" In 1936, he drew a map for his New China Construction Atlas. It included a U-shaped line—some would call it a “cow tongue”—that snaked down the coastlines along the South China Sea almost to the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. Everything within that line, he asserted, belonged to China. As he put it in an annotation, the South China Sea was “the living place of Chinese fishermen. The sovereignty, of course, belonged to China.”7 Almost nine decades later, Bai Meichu’s map is at the heart of today’s struggle over the South China Sea. "

― Daniel Yergin , The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations