INVESTIGATION: Ten Years After The Hague, Beijing Still Defies International Law

Introduction: An anniversary China would rather see forgotten

July 10, 2026, ten years to the day since a landmark ruling

July 10, 2026 marks the tenth anniversary of a major international arbitration decision: the one that rejected, in 2016, the bulk of Chinese territorial claims over the South China Sea. According to an assessment published on the very day of this anniversary, Beijing continues to defy that legal ruling, pursuing its construction, militarization and territorial claims in zones the tribunal had clearly assigned to other neighboring countries, notably the Philippines, according to reporting by India Today.

This Chinese persistence in openly defying an international legal decision, a decade after it was handed down, is an almost unique case study in contemporary international relations: rarely has a major power displayed, so openly, for so long and with so few immediate practical consequences, such contempt for an arbitration ruling it had nonetheless agreed to consider, at least formally, by ratifying the international convention that governed the procedure.

What that 2016 decision actually said, and why it still matters

The 2016 arbitration ruling, issued by a tribunal constituted under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, concluded that China held no legitimate historical right over most of the waters it claimed within its famous "nine-dash line," a Chinese cartographic delineation with no basis recognized under modern international maritime law. The tribunal also ruled several Chinese construction activities on contested reefs and rock formations illegal.

Ten years later, this decision remains the central legal reference invoked by the Philippines and other neighboring countries in their persistent territorial disputes with China, including in recent incidents like the Philippine rejection of a Chinese claim on an island province near Taiwan. Its relevance, far from eroding with time, seems instead to grow stronger as regional tensions intensify on several simultaneous territorial fronts.

Ten years of open defiance of an international court ruling should normally cost a major power dearly in reputation. That this has not really been the case for China says a lot about the structural limits of international law against the realpolitik of power balances.

The genesis of the case: how the Philippines brought this fight to international justice

Manila, alone against a giant, chose the legal path over direct confrontation

The Philippines' choice to bring this territorial dispute before an international arbitration tribunal, rather than seek direct military confrontation or an unbalanced bilateral negotiation against a far more powerful neighbor, reflected a bold diplomatic strategy for its time. Manila had bet, over the long run, that international legal legitimacy could offer more lasting protection than any bilateral agreement negotiated under the constraint of regional military power.

This strategic choice, initiated under an earlier Philippine administration, survived several internal political changes despite periods when certain Philippine leaders temporarily adopted a more conciliatory posture toward Beijing, seeking bilateral economic compromises that at times seemed to threaten the constant invocation of the 2016 decision as a cornerstone of Philippine foreign policy in the region.

China's immediate reaction: categorical rejection and refusal to participate

As soon as this arbitration procedure was announced, China refused to formally participate in the judicial process, contesting the tribunal's jurisdiction to hear the case and arguing the matter fell exclusively under direct bilateral negotiations rather than multilateral international arbitration. This refusal to participate, maintained until the final decision was issued in 2016, later allowed Beijing to contest the very legitimacy of the ruling, arguing it had been issued without its active participation in the proceedings.

This strategy of non-participation, followed by categorical rejection of the decision once it was made public, set a worrying precedent for the entire international arbitration system: a major power can choose to boycott an international judicial procedure, then simply ignore its outcome without facing consequences sufficiently deterrent to change its territorial behavior on the ground.

The Philippine gamble of bringing this case before international justice deserved to be praised as an act of diplomatic courage. That it did not produce all the hoped-for effects ten years later takes nothing away from the legitimacy of that move — it rather highlights the limits of the international system itself.

A decade of methodical defiance: what Beijing built despite the ruling

The continued militarization of contested reefs and formations

Over the decade following the 2016 decision, China pursued and even intensified, according to numerous satellite observation reports and specialized analysts, the construction of military infrastructure on several reefs and rock formations in the South China Sea, gradually turning minor and contested geographic features into de facto naval and air bases hard to dislodge without a major military confrontation nobody in the region actually wants to trigger.

This continued militarization, documented year after year through publicly available satellite imagery, illustrates a fait accompli strategy that makes any attempt to restore the territorial situation as defined by the 2016 arbitration ruling more complex and costly every year. In this file, time systematically favors whoever builds on the ground rather than whoever invokes an international legal ruling.

