About National Institute for South China Sea Studies

National Institute for South China Sea Studies

The National Institute for South China Sea Studies (NISCSS; Chinese: 中国南海研究院) is a Chinese academic research institute and national professional think tank dedicated to research on the South China Sea and to related academic exchange. It is located in the Jiangdong New Area of Meilan District, Haikou, the capital of Hainan Province — the Chinese province closest to the disputed waters the institute studies. Its predecessor was founded in 1996, it took its present national name in 2004, and over nearly three decades it has grown into the best-known Chinese research institution specialising in a single maritime dispute: its history, geography, law, security and diplomacy. Its official English website is en.nanhai.org.cn.

The institute's work matters because the South China Sea is contested by several governments and is central to debates about maritime law, regional security and China–ASEAN relations. The NISCSS is the institution that produces much of China's scholarly case on the issue, trains specialists in ocean governance, and runs many of the Track II — unofficial, expert-level — dialogues through which China discusses the dispute with Southeast Asian and Western counterparts. This profile covers its origins, organisation, leadership, publications and exchange platforms, using the institute's own published profile and independent reporting.

Origins: from a Hainan institute in 1996 to a national institute in 2004

The institute's own profile states that its predecessor was the Hainan Research Institute of South China Sea, established in 1996. In July 2004 it was upgraded and renamed the National Institute for South China Sea Studies — a change that lifted a provincial research body to national status and signalled that South China Sea research was becoming a national priority. The upgrade came two years after China and the ten ASEAN member countries signed the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC), the framework document for managing tensions in the waters, and the institute's later work has repeatedly been organised around implementing and debating that declaration.

Two later milestones expanded its reach. The NISCSS launched its Beijing Office in January 2013, giving the Haikou-based institute a permanent presence in the capital, closer to the foreign ministry, other national think tanks and foreign embassies. In October 2018 it set up a postdoctoral research workstation, formalising its role in training senior researchers, and in July 2019 it was granted the right to independently evaluate professional titles in first-level disciplines such as law and history in the social sciences. Published accounts also record that the NISCSS was listed among the second batch of 25 pilot units of China's National High-end Think Tank Construction programme, and it has worked with Wuhan University's China Institute of Boundary and Ocean Studies on joint construction as a national high-end think tank.

Organisation and research centres

According to its official profile, the NISCSS has five research centres and two management departments. The centres are the Center for Oceans Law and Policy, the Center for South China Sea History and Culture, the Center for the Area Studies, the Center for Maritime Silk Road and Security, and the Center for Public Diplomacy and Hainan Openness. The two management departments are the Administrative Office and the Division of International Exchanges and Academic Cooperation. The structure reflects the institute's mix of scholarship and outreach: three centres cover law, history and regional studies, one links the South China Sea to the Maritime Silk Road and security questions, and one is explicitly devoted to public diplomacy and to Hainan's opening-up, including its free trade port development.

The institute has more than 50 full-time and part-time researchers. Their fields, as listed in the official profile, cover the history and geography of the South China Sea, maritime law, international relations, marine economy, resource development, ocean governance, blue carbon sinks and public diplomacy. The NISCSS states its ambition in three parts: to build a research base for South China Sea issues, a training hub for marine governance talents, and an international exchange platform for South China Sea issues. Its location in Hainan is part of that design — the institute is simultaneously a national body and a Hainan institution, contributing expertise to the province that hosts the Boao Forum for Asia and China's free trade port project.

Leadership: Wu Shicun and the founding generation

The institute's defining figure is Wu Shicun, its founding president and senior research fellow, who holds a PhD in history. Wu's research interests cover the history and geography of the South China Sea, maritime delimitation, maritime economy, international relations and regional security strategy. His official biographies list a series of connected roles built around the institute: chairman of the board of directors of the China-Southeast Asia Research Center on the South China Sea, chairman of the Huayang Center for Maritime Cooperation and Ocean Governance (also rendered Huayang Institute for Research on Maritime Cooperation and Ocean Governance), deputy director of the Collaborative Innovation Center of South China Sea Studies at Nanjing University, and vice president of the Boao Forum for Asia's research institute. He has also been a member of the Foreign Policy Advisory Group of the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Wu brought direct negotiating experience to the institute. Accounts of his career record that from 1993 to 2000 he took part in the China–Vietnam negotiations on the delimitation of the Beibu Gulf (the Gulf of Tonkin) as a member of the Chinese government delegation and its expert group, and that he studied or pursued advanced training at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies and Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Senior Chinese officials have publicly credited that record: when Luo Zhaohui, chairman of the China International Development Cooperation Agency, met Wu in September 2021, he said Wu, as founder of the NISCSS, had made remarkable contributions to safeguarding China's maritime rights and interests and to carrying out Track II and people-to-people diplomacy, and he pointed to the institute's strong research resources and influence in marine resource protection, international law related to the South China Sea and China's peripheral diplomacy.

