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“The United Nations Permanent Court of Arbitration delivered its final ruling Tuesday in a case between the Philippines and China over disputed maritime claims in the South China Sea. …
As expected, the panel ruled in favor of the Philippines and determined that China has no legal basis to claim rights to the majority of the South China Sea. But there is no mechanism to enforce the ruling. And China quickly rejected the decision, with some in the Chinese establishment hinting at possible retaliation,” the Council on Foreign Relations reported on Wednesday.
The situation is becoming a focal point of world tensions. The author of the report also published a longer version of it in the Huffington Post. It makes for comprehensive reading on the evolvement of a situation that Yonder has been following over the past year.
However, this news allows me to add a little promising note: a new website, SupChina, which launched a few months ago and has so far functioned as an aggregate of news about China, has been reinforced by a podcast called Sinica, which is run by the duo Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn. Both have recently returned from China, where they spent more than two decades working and reporting. With Sinica, SupChina is gaining a bit of its own voice, and is no longer just a collection of mainstream news reports. It is interesting to note that two other reporters participated at the U.S. launch of Sinica — Gady Epstein from the Economist and independent writer and producer Mary Kay Magistad, two experts on China who have also recently returned from the country. So while we are losing some precious voices and reporters in China, let’s hope that publications like SupChina can use their experience and knowledge to create a dialogue in China from afar as ChinaFile is already doing it. Sinica’s launch within SupChina contained a good debate on the decision by the United Nations Court of Arbitration, and should be published as a separate podcast soon, I hope. It is definitely worth a listen.
Also published on Medium.
