The Philippines Supreme Court ruled that a pact was made between Vietnam, China, and the phillipines to explore the South China Sea for oil. This came as the current president of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said he was open to negotiations for joint oil exploration with china. The reason the agreement was ruled unconstitutional was due to it violating a charter that the exploration and gathering of any natural resources shall be under the control and supervision of the state. So in Philippine waters companies that drill and search for oil should be at least 60% Filipino owned which a Chinese and Vietnamese com are not going to be.
As every country tries to become less dependent on places like the middle east for oil they research the area around them and that was the point of this agreement but due courts found the agreement in violation of the philippine constitution. Now proponents of the deal argued that the deal was merely ¨pre-exploration¨ and so not in violation but the court ruled that the accord quite clearly entails exploration of Philippine owned waters and resources. There is also a disagreement of what parts of the sea belong to who with China claiming to have a greater part of it and so this stalled negotiations with the Philippines over joint exploration. Knowing how china is with territory they claim is theirs historically I doubt they reach a deal as china isn’t likely to give up its claim of sovereignty over parts of the sea though they may be able to reach a deal with regards to training any oil found
The part of class I think this article relates to was forms of power and how one of them was natural resources. As we see in countries like russia that no longer has access to a lot of its oil due to the war in ukraine its economy has imploded and seeing this countries are more and more eager to have autonomy when it comes to energy so they are always looking for ways to improve their self dependence.another thing i think this relates is actually shatter belts because the part of the sea that china is claiming so is the philippines, vietnam, taiwan, etc and so its an area of major contention