East/South China Sea Dispute: Final Post

During the length of this semester, my blog covered the conflict in the East and South China Sea involving China, Japan, and Vietnam. China claimed that the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea were theirs and Japan claimed the same. This dispute caused high tensions between both countries and had the U.S. involved as a peacekeeper trying to settle the dispute without violence. Ethnic tensions and memories of past crimes surfaced in the minds of China and Japan, making both countries prideful and steadfast on their refusal to resolve the issue. It grew out of proportion with both countries sending armed forces to patrol the islands. With the help of the U.S. and other events and issues surfacing, the islands have now become a minor issue that has not been resolved, but neither has it grown into a violent conflict. Down in the South China Sea, a similar dispute has been going on for 45 years. Before 1968, the control over the South China Sea wasn’t very important and fishing vessels roamed freely. But in 1968 the United Nations stated that there could be resources found in these waters, and the control over the South China Sea grew very important. Since then the Spratly and Paracel islands have been disputed with clashes between fishermen and Chinese military ships that patrol the waters. Vietnam had held some of the islands from the Paracel Archipelago and China the rest. This led to a confrontation in 1974 between the South Vietnamese Navy and Chinese Forces. The Vietnamese were defeated and the Chinese took control of the Paracel Archipelago. Since then there have been confrontations and no resolution to this conflict. China’s control over these large areas of waters is being observed by other countries waiting to see what the next move will be and worrying that these small territorial disputes will boil over into something far worse.

My team and I were lucky to have Guen who is Vietnamese and Yukun who is from China in our team due to the different points of view in these disputes. They were able to get news reports from both countries that would help us show both sides of the issue. Japan was easy to research as well being an ally of the United States; there were a lot of news articles on their side of the issue. We found that our way of researching and working was very successful. We researched individually and wrote 1 or 2 paragraphs with the information we found and placed the link of the news article we each used in a Google document so everyone could see which article was already taken and not have multiple paragraphs of the same source. We then got together and revised everything and decided the order based on what each paragraph talked about and we wrote the introduction and conclusion together. We would then research together anything we might have missed and explained what we found while making the last touches to the finished blog post. Our sources were local Vietnamese and Chinese newspapers that Guen and Yukun found, BBC world news, The Diplomat, The Wall Street Journal, and others.

I was fairly ignorant when it came to political affairs in eastern Asia. My knowledge of their disputes and alliances was close to zero. Throughout the semester I learned of the past conflicts between China and Japan and their ethnic differences. I learned of the tensions between Vietnam and China and how much China has been expanding its borders by sea. I was also fairly ignorant of the array of global media. I had assumed that BBC and CNN were the only reliable news sources with New York Times as a small competitor. I was sadly mistaken and learned to find the media bias in all the articles I researched from them and all the other news sources available. I learned to read in between the lines and understand the most important things in the news articles I read. Working in a team with a flexible schedule and distribution of work was also something new to me, which I found to be very helpful with my personal schedule. All in all, I feel I left the blog much more knowledgeable than when I started it.