Sino-US Competition in the South China Sea: Power, Rules and Legitimacy

Abstract

The increasing competition between China and the United States in the South China Sea necessitates that some important issues be resolved. What are China and the US fighting over? What is causing the two sides to increasingly diverge on this issue since 2009? This article attempts to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the three major factors—third parties, disputes over maritime rules, and power competition—to clarify the main mechanisms they have played in this competition since 2009, to assess the relationship among the factors, and to explore basic trends in the long-term China–US competition over the South China Sea. The main findings are that third-party factors, disputes over maritime rules, and power competition, respectively, have the most powerful explanatory power in 2009–2012, 2013–2016, and 2017 to 2020, and that the current China–US stalemate in the South China Sea is the result of the long-term China–US interactions over these three factors, which have different importance rankings in different periods.