Repeated maritime incidents, symptoms of a tension that never truly settles

Beyond infrastructure construction, the decade since 2016 has also been marked by numerous maritime incidents involving Chinese and Philippine vessels in contested zones, including collisions, water-cannon confrontations and intimidation maneuvers regularly documented by Philippine authorities and relayed by the international press. These incidents, while never so far degenerating into open military confrontation, maintain a constant tension that gradually wears down the diplomatic patience of all parties involved.

This accumulation of incidents over ten years illustrates the lasting and unresolved nature of this territorial dispute, contradicting any notion that the 2016 decision brought a definitive clarification capable of ending practical tensions on the ground, despite its widely recognized theoretical legal clarity.

A clear international ruling on paper is not worth much against bulldozers and warships on the ground. This decade of methodical Chinese construction despite the Hague ruling should worry people well beyond the Indo-Pacific region alone.

Regional solidarity: other neighboring countries watch and draw on the Philippine precedent

Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia, facing similar claims

Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia each maintain their own territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea, disputes that, while distinct in their specific geographic details, often implicitly or explicitly draw on the legal legitimacy established by the 2016 decision in favor of the Philippines. That ruling, though specific to the Philippine case, created a legal precedent other neighboring countries facing similar Chinese claims over their own maritime zones can potentially draw on.

This wider regional dimension of the 2016 precedent explains why Beijing continues investing so much rhetorical and diplomatic effort to contest the decision's legitimacy, knowing that fully accepting its implications could open the door to similar challenges from other neighboring countries currently engaged in comparable territorial disputes with China.

ASEAN, a regional forum that struggles to speak with one voice against Beijing

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which brings together all the neighboring countries involved in these territorial disputes, has historically struggled to adopt a sufficiently firm collective position toward China on this file, due to internal divergences among its members regarding the scale of their respective economic dependence on Beijing and their political will to directly confront their powerful neighbor on sensitive territorial issues.

This difficulty in building a united regional front, despite a favorable legal precedent established ten years ago, illustrates the structural limits of multilateral solidarity against a power that can negotiate bilaterally with each neighboring country according to its own specific economic and diplomatic levers, rather than having to deal with a united and coherent regional bloc on this territorial question.

Regional disunity toward Beijing is not a geographic inevitability, it is a cumulative political choice by several governments that prioritize their immediate bilateral economic interests over a long-term territorial solidarity that would protect them collectively far better.

The role of outside powers: Washington, Tokyo and the question of deterrence

The United States, guarantor of a maritime order it never fully ratified itself

There is an irony often noted by observers of this file: the United States, which presents itself as the leading defender of the 2016 arbitration ruling and the maritime international order it embodies, has itself never ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea that served as the legal foundation for that very decision. This contradiction, regularly highlighted by Chinese diplomats to discredit the American position, does not however stop Washington from maintaining steady military and diplomatic support for the Philippines and other neighboring countries in their territorial disputes with Beijing.

The Donald Trump administration has broadly maintained this line of support for regional allies facing Chinese claims, fitting into a wider strategic continuity of firmness toward Beijing on trade, technology and security issues that has characterized American foreign policy toward China for several years, regardless of changes in the White House.

Japan, an increasingly engaged partner in defending the regional maritime order

Japan, facing its own territorial disputes with China over certain islands in the East China Sea, has progressively strengthened its diplomatic and military commitment to upholding international maritime law across the Indo-Pacific region, considering that any precedent of an unpunished challenge to an international legal ruling could encourage similar claims against its own territory in a more or less near future.

This growing regional solidarity between Tokyo, Washington and Manila, while not translating into a single formal military alliance covering all these distinct territorial files, progressively builds an informal architecture of deterrence that defense analysts increasingly consider significant in Beijing's strategic calculations about how much pressure it can exert without risking a more formal and binding regional coordination against it.

American hypocrisy in defending a maritime law it never ratified itself does not make its support for the Philippines any less valuable on the ground. Sometimes perfect consistency must yield to the practical urgency of containing a revisionist power.

