"Chinese official has said China has the right to set up an air defence zone over territory it claims in the South China Sea. • The statement from Vice-Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin comes a day after an international tribunal said there was no legal basis for China's claims. • China has overlapping claims with other countries to reefs and islands across almost all of the South China Sea. • It has already said it will ignore the tribunal's findings. • President Xi Jinping has said China's 'territorial sovereignty and marine rights' in the seas will not be affected by the ruling 'in any way'."

Here is the problem, simply put: there are not enough analysts to make sense of every ship or activity at sea; nor enough government assets to persistently monitor them all. This reality is changing however, thanks to the rise of commercial space players who have already affected the national security landscape in significant ways.

The Asia-Pacific region is mostly water, which is why Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) gets a lot of attention in matters of peace, prosperity, and security. The importance of MDA surfaces in practice when, say, China maneuvers in the South China Sea and the U.S. and its allies assert principles of freedom of navigation, prevention of conflict and coercion, and the rule of international law.

One definition of MDA is the “effective understanding” of anything associated with the sea, ocean, or other navigable waterways, includ

"CANBERRA, Australia—Singapore will expand two military bases in Australia’s tropical north and rotate thousands of extra troops through the country each year as regional strategic tensions increase over China’s muscle-flexing in the South China Sea. • As part of a trade and defense deal, Singapore will spend US$1.7 billion upgrading Australian military bases at Townsville and Shoalwater Bay, near Yeppoon, while sending 14,000 troops to Australia each year for four-month training rotations, both governments said Friday. • Under the deal, the Southeast Asian city-state will follow the U.S. in beefing up military ties with Canberra and using Australia’s vast training areas to carry out military exercises. The U.S. Marines and U.S. Air Force have been expanding their footprints in the northern Australian port of Darwin as part of Washington’s rebalance of forces to the Asia-Pacific region. The Marines are deploying in regular six-month rotations, alternating with improvement work being carried at the Australian bases."

"'Now if you run the timeline out to the 10-year point, it's China. I'm not saying China's an enemy of the United States of America,' Hayden said. 'I'm just simply saying that if we do not handle the emergence of the People's Republic well, it will be catastrophic for the world.' China is currently pushing ahead on its claims to the South China Sea over the objections of Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and the US. In mid-February, Beijing took a further step of militarizing the region by placing advanced surface-to-air missiles on a disputed island to solidify its claims. Beijing is also constructing man-made islands throughout the region. On these islands China has been building ports, seawalls, and airstrips that would allow the country to dominate the region. By 2030, a report by the Center for Strategic & International Studies notes that the South China Sea will essentially exist as a 'Chinese lake.'"

An epochal contest is underway. With President Xi Jinping pushing a more assertive agenda overseas and tightening controls at home, the Trump administration has launched a trade war and is gearing up for what could be a new Cold War. Meanwhile, in Beijing the question these days is less how to catch up with the West than how to pull ahead — and how to do so in a new era of American hostility.

The pattern is familiar to historians, a rising power challenging an established one, with a familiar complication: For decades, the United States encouraged and aided China’s rise, working with its leaders and its people to build the most important economic partnership in the world, one that has lifted both nations.

During this time, eight American presidents assumed, or hoped, that China would eventually bend to what were considered the established rules of modernization: Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or the Chinese economy would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot.

But neither happened. Instead, China’s Communist leaders have defied expectations again and again. They embraced capitalism even as they continued to call themselves Marxists. They used repression to maintain power but without stifling entrepreneurship or innovation. Surrounded by foes and rivals, they avoided war, with one brief exception, even as they fanned nationalist sentiment at home. And they presided over 40 years of uninterrupted growth, often with unorthodox policies the textbooks said would fail.

In late September, the People’s Republic of China marked a milestone, surpassing the Soviet Union in longevity. Days later, it celebrated a record 69 years of Communist rule. And China may be just hitting its stride — a new superpower with an economy on track to become not just the world’s largest but, quite soon, the largest by a wide margin.

The world thought it could change China, and in many ways it has. But China’s success has been so spectacular that it has just as often changed the world — and the American understanding of how the world works.

