History
The countries with the most extensive activity in the South China Sea Islands are China and Vietnam.
In the 19th century, as a part of the occupation of Indochina, France claimed control of the Spratlys until the 1930s, exchanging a few with the British. During World War II, the Islands were annexed by Japan.
The People's Republic of China founded in 1949 claimed the islands as part of the province of Canton (Guangdong), and later of the Hainan special administrative region.
Read more about this topic: South China Sea Islands
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“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passé abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)