What this decade reveals about the structural limits of international law

A ruling without an enforcement mechanism remains, ultimately, a moral statement

This decade of Chinese defiance toward the 2016 decision illustrates a fundamental structural weakness of the contemporary international arbitration system: unlike a domestic legal ruling, which can be enforced by a state's police power, an international arbitration decision has no binding enforcement mechanism capable of forcing a recalcitrant major power to comply if it deliberately chooses to ignore it, as China has consistently done for ten years.

This reality, documented by many international law specialists, does not mean these decisions are devoid of any practical value. They provide a normative reference framework, lasting diplomatic legitimacy and a powerful rhetorical tool for the countries that invoke them, but they cannot, by themselves, guarantee a concrete change in territorial behavior from a power with enough military and diplomatic capacity to absorb the reputational cost of prolonged defiance.

Why this decade of defiance does not render the 2016 decision useless

Despite these evident structural limits, the 2016 decision continues to play an important diplomatic role, giving the Philippines and other neighboring countries a legitimate basis to systematically reject, as was done on July 9, 2026 regarding an island province near Taiwan, any new Chinese territorial claim without having to negotiate each time from a position of legal weakness. This constant legitimacy, even without a binding enforcement mechanism, durably shapes the regional and international diplomatic debate over the comparative legitimacy of Chinese claims and those of its neighbors.

It is precisely this lasting normative value that explains why Beijing, ten years after the ruling, continues to invest considerable diplomatic resources to contest its legitimacy rather than simply ignoring it silently, implicitly acknowledging that this decision retains a symbolic and diplomatic weight it cannot afford to fully disregard in its relations with neighboring countries and the wider international community.

International law without a sword to enforce it looks a bit like a boxing referee who cannot stop the blows below the belt. But a referee who keeps calling the fouls, even powerless to punish them, retains a value it would be unwise to underestimate over the long run.

The parallel with Ukraine: when international law meets a power that chooses force

Two different files, one shared lesson on the limits of the rules-based international order

This tenth anniversary of China's defiance of the Hague ruling invites an instructive parallel with another file where international law collided with a major power's willingness to ignore it by force: Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, in flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter and multiple international treaties guaranteeing Ukrainian territorial integrity, notably the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.

In both cases — the South China Sea and Ukraine — a major power with considerable military capabilities chose to openly defy international legal commitments or rulings, calculating that the diplomatic and economic cost of that defiance would remain manageable compared to the expected territorial and strategic gains. Vladimir Putin and successive Chinese leaders share, to some extent, this same fundamental strategic calculation about the practical limits of international law against the determination of a revisionist major power.

What nonetheless distinguishes these two files, and why that distinction matters

There is, however, a crucial distinction between these two files worth underscoring precisely: China, unlike Russia in Ukraine, has so far not chosen the path of a direct, massive military invasion to enforce its contested territorial claims, instead favoring a strategy of gradual construction, incremental intimidation and persistent diplomatic defiance rather than an open military confrontation with potentially uncontrollable consequences.

This difference in method, while it in no way erases the gravity of China's challenge to international law, may offer a diplomatic window of opportunity that the Ukrainian file, once the invasion began, had definitively lost. It is precisely this window regional and Western democracies should strive to seize before it closes permanently on a major new territorial conflict in the Indo-Pacific.

Comparing the South China Sea to Ukraine is not a gratuitous exercise in easy analogy. It is an urgent reminder that democracies must act now, while China still chooses patience over brute force, before a new regional Putin decides the time has come to change methods.

The economic weight of the South China Sea, a stake too often underestimated

One of the busiest trade routes on the planet

Beyond the strictly territorial and legal issues, the South China Sea is one of the busiest maritime trade routes in the world, with a considerable share of global international trade passing each year through these contested waters. This economic reality transforms a dispute often perceived as strictly regional into a global economic security issue that directly concerns all trading powers, including Western economies geographically far removed from this region.

Any major military escalation in these contested waters, or any effective blockade imposed by China on certain strategic shipping lanes, would have immediate and considerable economic repercussions on global supply chains, a factor that partly explains why many powers outside the region, including certain European nations, have begun expressing growing diplomatic interest in the stability of this crucial maritime zone.

