China’s claim to the South China Sea gets even odder

Despite its more co-operative tone, China will not stop its bullying in the South China Sea

Late last month the government in Beijing published a “standard map” of China and all its territorial claims. It did a strikingly efficient job of upsetting the neighbours, from India to Japan, but above all those around the South China Sea.

Vietnam objected to the map’s inclusion of the Paracel Islands, which China seized from it in 1974. The Philippines protested over the Scarborough Shoal, from which China has barred it by force since 2012, even though it lies well within the Philippines’s 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone (eez). And the map’s inclusion of the Spratly Islands—a welter of islets, atolls and reefs spread out across a vast swathe of the South China Sea a very long way from China itself—angered those countries and Malaysia, too.