Arbitrators at the Permanent Court of Arbitration last week heard the first phase of the world’s most misunderstood maritime battle, brought by the Philippines against China, over the status of a few rocks that form the most controversial dots on the world map. Friday’s New York Times editorial about the dispute, “The South China Sea, in Court,” billed it as a chance to head off a violent clash and bolster China’s international rule-of-law credentials to boot.
Read any deeper, however, and the waters get murky. To borrow a page from Foreign Policy magazine, here are six myths of the “South China Sea.”
