South China Sea Maritime Dispute Continues to Roil Region

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Sep 9, 1:18PM EDT

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Contested overlapping maritime offshore claims between China, Vietnam, Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei over the South China Sea continue to disrupt relations between the six nations.

China claims approximately 75 percent of the South China Sea, including the Paracel and Spratley islet groups, justifying its assertions with the region’s historical affiliations with the mainland, an assertion opposed by Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei, which have all laid claim to contested regions of the offshore waters.

The region has already seen armed conflict between the contestants, including naval encounters between China and Vietnam in 1974 and 1988, Singapore’s The Business Standard newspaper reported.

Other regional powers are slowly being sucked into the maelstrom, as last week an Indian Navy vessel was challenged by a Chinese warship off the coast of Vietnam.

Three months ago City-state Singapore’s Foreign Ministry issued a press briefing commenting, “We have repeatedly said that we think it is in China’s own interests to clarify its claims in the SCS (South China Sea) with more precision, as the current ambiguity as to their extent has caused serious concerns in the international maritime community. The recent incidents have heightened these concerns and raise serious questions in relation to the interpretation of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.”

By. Joao Peixe, Deputy Editor OilPrice.com

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.