Undersea energy resources, a quiet but real driver of the Chinese claim

Estimates of potential oil and natural gas reserves beneath the seabed of the South China Sea, though variable depending on studies and methodologies used, constitute an additional economic factor that partly explains Chinese determination to maintain its territorial claims despite the unfavorable 2016 ruling. Access to these potential energy resources, combined with extensive fishing rights in a maritime zone rich in fish stocks, represents a tangible economic stake that goes well beyond the mere symbolic or nationalist dimension of this territorial dispute.

This underlying economic dimension helps explain why Beijing continues to invest considerable diplomatic and military resources to maintain its presence in these contested waters, despite the international reputational cost of this persistent defiance of a legal ruling that, economically, would deprive it of significant exploitation rights if fully respected.

It would be naive to reduce this territorial dispute to a simple matter of Chinese nationalist pride. Behind every maritime claim lie very concrete economic interests, and it is precisely this economic dimension that makes resolving this file so hard to achieve through diplomacy or law alone.

Conclusion: An anniversary that questions the future as much as the past

What this decade of Chinese defiance should teach us for the next ten years

This tenth anniversary of the 2016 arbitration decision should not be celebrated as a mere symbolic commemoration, but analyzed as a serious warning about the structural limits of the current international system against revisionist powers determined to defy established rules when their territorial or strategic interests seem to demand it. Chinese persistence in this defiance, documented in an assessment published precisely on the day of this anniversary, confirms that no significant improvement in the situation has occurred over this past decade.

This reality should push regional and Western democracies to seriously rethink available deterrence mechanisms beyond the legal international framework alone, including continued strengthening of regional security partnerships, a more constant and visible diplomatic presence, and increased material support for neighboring countries directly facing persistent Chinese territorial claims in the region.

Philippine determination, a model of resilience deserving far more support

Despite ten years of Chinese defiance toward a ruling that was nonetheless in their favor, the Philippines continue to show remarkable diplomatic resilience, systematically refusing every new Chinese attempt at territorial erosion, as illustrated by the recent rejection of a Chinese academic claim on an island province near Taiwan. This consistency deserves to be recognized and supported far more firmly by all democracies that share, at least rhetorically, an attachment to a rules-based international order rather than to the sheer brute force of power dynamics.

Ten years after The Hague, the Philippines' fight to enforce a legitimate international legal ruling remains, unfortunately, as relevant and as necessary as it was on the first day of that historic judgment.

I end this investigation with a simple but stubborn conviction: international law will not die in a single blow under the repeated challenges of powers like China or Russia, but it erodes silently every year the world watches these challenges without answering with the firmness these ten years should have taught us.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

Editorial positioning

This piece assumes a clear editorial line of defense of the rules-based international order and support for democracies confronting revisionist powers that openly defy international legal rulings, whether China in the South China Sea or Russia in Ukraine. The columnist here engages his own analytical judgment, with no claim to false neutrality on fundamental issues of sovereignty and international law.

Methodology and sources

The core fact of this investigation — the assessment published on July 10, 2026 on China's persistent defiance of the 2016 arbitration decision — comes from reporting by India Today. The historical and legal context on the decision itself, continued Chinese militarization, Indo-Pacific regional dynamics and the parallel with the Ukrainian file rest on widely documented and verifiable facts from multiple sources. No specific detail not provided by the sources was invented.

Nature of the analysis and limits of the record

This piece is an analytical investigation based on existing documentary and journalistic sources, not original field reporting. The columnist had no direct contact with Philippine or Chinese authorities, nor with members of the 2016 arbitration tribunal. The factual limits of this record concern the absence of precise, up-to-date data on the exact scale of current Chinese militarization, whose full assessment depends on satellite sources and specialized analyses not exhaustively detailed in the sources available for this article.

Sources

Primary sources

Tenth anniversary assessment of the South China Sea arbitration ruling — India Today, July 10, 2026

Reporting on the Philippine rejection of a Chinese claim near Taiwan — Reuters, July 9, 2026

Ukrainska Pravda — comparative coverage of revisionist powers' challenges to international law

Secondary sources

Foreign Policy — analyses on the 2016 arbitration decision and its regional implications

Al Jazeera — comparative analyses of territorial challenges involving authoritarian powers

The Guardian International — coverage of tensions in the South China Sea

WION News — analyses on territorial dynamics in Southeast Asia