"Snubbed in world’s biggest war game, will Beijing..." Topic

… make waves in South China Sea?.

"Twenty-six nations are engaging in the massive US-led naval exercise known as RIMPAC. And China isn't one of them

The resource-rich Spratly and Paracel archipelagos may be the main sticking points in the South China Sea territorial dispute, and this week the world's two major powers were shadowboxing over the issue thousands of kilometres away in Beijing and the Western Pacific.

On the Chinese side, the fresh missive came from President Xi Jinping as he warned the visiting US Secretary of Defence James Mattis that while Beijing – a claimant to the contested waters – was committed to peace, it would not yield "an inch" of ancestral territory…."

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Amicalement
Armand

Pretty sure you can simply tell China "your ships and crews need to be able to operate at a wartime level a month's travel from their home ports. It would be highly embarrassing to break down in the middle of RIMPAC."

Ancestral territory? I can't believe that some people still talk like that, even after the world told Hitler what to do with his ancestral lands. Hilarious.

Dan

An idea. Draw a straight line from each island in dispute and whichever country is closest gets to keep it. Seems like a fair way to do it.

None of that matters to the strongest of all the parties in the dispute, Communist China, who despite having the weakest of all the claims is now capable of bossing around all its neighbors and even threaten to close off international trade route access, all without any real repercussions.

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Now China controls the fish "breadbasket" of all its sea-dependent neighbors.

Dan