South China Sea. China warned Japan “not send Self-Defense Forces to join U.S. operations that test the freedom of navigation in the disputed South China Sea....

President Barack Obama meets with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India in June. (Photo by Dennis Brack-Pool/Getty Images) Around August 30, in Washington, India and the U.S. will sign a major war pact that makes them logistical allies against, among others, the superpower China currently making a bold power grab in the South China Sea. Specifically, Indian Defense Mister Manohar Parrikar will sign the deal during a two-day visit in Washington. The deal is the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA), a foundational agreement for India and the U.S.. In this instance, the agreement provides for each to use the...

Adding to the latest in a series of military drills, Beijing has said a branch of its coast guard is holding live-fire exercises from Monday to Wednesday (22 - 24 August). The drill is being staged at the Gulf of Tonkin, the northern arm of the South China Sea, home to several territorial disputes among Asian countries. Despite fresh tensions in the disputed waters, China's Maritime Safety Administration said it was banning vessels from entering the area between China's southern island province of Hainan and the northern coast of Vietnam. The Tonkin Gulf has historical significance over the Vietnam War...

CHINA could match the military might of the US in a decade and any conflict between them would rock the entire world economy. That is the frightening warning issued by research organisation, Rand Corporation, which highlights how the US and China remain at loggerheads over several regional disputes with large military forces operating closely together. In its new report War With China, Thinking Through the Unthinkable, Rand warn any conflict would ultimately be intense, destructive and protracted. “If an incident occurred or a crisis overheated, both have an incentive to strike enemy forces before being struck by them,” the report...

Japan's decision to develop surface-to-sea missiles with a range of 300 kilometers to cover the disputed islands shows the country may be eyeing a shift to an offensive posture, analysts said. The Japanese government has decided to develop the missiles to "protect the nation's isolated islands," including the disputed Diaoyu Islands, the Yomiuri newspaper reported. Development costs will be part of the Defense Ministry's budget request for the fiscal year ending March 2018, and the weapons are set to be deployed on islands, such as Miyako, in Japan's southernmost Okinawa prefecture by 2023. "Japan is trying to use the missile...

It seems if the People’s Republic of China is going to make a push to radically alter the status-quo in the South China Sea—by reclaiming the hotly disputed Scarborough Shoal that is clearly within the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the Philippines—we now have a good idea of when that might happen: sometime between early September, after the G-20 summit being hosted in China, and the U.S. presidential election on November 8th. The idea was laid out in a recent article in the South China Morning Post in an article dated August 13th. The report, quoting “a source familiar with...

Vietnam has discreetly fortified several of its islands in the disputed South China Sea with new mobile rocket launchers capable of striking China's runways and military installations across the vital trade route, according to Western officials. Diplomats and military officers told Reuters that intelligence shows Hanoi has shipped the launchers from the Vietnamese mainland into position on five bases in the Spratly islands in recent months, a move likely to raise tensions with Beijing.

Around the announcement of the arbitration tribunal over the South China Sea, Australia was one of the most delirious countries. Canberra immediately supported the arbitration result and claimed China “must” abide by it, and also signed a joint declaration with the US and Japan. Australia has inked a free trade agreement with China, its biggest trading partner, which makes its move of disturbing the South China Sea waters surprising to many. Australia is a unique country with an inglorious history. It was at first an offshore prison of the UK and then became its colony, a source of raw materials,...

In the latest escalation of bellicose rhetoric over the territorial dispute involving the South China Sea, Chinese Defense Minister Chang Wanquan warned of "offshore security threats" and urged for a "substantial preparation for a people's war at sea" to safeguard sovereignty, China's Xinhua writes. The warning comes a day after China launched a massive naval drill which is set to prepare China for a "sudden, cruel and short" war.

The Western Pacific “island chains” are a persistent feature of Asia’s maritime geography. While their underlying fundaments remain constant, their specific strategic importance has evolved over time. Different major powers have thus interpreted, then re-interpreted and re-evaluated, the value of particular islands, the role they play in national military strategy, and their operational significance in a warfighting context. Chinese naval strategists such as former naval commander Admiral Liu Huaqing have devoted considerable attention to the island chains since the mid-1980s, examining how and where the island chains can hinder or support China’s maritime goals. Yet Chinese strategists are hardly unique...

The first AG600 amphibious aircraft rolls off a production line in Zhuhai, in south China's Guangdong Province. The aircraft will be used to fight forest fires and perform marine rescue missions. (Xinhua photo) GUANGZHOU, Xinhua --- China has completed production of a massive amphibious aircraft that it plans to use to fight forest fires and perform marine rescue missions. The AG600 rolled off a production line in the southern city of Zhuhai on Saturday, in what aviation observers see as a milestone for the country. The aircraft has a maximum take-off weight of 53.5 tonnes, a maximum cruising speed of...

The decisions of the UNCLOS “compulsory” arbitration tribunal are not enforceable in the conventional legal sense The international arbitration tribunal, constituted under Annex VII to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (“UNCLOS”), issued its final Award on July 12th in the so-called “compulsory” arbitration instituted by the Republic of the Philippines against the People’s Republic of China. The Philippines had sought rulings on a number of issues, including the source of the parties’ rights and obligations in the South China Sea and the effect of UNCLOS on China’s claims to historic rights within its claimed ‘nine-dash...

BEIJING has sent the US a message in the skies above the South China Sea: Anything you can do, we can do too. It’s just flown a nuclear-capable bomber over Scarborough Shoal. The United States has conducted several B-52 bomber ‘freedom of navigation’ flights over the contested waterway in recent months, along with flights by surveillance and patrol aircraft. Beijing on Friday returned the favour. The People’s Liberation air force (PLAAF) at the weekend released photographs of one of its newest H-6K long-range nuclear-capable bombers overflying Scarborough Shoal on China’s Weibo social media service. The aircraft, based on a 1950s...

Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered the People's Liberation Army to prepare for combat. This comes after an international tribunal on Tuesday issued an unfavorable ruling against China's claims over the South China Sea. U.S.-based Boxun News said Tuesday that the instruction was given in case the United States takes provocative action in the waters once the ruling is made. The U.S. and China have been expanding their military activities across the sea, stoking heavy tension between the two superpowers. China controls roughly 90 percent of the South China Sea, a critical waterway that handles some five trillion U.S. dollars...

China has no legal basis to claim “historic rights” to islands in the South China Sea, an international tribunal ruled on Tuesday in a bitter dispute that risks stoking further tensions in Southeast Asia. “The Tribunal concluded that there was no legal basis for China to claim historic rights within the sea areas falling within the ‘nine-dash line’,” the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration said in a statement. It has dealt a setback to Beijing that the US fears could intensify moves to establish its control by force. How Beijing responds to the ruling in the case filed by US...