The back and forth over Sandy Cay is the latest flare-up in a long-running dispute over territory in the hotly contested South China Sea, which China claims almost in its entirety.

Officials said a Filipino scientific team were in Sandy Cay to collect sand samples from the sandbars. A larger Chinese coast guard ship “water cannoned and sideswiped" one of the vessels twice ...

Sandy Cay (Filipino name: “Pag-asa Cay 2”), a tiny South China Sea (SCS) sandbar found in the western section of our Pag-Asa island’s Territorial Sea (TS), is very much in the news these days.

Why Sandy Cay matters. Sandy Cay is just a sandbar, slightly more than 200 square meters in size, notes the Financial Times. However, it holds strategic importance for China, ...

Although just a sand bank measuring little more than 200 square metres, Sandy Cay has strategic value for China because international law grants it a territorial sea.