Research fields and approach

The institute's research is organised around the South China Sea as a single, multi-disciplinary problem. Its historians and geographers reconstruct the historical record of Chinese activity in the waters and the origins of the island disputes. Its lawyers work on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), maritime delimitation and the legal arguments deployed by claimant states — work showcased as early as October 2013, when the institute co-organised with Nanjing University's Collaborative Innovation Center of South China Sea Studies an international conference in Haikou titled “The South China Sea: UNCLOS and State Practice,” at which Wu argued that UNCLOS had played a critical role in promoting exchanges and cooperation at sea and maintaining peace and stability in the South China Sea.

Alongside law and history, the institute studies regional security strategy, the marine economy and resource development, ocean governance including blue carbon sinks, and the public diplomacy through which South China Sea narratives are contested internationally. That breadth is deliberate: because the dispute is argued simultaneously in archives, in legal forums, in naval planning and in media, the NISCSS maintains centres able to speak to each arena, and its researchers appear frequently as media commentators on South China Sea and regional security issues.

Publications and books

Much of the institute's influence flows through the books of its founding president and its associated scholars. Wu Shicun's single-authored works include What One Needs to Know about the South China Sea (Current Affairs Press, 2016), What One Needs to Know about the Disputes between China and the Philippines (Current Affairs Press, 2014) and Solving Disputes for Regional Cooperation and Development in the South China Sea: A Chinese Perspective (Chandos Publishing, 2013). His later single-authored work includes The Origin and Development of the Nansha Disputes: A Study on the History of South China Sea Issue from a Country-Specific Perspective (Zhonghua Book Company, 2022), and, reflecting the institute's Hainan brief, Hainan Free Trade Port: A Global Perspective (Guangdong People's Publishing House, 2021).

His edited volumes map the institute's international publishing partnerships: The 21st Century Maritime Silk Road: Challenges and Opportunities for Asia and Europe (Routledge, 2019), South China Sea Lawfare: Post-Arbitration Policy Options and Future Prospects (South China Sea Think Tank / Taiwan Center for Security Studies, 2017), Arbitration Concerning the South China Sea: Philippines versus China (Ashgate, 2016), UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and the South China Sea (Ashgate, 2015), Non-Traditional Security Issues and the South China Sea — Shaping a New Framework for Cooperation (Ashgate, 2014), Recent Developments in the South China Sea Dispute: The Prospect of a Joint Development Regime (Routledge, 2014) and Securing the Safety of Navigation in East Asia — Legal and Political Dimensions (Chandos Publishing, 2013). The institute also publishes books and journals in Chinese, including work supporting The Journal of South China Sea Studies, giving its scholars both an English-language channel to international academic publishers and a domestic scholarly outlet.

Track II diplomacy and the CSARC

The institute's most distinctive activity is Track II diplomacy — structured expert dialogue that runs parallel to official negotiations. Its official profile says it has established a series of institutionalised academic exchange platforms with counterparts in ASEAN countries, the United States, Japan, South Korea, Canada and China's Taiwan region, launched a number of productive think tank “Track 2.0” exchange projects, and created a cooperation network integrating international conferences, media resources and academic connections.

The flagship of that network is the China-Southeast Asia Research Center on the South China Sea (CSARC). The centre grew out of workshops themed “Partnership for Regional Peace: Operationalizing ASEAN-China Strategic Partnership in Southeast Asia,” held during 2014–2016, which brought together scholars and practitioners from China and the ten ASEAN member countries. The CSARC was inaugurated on 25 March 2016 at Boao, on the sidelines of the Boao Forum for Asia annual conference. Initiated by the NISCSS together with Indonesia's Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), it incorporated seven leading think tanks and research institutes from China and Southeast Asia as founding member organisations — including the Cambodian Institute for Cooperation and Peace, CSIS Indonesia, Malaysia's Institute of Strategic and International Studies and Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies — and was inaugurated by Wu Shicun and CSIS co-founder Jusuf Wanandi. Wu's stated focus for the centre was building political mutual trust and conducting maritime cooperation under the DOC framework, covering scientific research, maritime search and rescue, navigation safety and combating maritime crimes. The CSARC is headquartered in Hainan, and Wu chairs its board of directors.

