South China sea

[Ninurta]

I can certainly understand the ancestral claim to territory - my ancestors roamed all of North America from eastern Canada north of the Great Lakes to the Savannah River in Georgia, and from the Atlantic ocean on the east to just beyond the Mississippi River on the west, so by ancestral rights I can claim all of that land. I would, too, except I don't feel like paying all the taxes on it, and I doubt rents would cover them. Additionally, I don't much trust the Canadians to respect my territorial integrity - they can get pretty mean when riled, and wrongly feel they have a claim to some of that territory. I mean, their ancestors came from France or Britain, right? That would be about the time mine were setting up food pavillions on the beach to greet the newcomers with.

What about the ancestors of the Phllippinos, the Vietnamese, the Malays, etc, etc? Do their ancestors somehow not count in this equation? I'm just trying to get a handle on this, to figure out why China's claim negates the territorial rights of the other countries, ignore international law on territorial limits at sea, and claims water that laps all the way to the beaches of all the other countries in the area.