There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Even as they put the disasters of Mao’s rule behind them, China’s Communists studied and obsessed over the fate of their old ideological allies in Moscow, determined to learn from their mistakes. They drew two lessons: The party needed to embrace “reform” to survive — but “reform” must never include democratization.

China has veered between these competing impulses ever since, between opening up and clamping down, between experimenting with change and resisting it, always pulling back before going too far in either direction for fear of running aground.

Many people said that the party would fail, that this tension between openness and repression would be too much for a nation as big as China to sustain. But it may be precisely why China soared.

Whether it can continue to do so with the United States trying to stop it is another question entirely.

In China, the Global Times, a state-run newspaper, cast China’s demand that the content be removed as a battle over values. It said the only reason that Western values — of free discourse and academic freedom — sat at “the core of human society” was due to “the West’s strength.” When China becomes stronger, it vowed, China will call the shots.

China’s move to demand self-censorship is not an isolated case. It’s just one of many the Communist government has taken in recent years to mold history and historians to serve the needs of the Chinese Communist Party. Party boss Xi Jinping has led a campaign against what he calls “historical nihilism,” the party’s shorthand for attempts to write honestly about the past and mistakes committed by China’s Communist leaders. As part of that campaign, historians and writers have been silenced and jailed, books have been banned and party censors have launched a nationwide campaign to expunge any positive mention of Western political ideas from Chinese college textbooks.

In May 2000, Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Pete Stark, and Carolyn McCarthy wrote a letter to their House counterparts urging them to deny China a far-reaching and highly-coveted trade status called Permanent Normal Trade Relations. In their warning, the three Democrats didn’t mention the potentially damaging economic or political ramifications of such a relationship with China or even invoke the country’s infamous human-rights record. Instead, they focused on one specific issue: semi-automatic weapons.

From 1987 until 1994, some 42 percent of all rifles imported into the United States had come from China. The representatives noted that an embargo had been imposed in 1994 because, in just a few years, China “had exported almost one million Chinese rifles to the United States—more than made by all U.S. manufacturers combined in 1992.” Conferring this new trade designation, they argued, would effectively unravel the embargo and allow assault rifles like the SKS semi-automatic to become cheaply available again. “What made them attractive was their power and inexpensive price, only $55.95,” they wrote of the SKS, noting its popularity among neo-Nazis, gangs, and white supremacists. The letter concluded, “Don't give China the power to decide gun policy in the United States.” The bill was signed into law that October.

"He who lives by the military buildup, dies by the military buildup. Though the recent visit to Beijing by Japan’s Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida suggests a thaw in Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations, there remains a gulf—or more accurately, a sea—between the two Asian powerhouses. • China’s growing naval activism in the East China Sea has inevitably sparked reaction from Japan, as Tokyo is busy raising a defensive wall along its southern flank, coinciding with one of the most vulnerable sections of the so-called first island chain, to control and deter possible aggressive moves by the Chinese navy. • On the heels of new security legislation allowing Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to engage in armed conflicts overseas for the first time since the end of World War II, evidence is mounting that Tokyo is intent on closing in on China through a variety of ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) and antimissile facilities. Key to this strategy is the militarization of the Nansei Island Chain, Japan’s southernmost territories, which includes the prefectures of Okinawa and Kagoshima."

No one wants to have one set of rules for how we deal with China and another for how we manage relations with everyone else. And no one wants to be irrationally fearful of China. However, these are not good reasons not to take a step back and acknowledge that the U.S. system may well be inadequate to the challenge at hand and that managing the uncertainty that China presents may necessitate rewriting the rules for everyone.

AMC Entertainment, the movie-theater chain owned by Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda, has purchased Carmike Cinemas, a rival 3,000-screen chain known as "America's hometown theater circuit," for $1.1 billion.

Last summer, a Chinese-American woman contacted NPR's Frank Langfitt with an unusual request: to help find her troubled sister, who'd vanished in southwest China. A difficult journey followed.

"Law could require tech firms to install 'back doors' in products or hand over sensitive information to the government" • "China is set to pass its controversial new anti-terrorism law on Sunday, the largely rubber-stamp parliament said on Friday, despite U.S. criticism about its cyber provisions and concerns over human rights. • The draft law, which could require technology firms to install 'back doors' in products or hand over sensitive information such as encryption keys to the government, has also been criticized by some Western business groups."