The China-ASEAN Academy on Ocean Law and Governance

Closely linked to the CSARC is the China-ASEAN Academy on Ocean Law and Governance, an annual training programme held in Haikou and co-organised by the CSARC, the NISCSS and the International Ocean Institute–Canada. Its second programme, launched on 7 November 2016, ran for ten days and covered the law of the sea, maritime delimitation, international shipping, regional security, climate change, environmental protection, living and non-living resource management and development, and comprehensive marine management. Courses were given in English by 17 prominent experts from China and abroad, including Vladimir Golitsyn, then president of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, and former Thai vice foreign minister Sorajak Kasemsuvan. More than 30 scholars and officials from ocean-related agencies, universities and research institutions in China and ASEAN countries took part, with visits to the Hainan Maritime Safety Administration and the Hainan Academy of Ocean and Fisheries Sciences. The academy format — training officials and scholars from claimant and non-claimant states together — is the training-hub side of the institute's stated mission.

Boao, Washington and other exchange platforms

The institute is a regular organiser within the Boao Forum for Asia, held each year in Hainan. South China Sea sub-forums under the forum's framework have been co-organised with CSARC participation for years; the 2026 sub-forum, themed “Construction and Governance Cooperation of the South China Sea Order in a Changing World Landscape,” was co-organised by the NISCSS, the Huayang Center for Maritime Cooperation and Ocean Governance, the China Oceanic Development Foundation and the Boao Forum for Asia Secretariat, and brought together senior representatives of governments, think tanks, research institutions, international organisations and the maritime industry.

The institute's network extends to North America. In 2014, the Institute for China-America Studies (ICAS) was established in Washington, D.C. with the support and sponsorship of the NISCSS-affiliated Hainan Nanhai Research Foundation, and has been described as the first Chinese think tank to go overseas; Wu serves as chairman of its advisory board. NISCSS scholars have also sustained trans-Pacific academic links — Nong Hong, who directed the institute's Research Center for Oceans Law and Policy from 2010, later became executive director of ICAS — and the institute has co-sponsored forums such as the Asia-Pacific/Arctic Maritime Security Forum held in Halifax, Canada, in September 2019 with Dalhousie University's Marine & Environmental Law Institute among the partners. In December 2017 the institute hosted in Haikou an international symposium on the Belt and Road Initiative and common development of the greater South China Sea region, together with the first annual conference of the CSARC, co-organised with Wuhan University's China Institute of Boundary and Ocean Studies.

Recent work: History and Facts of the South China Sea

The institute's most prominent recent publication is History and Facts of the South China Sea, released in Beijing on 8 January 2026. Xinhua reported that the book examines the historical basis of China's territorial sovereignty and maritime rights in the South China Sea and is the outcome of a seven-year research project involving more than 10 scholars across China. It approaches the issue from multiple disciplines, including history, international law, international relations, cartography and geography. The launch was jointly hosted by the Huayang Center for Maritime Cooperation and Ocean Governance, based in Sanya, Hainan, the National Institute for South China Sea Studies and the Zhejiang Publishing United Group. Wu Shicun, the book's lead editor, said at the launch that some existing overseas publications on the South China Sea are rife with errors and misconceptions, and revealed that an English edition is planned. The project illustrates the institute's working method at scale: long-term, team-based historical and legal research, published as a reference volume and promoted as a corrective to foreign accounts.

Public voice and significance

Within China, the NISCSS functions as the specialist national voice on the South China Sea. Its president gives interviews setting out the institute's reading of current tensions — including the view that progress depends on regional countries settling disputes through negotiation, and that talks between China and ASEAN foreign ministers on a code of conduct for the South China Sea should be accelerated — and its scholars staff the expert panels through which Chinese positions are explained to foreign audiences. China's International Development Cooperation Agency has explicitly urged the institute and related think tanks to take the initiative in international work and invest more in training, reflecting official expectations that Track II institutions support diplomacy.

For outside readers, the institute is best understood as both a research body and an interface: a Haikou academy with five research centres and more than 50 researchers that produces the historical and legal scholarship underpinning China's South China Sea case, and a convenor — through the CSARC, the China-ASEAN Academy on Ocean Law and Governance, Boao sub-forums and its Washington-linked partner ICAS — of the unofficial dialogues where that case is tested against Southeast Asian and Western counterparts. Its English website, en.nanhai.org.cn, publishes its profile, research and event reports, and remains the primary public window on its work.