China Wants Everything, But Its Sea Claims Are More ‘Core’

Posted: September 8th, 2016

By Gordon Chang

Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China and Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World. Chang lived and worked in China and Hong Kong for almost two decades, most recently in Shanghai, as counsel to the American law firm Paul Weiss and earlier in Hong Kong as partner in the international law firm Baker & McKenzie. He has given briefings at the National Intelligence Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the Pentagon, and appeared before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Follow him on Twitter @GordonGChang.

In Asia, there is now a “whiff of 1914,” a reference by Australian University Professor Hugh White to the lead up to World War One. The South China Sea, as the International Crisis Group has noted, is “the cockpit of geopolitics in East Asia.” Scholar Robert Kaplan even called it “Asia’s Cauldron,” a location “on the way to becoming the most contested body of water in the world.”

Only on the way? “The South China Sea, located at the heart of Southeast Asia, not only brings about many important benefits to nations in the region but it is also a vital route to maritime and air transport of the world,” Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang told a gathering of diplomats and academics in Singapore at the end of last month, “And should we allow instability to take place, especially in the case of armed conflicts, there will be neither winners nor losers but rather all will lose.”

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