After the 1969 Emery Report, the Republic of China (ROC) government, a signatory to the 1958 UN Convention on the Law of Sea, promptly ratified the 1958 Continental Shelf Convention in August 1970. Consequently, the Chinese Petroleum Corporation (Taiwan) was able to secure contracts with U.S. oil corporations for joint exploration north of Taiwan to strengthen ROC’s claims to sovereignty over the Diaoyutai Islands.

The South China Sea Arbitration was called by the Western media the “trial of the century”, but it was criticized by mainland China for being a “political arbitration”, “political farce”, and a piece of “scrap paper” pretending to be a justified lawsuit. On July 12, 2016, the Registrar of the Court of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in Peace Palace in The Hague, the Netherlands, published its definitive and final award that concluded the controversy surrounding the arbitration.

After World War II, civil war with the Chinese Communists (1945–1949), retreat of the Republic of China (ROC) central government to the island of Taiwan, President Chiang Kaishek’s dream of recovering the Chinese Mainland and maintaining its seat in the United Nations and sufficient number of diplomatic recognitions had always topped priorities in its national security. The ROC territorial disputes with Japan and other Southeast Asian claimants in the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea or Nansha/Spratly Islands in the South China Sea were hardly perceived as a national survival in face of continuous People’s Republic of China (PRC) military threat against Taiwan. Through practices and historical documents, one could find that the ROC, not the PRC, is the one that tackled the disputed islands both with Japan and other ASEAN claimants at the first instance while suffering diplomatic entanglement from the PRC in the 1970s.

On April 10, 2012, the government of the Philippines deployed a navy vessel (BRP Gregorio del Pilar) – recently acquired from the US Navy – to waters surrounding Huangyan Island in the east of the South China Sea: an area included in the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines.