ABSTRACT
The legal dispute over jurisdiction in the South China Sea is already a famously complicated one. This chapter focuses on the impact of competing conceptions of the freedom of navigation and its likely impact on the problems of working towards a sustainable way of handling the dispute over the South China Sea, whether that aspires to actually resolving the dispute or more immediately to managing away its more dangerous aspects. The United States view is that it takes no position on the ownership of the islands of the South China Sea, that it wants to see the matter resolved peacefully but that neither the dispute nor its resolution should interfere with the principle of free navigation in the area. China has repeatedly sought to make clear that the freedom of navigation of commercial vessels in the South China Sea is not an issue.
