- - Thursday, November 19, 2015
In a rare move to avoid further isolation in a region where it has territorial disputes with nearly all of its maritime neighbors, China made a major concession last week by publicly clarifying and acknowledging Indonesia’s sovereign right to the Natuna Islands in the South China Sea.
The region has been witnessing a dramatic rise of tensions since January, when China began a massive sand-pumping project to greatly expand the tiny isles of Mischief Reef and Subi Island in the Spratly Islands chain in the South China Sea.
The Natuna Islands chain, which sits between the northwestern tip of Indonesia on the island of Borneo and the southern tip of Vietnam, consists of about 270 islands that form part of Indonesia’s Riau Islands Province with some 70,000 residents