Manila won its case in The Hague in 2016. China refused to accept the ruling. A decade later, Philippine resupply boats, Chinese coast guard ships, and a rusting warship on a reef decide what international law means in practice.
Published 14 October 2026 · 06:00 GMT
There is a ship in the South China Sea that has not moved in more than two decades, and the whole region moves around it. The BRP Sierra Madre, a Philippine Navy transport deliberately grounded on Second Thomas Shoal in 1999, is rusting into the reef, and a handful of Philippine marines live aboard it. Every few weeks, a small Philippine boat tries to bring them food, water, and building materials. And nearly every time, Chinese coast guard and maritime militia vessels are waiting. What looks like a local quarrel over a wreck is, in fact, the sharpest test of international law in Asia.
The legal background is unusually clear. The Philippines took its case against China to an arbitral tribunal under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the treaty both countries have signed. In July 2016, the tribunal ruled largely for Manila. It found that China's claim to historic rights across most of the South China Sea, drawn as a nine-dash line on Chinese maps, had no legal basis under the Convention. It found that certain reefs China had built up were rocks or low-tide elevations that generate no exclusive economic zone of their own. And it found that China had violated the Philippines' rights in Philippine waters. China refused to take part in the proceedings and rejected the ruling. It has never accepted it.
What followed is a lesson in the gap between law and power. The Philippines has the ruling. China has the ships, the artificial islands, and the dredgers. Since the ruling, Beijing has continued to build and militarize features in the Spratly Islands, to patrol Scarborough Shoal, which it has controlled since a 2012 standoff, and to press Philippine resupply missions with water cannon, blocking maneuvers, and collisions that Manila calls dangerous and Beijing calls lawful enforcement. Manila, for its part, has publicized the encounters with video and photographs, turning each resupply run into a piece of evidence. The sea has become a courtroom where the hearings are filmed.
The South China Sea is not a remote quarrel. A large share of global shipping passes through it, including energy shipments that keep the economies of East Asia running. The waters hold fisheries that feed millions of people across Southeast Asia, and estimates of the oil and gas beneath the seabed vary so widely that they are better treated as a source of argument than as a fact. The sea also sits at the junction of the world's two most consequential rivalries: the contest between the United States and China, and the contest over who writes the rules for the oceans. Whoever controls the South China Sea controls the waterway that connects the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, and the precedent that decides whether might or law settles maritime disputes.
For the Philippines, the stakes are more immediate than shipping lanes. Filipino fishing communities have fished Scarborough Shoal and the Spratlys for generations, and their access has narrowed as Chinese vessels have grown more assertive. The country's exclusive economic zone, the 200-nautical-mile belt in which international law gives the coastal state rights over resources, is where the confrontations happen. Every blocked resupply mission and every fishing boat turned away is, for Manila, a test of whether a mid-sized country can exercise rights that a tribunal said it has, against a great power that says the tribunal had no business deciding.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who took office in June 2022, changed course from his predecessor's accommodation with Beijing. Manila began publicizing confrontations, filing diplomatic protests, deepening the alliance with Washington, and building partnerships with Japan, Australia, and European states. The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, signed in 2014 and expanded in 2023, gives the United States rotational access to more Philippine sites. Joint patrols and exercises, including the annual Balikatan drills, have grown. The United States has said its 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty with the Philippines covers armed attacks on Philippine forces, vessels, and aircraft in the South China Sea, a statement meant to draw a line without drawing a trigger.
The other track is ASEAN. The Philippines and its Southeast Asian neighbors have negotiated with China for years over a code of conduct for the South China Sea, meant to set rules for encounters at sea and reduce the risk of a clash. Progress has been slow, and critics in Manila argue that the negotiations serve Beijing's interest in delay while facts are created on the water. Supporters argue that a code, even a weak one, is better than no rules at all, and that the alternative to talking is a region where every fishing boat is a potential incident. Both views are honest. Both may be true.
Western coverage reads the South China Sea as a test of the rules-based order. The 2016 ruling is the centerpiece, and every Chinese blocking maneuver is presented as defiance of it. The United States, in this telling, is the guarantor: the treaty ally whose presence keeps the dispute from being settled by tonnage alone. Western navies have sailed freedom-of-navigation operations through the area for years, insisting that the sea lanes belong to all, and Western editorials treat the Sierra Madre resupply missions as a weekly referendum on international law.
The Western lens is also the most comfortable with escalation risk as a policy tool. Deterrence, in this telling, works when Beijing believes Washington would act, and the alliance with Manila is the mechanism that makes that belief credible. What Western coverage underplays is the asymmetry of attention: Washington can focus on the South China Sea when it chooses, but Manila lives there, and it is Filipino fishermen and sailors who bear the daily cost of the standoff.
Chinese coverage reads the same waters as a sovereignty story. Beijing's position is that its claims rest on history, that the tribunal had no jurisdiction, and that the Philippines is being used by the United States to contain China. In this telling, the resupply missions are not humanitarian runs but attempts to reinforce an illegal grounding and to build a permanent outpost on a Chinese reef. The China Coast Guard's actions are presented as restrained law enforcement against provocations.
The Eastern lens also points to the longer map. China's artificial islands, with runways and radar, are framed in Beijing as defensive necessities in waters where the United States sails warships and flies surveillance aircraft. From this vantage, the South China Sea is not a place where China is expanding. It is a place where China is finally defending what it has always claimed, after centuries in which it lacked the means. The ruling of 2016, in this telling, is a piece of paper that cannot change geography or history.
Global South coverage, especially from Southeast Asia itself, reads the dispute as a warning about what happens to small states when great powers collide. The Philippines is not the only claimant: Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan all hold claims in the sea, and every one of them watches Manila's treatment as a preview of its own. In this telling, the real question is whether international law can protect a country that cannot protect itself, and whether ASEAN can turn shared anxiety into shared leverage.
The Southern lens also centers the people the great-power story forgets. Fishing communities from Luzon to Palawan have seen their grounds shrink and their risks grow. A fisherman turned away from Scarborough Shoal does not care about the nine-dash line's legal status. He cares that his catch is smaller and his fuel costs more. In this telling, the South China Sea is not a chessboard. It is a workplace, and the workers are losing.
