The missile-defense deployment will worsen the bifurcation in East Asia, where regional arrangements for economic growth are shaped with China at its core while regional security architecture is set up with the US-centered military alliances as its foundation. Should this contradictory situation evolve, neither regional economic growth nor security could be sustained.

As China’s commercial and security interests expand, the Chinese Navy, like its US counterpart, may also wish to conduct more passages through international sea lanes, even if they are in the territorial sea of other countries. Anti-piracy cooperation off the coast of Somalia is an example that could prove to show a path to compromise without harming either country’s security goals.

China’s diplomatic ideal is to establish an international relationship where countries treat each other on equal footing and work together for common security, mutual benefit and joint development. China does not challenge anybody else but does not fear any challenge either, and will not allow its core interests to be jeopardized. Pursuing peace, cooperation and joint development is the only right way to follow.

But having made plenty of diplomatic, political and military efforts to hype up the arbitration during the past three years, the US will not sit idle while China tries to safeguard its lawful rights. Such are their differences on the South China Sea issue that many fear they could lead to a military conflict.

The US “freedom of navigation” operations are nothing but an exercise of double standards and selective enforcement, as evidenced by the uneven treatment of Japan and China. The operations’ real purpose is to ensure American interests. The professed aim of upholding international law or UNCLOS is just a façade.

Cyberspace is a world of inter-connectivity and convergence of interests. In terms of ensuring the security, equality, freedom and development of cyberspace, China shares the same goals with all other countries and aims to prevent abuses that interfere with those goals.

Beijing and Washington have the shared goal of fighting terrorism and extremism in the region despite modest differences on the ways to address the problem. China’s efforts to engage the region economically, not militarily, relieves pressures that lead to extremization, and should therefore be appreciated by the U.S.

Amid rising tensions in the South China Sea and an impending ruling at The Hague, China will attend the U.S.-hosted RIMPAC 2016 naval exercise, signaling that the vital signs of the U.S.-China relationship remain intact and will be crucial to confronting the global challenges ahead of us.

A former top Chinese diplomat argues against framing the South China Sea issue as a strategic issue and interpreting China’s behavior based on the “western theories” of international relations and history, adding assertions that China wants to make the South China Sea an Asian Caribbean Sea and impose the Monroe Doctrine to exclude the US from Asia are baseless.

Relying on certain clauses of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) of 1982, to which both the Philippines and China are parties, the Phi