If Beijing can claim South China Sea, US can call Pacific ‘American Sea’, says Clinton in leaked speech

Except that Western powers acknowledged that China owned the SCS in previous treaties and when the nationalists ruled over China.

Those are flawed examples because those places were already inhabited. Whereas there are no documented historical claims earlier than Chinese, and when others went to the islands they repeatedly documented Chinese there.

France for example.

In 1933, France seized the Paracels and Spratlys, announced their annexation, formally included them in French Indochina, and built a couple of weather stations on them, but did not disturb the numerous Chinese fishermen it found there.

http://chasfreeman.net/diplomacy-on-the-rocks-china-and-other-claimants-in-the-south-china-sea/

France also is the one who says Vietnam has nothing to do with the Spratly Islands.

By September 1953, the French Foreign Ministry maintained the view that the Spratlys belonged to France, not Vietnam: ‘These islands, French, were not attached to Vietnam in 1949, when the former colony of Cochinchina was ceded to this Associated State. They therefore depend on the Ministry of Overseas France’.122

The French Ministry of Associated States asked the opinion of the French Foreign Ministry, who prepared yet another ‘note’ claiming beyond doubt that the Spratlys belonged to the French Union, not Vietnam, citing several reasons. One of them was that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had failed to protest when the People’s Republic of China claimed the Spratlys as Chinese.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/56468/The-South-China-Sea-in-the-Age-of-European-Decline

Spratly fishermen.

Independent witness of Chinese activity in the Spratly islands dates to 1867, when a British survey ship allegedly encountered Chinese fishermen on Itu Aba.26

https://www.dur.ac.uk/ibru/publications/download/?id=232

Between 1930 and 1933, the period when the French invaded the nine features, they also acknowledged that there were only Chinese fishermen living on the islands. The periodical Colonizing the World published in 1933 recorded that when the French warship Malicieuse surveyed the Nansha group, there were three Chinese fishermen living on the island (Wu, 1999:51). In April 1933, when the French invaded the Nansha features, the residents there were Chinese: seven people on Southwest Cay, five on Thitu Island and four on the Nansha Islands, plus huts, wells and temples left behind by the Chinese on Loaita Island (ibid.: 14)

https://books.google.ca/books?id=zc5ZAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA73#v=onepage&q&f=false

A Japanese exploration team visited the Spratly islands in 1918 and met with Chinese fishermen who lived on Southwest Cay.37

https://books.google.ca/books?id=o5P4U4UlucMC&pg=PA9#v=onepage&q&f=false

Not really, fundamentally the players either do unilateral initiatives or seek an agreement together. Specifically for the Philippines, it is a fake attempt at a solution. Not just because it is unilateral, but because the case has nothing to do with sovereignty for the disputed islands. Which means even when you pretend that the interest is about peaceful resolutions, your actual example doesn't do even that. To put it simply, regardless of the ruling, it's not going to have a single thing to do with the actual disputed territories.

/r/worldnews Thread Parent Link - m.scmp.com