ABSTRACT
Wealth and power steered global prestige from East to West and back to Asia. History’s serial relocations of economic growth and corollary power changed the character of the South China Sea into a conflictual conduit for Eastern and then Western colonialism, a strategic sea space in a worldwide war, and now a cockpit of contest to maintain or revise the rules-based international order. For the first time in several centuries, China’s blue water navy is projecting power across the Indo-Pacific and prosecuting a national maritime security strategy to transform the South China Sea into a “Chinese lake.” In large part, the winner of the Sino-American struggle for preponderance in the South China Sea will steer the course of the 21st century in the Indo-Pacific.
Command, strategic contest, and confidence-building among the disputing territorial claimants in the South China Sea are governing theatres of influence in the epochal struggle between the United States of America (USA) and the People’s Republic of China. This chapter examines the international agency of three critical domains in the semi-enclosed sea where Secretary-General Xi Jinping’s Communist Party dictatorship is revisioning China as the preponderant power and the ASEAN, the USA, and their allies and partners are concerting to maintain the rules-based regional order.
