Greg Poling

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344 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Greg Poling’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Pekingology · Avoiding War in the South China Sea · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

And that's just simply unacceptable.

for China's neighbors.

So whether that means fishing rights, law enforcement rights, oil and gas rights, or just the bare notion that we live in a r world of rules and norms and institutions, that is all particularly salient for the Southeast Asians.

For everybody else, the third parties like the US,

It boils down to freedom of the seas, and that's broader than the concept of freedom of navigation, the right of U.S.

Navy or commercial ships to go from point A to point B.

But it basically means that it outside states cannot accept the idea that China gets to claim five times as much sea and airspace as every other country on Earth, because that would undermine the entire regime of international law.

You can't carve out such a G

Giant exceptional claim.

for a single power just because it's gotten a navy in the last couple of years and thinks or the last couple of decades and thinks it can throw its weight around and expect that not to bring down the whole deck of cards.

So I think there's been two

Ongoing evolutions.

The first is in the nature of China's claims and the second is in the risk tolerance that Beijing has shown in advancing them.

So on the first

I want to be crystal clear, these claims are not ancient.

The maritime claims in particular are younger than I am.

There's no no Chinese official ever used the word historic rights or defined the 9-line as a maritime boundary before the late 80s, certainly the early 90s.

This whole concept of historic rights was only baked into domestic Chinese law in 1998.

So for decades the reason that most of the outside world didn't care that much about the South China Sea is because China's claims were limited to the rocks.

And nobody really had that big a stake in who had sovereignty over the rocks, as long as that was pursued peacefully.

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