It has been two years now since an arbitral tribunal ruled that the "nine-dash line" asserted by China in the South China Sea is in violation of United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) on July 12, 2016. During this time, China has made numerous attempts — military, political and legal — to negate the effects of the arbitral award.
Immediately after the ruling, on Sept. 12, 2016, China and Russia held "Joint Sea 2016," a joint military exercise, off the coast of Guangdong Province in the South China Sea. Then, in May 2018, China held its biggest ever military exercise, involving a naval carrier, off the coast of Hainan Island. Rejecting the arbitral award, China is bolstering its military presence in the South China Sea. Despite Beijing's claim that the construction of artificial islands is for peaceful purposes, Mischief Reef and Fiery Cross were equipped with jammer systems, with exclusively military application, in April.
China moved quickly to repudiate the tribunal's ruling. Ahead of the ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Meeting, the Chinese foreign minister traveled to Laos on July 24, 2016, to meet with the foreign ministers of Singapore, Brunei, Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia individually in an effort to divide ASEAN. Cambodia was promised more than $500 million in grant aid over the next three years, which was enough to convince Prime Minister Hun Sen to assert that Cambodia "does not support the arbitral award."