The US has told China that it is aligning itself with a 2016 order of the Arbitral Tribunal constituted under the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention that had rejected China’s maritime claims in the South China Sea

China once again received a firm rejection from the US to its claim on the South China Sea, indicating categorically that Beijing would not go away with its expansionist plan in the Indo-Pacific region as easily as it thinks.

“We are strengthening US policy in a vital, contentious part of that region, the South China Sea,” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement. “We are making clear Beijing’s claims to offshore resources across most of the South China Sea are completely unlawful, as is its campaign of bullying to control them,” the US Secretary of State was quoted as saying by Hindustan Times in its report.

In no uncertain terms, the US has told China that it is aligning itself with a 2016 order of the Arbitral Tribunal constituted under the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention that had rejected China’s maritime claims in the South China Sea.

Basing its claim on the South China Sea on the basis of ‘Nine-Dashed Line’-a cartographic inscription from 1947 and modified later to its present form, China maintains that 85 percent to 90 percent part of this water body despite being few hundred kilometres from the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia, belong to it. The tribunal rejected its claim in 2016.

When the tribunal’s verdict was made public four years ago, Washington DC had welcomed it but had not shown as much seriousness towards it as it is showing now like the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam.

The hardening of the US position came amidst a recent spike in tensions between the two countries triggered by the Covid-19 epidemic, which started in Chia but hit the United States the hardest. The Trump administration has sought to blame China for it in a bid to shift some of the blame for its own mishandling of the outbreak.

President Donald Trump said last week the relationship with China has been “severely damaged” by its handling of the coronavirus epidemic.

Read the article in details in Hindustan Times: