China has published baselines for a contested shoal in the South China Sea it had seized from the Philippines, a move that’s likely to increase tensions over overlapping territorial claims. The Foreign Ministry on Sunday posted online geographic coordinates for the baselines around Scarborough Shoal. A nation’s territorial waters and exclusive economic zone are typically defined as the distance from the baselines. A 2016 ruling by an international arbitration court found that most Chinese claims in the South China Sea were invalid but Beijing refuses to abide by it.
