Tension is rising in the South China Sea. What are the major issues? Is freedom of navigation at risk?

Essay from the year 2022 in the subject Politics - Other International Politics Topics, grade: A, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies,Nanyang Technological University (SAF-NTU Academy), course: Maritime Security Studies, language: English, abstract: The growing tensions in the South China Sea (SCS) as a geopolitical 'focal point for confrontation' are supported by recently published press/research articles and a qualitative literature review of 343 SCS-related sources since 2009. In sum, they allow us to identify the main issues in the employment of national power instruments that are at interplay in the SCS power arena among six regional claimant states; namely the 'People's Republic of China' (PRC), 'Taiwan', 'Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam' also including non-claimant Indonesia and the U.S. as an external party. Therefore, the paper will apply the DIME-L framework as a conflict-analysis tool to cover a 'Tour d'Horizon' of key causes/drivers of the conflict as well as the attempts to deal with them. The stipulated essay question addresses the ongoing discourse on the 'Arms Race (AR)' concept in the maritime domain of the vast Indo-Pacific theatre. For the scope of this paper, I will focus on the superpowers U.S. and China due to 'numerous headlines' which recently proclaim heightened tensions between them. In particular, at 'security flashpoints' like the South/East China Sea (SCS/ECS), the 'Korean Peninsula and Taiwan' and with regard to the intensified development of 'Hypersonic Missile Technology (HMT)'. This calls for an update of Till's decade ago assessment who qualified the U.S.-Chinese instance as 'naval modernisation in the region' which 'has not yet become a fully-fledged naval arms race' but 'clearly has the potential to do so'. To derive the answer for the case study, the paper will suggest an 'Arms Dynamics (AD)' framework to better differentiate the concepts of AR versus 'Arms Competition (AC)' in chapter two and will subsequently discuss and assess the constituting criteria in chapter three.