South China Sea | featured news

After a week of acrimonious accusations between China and Vietnam, the Chinese military has admitted that one of its ships fired at a Vietnamese fishing boat, though it insisted that only flares were shot and that Vietnam’s claims of fire damage to the fishing boat were a “sheer fabrication.”

China's new leaders may be moving closer to resolving disputes over the South China Sea through a regional alliance rather than through separate negotiations with each of its territorial rivals.

President Barack Obama urged Asian leaders on Tuesday to rein in tensions in the South China Sea and other disputed territory, but stopped short of firmly backing allies Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam in their disputes with China.

US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is in Beijing to press Chinese authorities to agree to peacefully resolve disputes with their smaller neighbors over competing territorial claims in the South China Sea.

China and its neighbors in Southeast Asia must move determinedly to draw up a code of conduct to help resolve disputes in the South China Sea, and should refrain from threats and coercion that have sent tension skyrocketing, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Monday.

Vast oil reserves, trillion-dollar trade routes, fervent nationalist sentiments, competing territorial claims and bitter histories – the waters off the east coast of China are a sea of money and a sea of trouble.

China recently established a larger army garrison and expanded the size of an ostensible legislature to govern a speck of land, known as Yongxing Island, more than 200 miles southeast of Hainan. The goal of that move, Mr. Wu said, is to allow Beijing to “exercise sovereignty over all land features inside the South China Sea,” including more than 40 islands “now occupied illegally” by Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia.

China blasted the United States on Saturday for its recent public criticism and urging of diplomacy to address territorial disputes in the South China Sea, saying the U.S. statement shows "total disregard for the facts" and sends "a seriously wrong message."

The Philippines says a Chinese warship entered an area it claims in the South China Sea and ran aground on a shoal, as tensions continue between the two countries over a separate territorial dispute.

The United States and China signaled a willingness on Thursday to work together on "sensitive issues" in a move to cool tensions between rival claimants to the potentially oil-rich and increasingly militarized South China Sea.