China's South China Sea Overreach Faces Growing Obstacles

[...]China's huge economie and industrial capacity has enabled the Chinese to fill the South China Sea with more and larger Coast Guard and Navy ships than other claimants can match, not to mention deputizing swarms of Chinese fishing boats to carry out strategie tasks. Beijing asserts an argument expressly rejected by the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea Treaty, of which the PRC is a signatory. [...]the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague ruled in 2016 that China's nine-dash line claim is invalid. China is apparently moving toward permanently slower economie growth, with added challenges due to the Xi regime's prioritization of political correctness and reduced international appetite for doing some kinds of business with the PRC. Since the South China Sea is a strategie liability, far from China and totally dependent on power projection, a slowing Chinese economy makes a bold PRC South China Sea policy less tenable, especially if the United States remains a major strategie player.