On Wednesday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei told journalists that China has "indisputable sovereignty over the South China Sea islands and adjacent waters, which has abundant historical and legal grounds".
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One of those involves an increasingly shrill argument with the Philippines about who has sovereignty over the Scarborough Shoal, a group of rocks in the South China Sea called the Huangyan Islands by China.
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Relations with Vietnam have also worsened in recent years as China has asserted a historic claim to much of the South China Sea, including islands for which the two countries have previously fought for control.
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Vietnam, the Philippines and Taiwan are also in dispute with China over the sovereignty of islands in the South China Sea.
Remember that there are six nations involved in the various -- and contesting over the various features and islands throughout the South China Sea.
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After the Soviets drew down their forces at Vietnam's Cam Ranh Bay naval base in 1984 and the U.S. left the Clark and Subic Bay bases in the Philippines in 1991, the PLA occupied nearby islands in the South China Sea.
Before the ink on the law had dried, China upgraded the administrative status of Sansha City, encompassing a group of disputed islands in the South China Sea, and established a military garrison.
Vietnam, the Philippines, and Taiwan have all objected because it shows disputed islands in the South China Sea and Taiwan to be a part of China.
For years, China has been making illegal claims to and occupying various contested islands in the South China Sea.
The competing stakes in the South China Sea are nothing new: territorial claims to the islands stretch back decades, even centuries, according to some of the nations vying in the sea grab.
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Over in the Philippines, the government is asking bookshops to stop sales of Chinese-made globes showing claims to disputed islands in the South China Sea, South China Morning Post reports.
North-east of the South China Sea lies a small crop of islands that Japan and China are squabbling over.
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Both countries are locked in a dispute over ownership of resource-rich islands in the South China Sea.
There, islands in the South China Sea, beneath which oil and gas are thought to lie, are subject to several disputes involving China and South-East Asian neighbours.
Bacuit Bay, home to an archipelago of 45 islands bordering the South China Sea, occupies a place in the Filipino psychogeography like Alaska's in the American imagination: an unspoiled national Eden that few citizens ever get around to visiting.
About half of all US troops based in Japan are stationed in Okinawa, which lies south of Japan's main islands in the East China Sea.
"Vietnam has planned to bluff the international community by playing the role of victim, and it is actually trying to justify its illegal claim over the islands, " Wu Shicun, director of the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, tells China Daily.
Beijing is destabilizing its neighbors, supporting retrograde elements in Burma, implicitly threatening democratic India with its nuclear missile force, massing hundreds of missiles on the coast against Taiwan, and claiming and militarily occupying islands and reefs claimed by Vietnam and the Philippines in a bid to control the South China Sea.
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