The South China Sea is where China’s rising ambitions are colliding with the United States’ global role. This strategic competition is interacting in dangerous and unpredictable ways with tensions about the fate of the atolls and island that dot the sea: the Spratly Islands, the Paracels and Scarborough Shoal. Bill Hayton will explain the - sometimes bizarre - origins of the various claims and suggest how they might be resolved.

Bill Hayton was appointed an associate fellow of Chatham House in 2015. He is the author of ‘The South China Sea: the struggle for power in Asia’ that was published by Yale Univer- sity Press and named as one of The Economist's books of the year in 2014. His previous book, ‘Vietnam: rising dragon’, was published in 2010, also by Yale.

Bill Hayton has worked for the BBC since 1998 and currently works for BBC World News television in London. In 2006-07 he was the BBC's reporter in Vietnam and spent a year in 2013 embedded with Myanmar's state broadcaster working on media reform. He has giv- en presentations about South China Sea and Southeast Asian issues for think-tanks and gov- ernment institutions in the UK, US, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. His written work has been published in The Economist, the South China Morning Post, The Dip- lomat and the National Interest,among others.He graduated from the Universityof Cambridge in 1990.