Fishing freedoms on the hook in Indonesia-China legal stoush (Sourabh Gupta, Institute for China–America Studies, East Asia Forum)

Western and Asian governments and commentators have pilloried the Chinese government for its inscrutability on the so-called ‘nine-dash line’ in the South China Sea. Because the nine-dash line allegedly lacks a basis in international law as reflected in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), they have hectored China to clarify the line’s meaning and to derive all maritime claims from the textual provisions of the Convention.

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Sourabh Gupta is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for China-America Studies in Washington, D.C.