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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...

The US Navy is making its presence known in the heavily disputed South China Sea. It recently deployed two aircraft carriers along with about 140 aircraft and additional ships to conduct training exercises. This action comes as China and the Philippines await a decision from The Hague about whether or not the former can legally claim sovereignty over the South China Sea.

Dozens of activists were detained in Vietnam's two biggest cities Sunday as they tried to hold protests calling for greater government transparency over a recent spate of mass fish deaths. Tonnes of dead fish and other marine life began washing up on central Vietnamese shores two months ago and continued to appear for two to three weeks, sparking widespread anger. Frustration has been further fuelled by a perceived lack of clarity from the communist leadership about what caused the deaths. Major streets in central Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City were temporarily deserted on Sunday morning as security forces blanketed...

ULAANBAATAR (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday the United States would consider any Chinese establishment of an air defense zone over the South China Sea to be a "provocative and destabilizing act". U.S. officials have expressed concern that an international court ruling expected in coming weeks on a case brought by the Philippines against China over its South China Sea claims could prompt Beijing to declare an air defense identification zone, or ADIZ, as it did over the East China Sea in 2013. "We would consider an ADIZ...over portions of the South China Sea as...

Striking a notably positive tone, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter on Saturday offered closer U.S. cooperation with China in pursuit of a deeper and broader Asian security network. He said he intends to visit Beijing this year. In a speech to an international security conference in Singapore, Carter repeated frequent U.S. complaints about China unnerving its neighbors with expansive moves to build up reefs, islets and other land features in the disputed South China Sea. But he did not explicitly accuse China of militarizing those areas. He emphasized possibilities for cooperating with China while stating that the U.S. will remain...

<p>As China continues to posture in the South China Sea, tensions rise between China, Vietnam, Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and other regional powers such as Japan and India.</p> <p>At the defense blog War is Boring, US Naval War College Professor James Holmes discusses recent developments in the South China Sea and the risk of regional conflict.</p>

Tribunal’s conduct serves as a case study of the dangers in delegating too much ill-defined juridical power to an unaccountable, non-democratic transnational institution Multilateral treaties have become a bedrock of international law, especially since the end of World War II. More than 600 multilateral treaties have been sponsored by the United Nations out of the approximately 8,000 multilateral treaties entered into since World War II. In setting out the parties’ rights and obligations, norms of behavior and dispute resolution mechanisms, carefully written treaties that have buy-in from the member countries can reduce the potential for resort to armed conflict or...

Yet again, China is floating around the idea of building floating nuclear plants, but this time they are planning on an entire flotilla -- in the South China Sea. To provide power to the cozy artificial islands it has built up from reefs just sticking over the surf, China announced on Friday that it will construct a fleet of 20 power plants floating over the hotly disputed waters, People's Daily reports.