China and joint development in the South China Sea: An energy security perspective

If one were to trace the origins of the proposal to conduct joint development in the South China Sea by China, one could go back to the days of Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s. By then China under Deng was faced with quite a number of territorial disputes, including the ones with Japan in the East China Sea and the much more complicated ones with some Southeast Asian states in the South China Sea.