Bill Hayton is Associate Fellow in the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House, United Kingdom.
He is also the author of ’The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia’ (Yale, 2014) and the editor of the academic journal ‘Asian Affairs’. He was the BBC’s reporter in Vietnam from 2006-7 and is the author of ‘Vietnam: rising dragon’ (Yale 2010, second edition 2020), ‘A Brief History of Vietnam’ (Tuttle, 2022) and ’The Invention of China’ (Yale, 2020). In 2019, he received his PhD from the University of Cambridge for work on the history and development of the South China Sea disputes.
China’s new map depicting its claims to the South China Sea has provoked some fierce reactions from its neighbours. The fact is that the “new” map is anything but.
This Long Read argues that Southeast Asian states have an interest in recognising each other’s de facto occupation of specific features and then presenting a united position to China. The historical evidence of physical acts of administration suggests that, with some important exceptions, the current occupiers of each feature have the best claim to sovereignty over it.
