Quotes About South China Sea

It's easier for China to assert its maritime power by creating artificial islands in the South China Sea than by defying the U.S. Pacific Fleet with an aircraft carrier.

We call on the P.R.C. to remain focused on supporting international efforts to combat the global pandemic and to stop exploiting the distraction or vulnerability of other states to expand its unlawful claims in the South China Sea.

To get Xi Jinping to help with our Pyongyang problem, Trump has dropped all talk of befriending Taiwan, backed off Tillerson's warning to Beijing to vacate its fortified reefs in the South China Sea, and held out promises of major concessions to Beijing in future trade deals.

Above all, those with a strategic sense argued that the US had to challenge Russia over Ukraine as a warning to China over its possible ambitions in the South China Sea and Taiwan.

The South China Sea functions as the throat of the Western Pacific and Indian oceans—the mass of connective economic tissue where global sea routes coalesce. Here is the heart of Eurasia's navigable rimland, punctuated by the Malacca, Sunda, Lombok, and Makassar straits. More than half of the world's annual merchant fleet tonnage passes through these choke points, and a third of all maritime traffic worldwide.2

The news coverage of the Indian Ocean tsunami indicates how the South China Sea may appear to the world through the media's distorting mirror.

There were only two men on the planet better educated in the various martial arts than Butler, and he was related to one of them. The other lived on an island in the South China Sea, and spent his days meditating and beating up palm trees. You really had to feel sorry for those goblins.

Americans deserve to feel secure in their own lives, in their own middle-class aspirations, before you go to them and say, 'We're going to have to enforce navigable sea lanes in the South China Sea.'

Take the most dangerous power in the South China Sea, China. While the century of humiliation at the hands of the Western powers "is a period etched in acid on the pages of Chinese student textbooks today

Beijing's imperial reach extends far and wide, from Taiwan and Xinjiang to the South China Sea and beyond.

There's a national ambition, a collective, in a sense, political ambition, which I think is the thing we see from far away. That's the fact that China's building roads and airports and extending its reaches out into the East China Sea and the South China Sea, and in a way that's putting it into some tension with its neighbors.

The river passes through our mountains, changing its name to Mekong where China, Laos, and Burma meet, before flowing through Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and eventually to the South China Sea. "Yes! It is called the Danube of the East.

The United States would be a more willing container of China, but in the mid-1990s it is unclear how far it will go to contest an assertion of Chinese control over the South China Sea.

My basic advice to the Chinese with respect to the South China Sea is, 'Hey, guys, cool it.'

The U.S. is not a claimant state in the South China Sea or in the China-Japan dispute over the Senkaku Islands. But, of course, the 7th Fleet has been a presence in the region since the Second World War, and it is the most powerful fleet in the region.

But China has gone too far in the South China Sea with the island building." For years, the Chinese had been building military bases on the islands. They had vastly expanded their footprint by dumping sand and muck dredged from the ocean on top of the rock and reef formations, building man-made islands in order to set up more bases with an alarming array of military installations in the highly valuable international trade passage that threatened the U.S. Navy's Pacific domination.

If we were building our navy, rather than reducing our navy to pre-World War I levels, China would not be thinking about increasing its navy to take over the South China Sea.

2012 Phnom Penh meeting indicated that the South China Sea issue was beginning to affect the ASEAN-China relationship.

An impressionistic map of the South China Sea has been dashed across these covers by molecularly reconstructed Ming Dynasty calligraphers using brushes of combed unicorn mane dipped into ink made of grinding down charcoal slabs fashioned by blind stylite monks from hand-charred fragments of the True Cross.

Or perhaps the best that can be hoped for—as a play on the "MAD" (mutually assured destruction) of the U.S.-Soviet nuclear standoff in the Cold War years—may be "MAA," "mutually assured ambiguity." But seeking to address issues in a multilateral framework, with a critical role for ASEAN, would help modulate the conviction that the South China Sea is fundamentally a standoff between China and the United States.

Today there is a growing struggle over sovereignty in the South China Sea—over who controls the Spratlys, as well as another island group closer to China and Vietnam called the Paracels, and other tiny "land features" that barely jut out from the waves—and indeed the sea itself.

without the naval power to counter the French advance, "the Chinese government," as one historian has written, turned to warriors of another kind—"its mapmakers."6 Various maps were promulgated between 1933 and 1935 that asserted Chinese sovereignty into the South China Sea, reaching almost a thousand miles from the Chinese mainland

About half of the world's oil tanker shipments pass through the South China Sea, not only to China, but also to Japan and South Korea. For Japan and South Korea, the possible risk of disruption would come from actions by China. For China, however, there is only one "certain power"—the United States and, in particular, the U.S. Navy.

The Philippines is a collection of seven thousand islands spread over a far-flung archipelago in the South China Sea.