China's Push Through the South China Sea: The Interaction of Bureaucratic and National Interests

Over the past decade a highly significant development has attracted little scholarly attention: the steady expansion of Chinese power in the South China Sea. There were several excellent studies of this process through the very early 1980s, but these ended well before China's push from the Paracel Islands to the Spratly Islands in 1988. Indeed, they disagreed about whether China would actually do this. By the early 1990s China had pushed into the Spratlys and built up a relatively strong base there. It is thus time to look anew at China's activities in that region.