Can someone explain the South China Sea from a political and legal point please?Can someone explain the South China Sea from a political and legal point please?

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Can someone explain the South China Sea from a political and legal point please?

My niece wants to know for an essay and I said you guys on here would be able to explain it better than me 😀

Some large % (40%?) of the world's trade moves thru those waters & China keeps building artificial islands with military installations on them which would give them potential military control of these waters. How old is your niece, shouldn't she try to research herself? Must be loads of pages.

www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-13748349

Try this.

Has her school given her no guidance on this? They should be teaching the kids, not just expecting them to come up with essays on topics that have not been covered in the syllabus.

Its mainly about fishing, and more importantly mineral resources.

see here

Yes she knows and is researching it but she asked me to explain it in simple terms specifically form the legal and political points and what the difference's were between those two.

I said I'm not sure but that when I don't quite understand something in the news I look on here and normally someone has explained it in easier terms. This then helps me to understand some of the more harder articles about stuff. Someone explained World War 1 really well once, although I've forgotten it all now

I didn't know this interesting and worrying !

Put simply:

Politically it is about mineral resources and rights to exploit
Legally, sea and island ownership is a very murky bit of law. There is general rules about sea borders, but there is huge debate all over the world when it comes to islands and minerals.
See - UK vs Scotland oil borders

• Falkland Islands
• UK Iceland cod war Broadly speaking no-one cares about uninhabited rocks until they find minerals and then anyone who has every been near the place stakes a claim. These are all complicated by previous wars, empires, annexations and border changes. At the end of the day, there is no international law unless countries agree it and no international policeman to enforce it (which is why we have wars).

Thank you