ABSTRACT
The South China Sea (SCS) spans from Singapore and the Strait of Malacca in the south to the Taiwan Strait in the north, and from Borneo and the Philippines in the east to Vietnam and south-eastern China in the west. It is one of the world’s largest marginal seas bordering eight countries. Over the millennium, the SCS has served as both a fishery and a pathway for trade, exploration, and conquest. The SCS was surrounded by some of the world’s fastest developing nations until the Asian financial crisis in 1997. This semi-enclosed sea is a 1.4 million square miles body of water that carries roughly one-third of the world’s shipping and could hold trillions of dollars in undersea deposits of oil and natural gas. Under the United Nations convention for the Law of the Sea countries may designate areas within 200 nautical miles of their coasts over which a state has special rights as exclusive economic zones.
