In recent years, China has been building artificial islands in an attempt to gain control of a wider area within the South China Sea. Last year, some of their islands expanded into territory controlled by the Philippines, an action which went to trial in The Hague. The ruling was in favor of the Philippines and rejected China’s claims to the waterway, but hasn’t been on the agenda of an ASEAN summit yet. Though there was a ruling against China, the Philippines is unable to remove the existing structures built by the Chinese on their artificial islands. Despite this, the Philippines do not seek a confrontation with the Chinese, instead opting to bring the issue up in later discussions that do not involve any outside parties. Despite the fact that the international community is mostly against the expansion of China into the South China Sea, an expansion which threatens many Southeast Asian nations and allows China to become a greater economic power, the international rulings are more of an affirmation of distrust for the Chinese than an actual deterrent as the countries affected have military and economic capabilities much less than those of China, their economic organizations don’t have significant power when compared to the Chinese, and their allies are unwilling to risk a military or trade war with China, though these steps may be necessary to prevent further expansion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In recent years, China has been building artificial islands in an attempt to gain control of a wider area within the South China Sea. Last year, some of their islands expanded into territory controlled by the Philippines, an action which went to trial in The Hague. The ruling was in favor of the Philippines and rejected China’s claims to the… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":395,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions\/395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}