Sino-US relations in the balance as tensions rise in East Asia

Hundreds of rocky islands, islets, sandbanks, reefs and cays lie scattered across Asia's eastern waters, unimportant looking to the naked eye but significant enough to spark what may be the most worrying deterioration in US-China relations in decades.

China's military rise and its increasingly assertive claims to sovereignty of these largely uninhabited lumps of rock, coral and sand have set it on a possible collision course with its neighbours, who also make various claims to parts of the archipelagos, and with the United States, which has important alliances with three of the rival claimants and would be obliged to defend them in case of an attack.

As Chinese and Vietnamese ships ram each other in the contested waters, and Chinese and Japanese fighter jets play games of chicken in Asia's disputed skies, the risk of military escalation is growing. Even more significantly, the stand-off is generating bad blood between Washington and Beijing and could torpedo cooperation on important global issues, including the Middle East, climate change and nuclear proliferation.

With US Secretary of State John Kerry and US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew visiting Bejing for the sixth annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue meeting, some say the US-China relationship is facing its stiffest test since President Richard Nixon travelled to Mao Zedong's China in 1972.

"US-China relations are worse than they have been since the normalisation of relations, and East Asia today is less stable than at any time since the end of the cold war," said Robert Ross, a political science professor at Boston College and associate of Harvard's John King Fairbank Centre for Chinese Studies. The Obama administration's foreign policy rebalance, or "pivot," to Asia has been widely interpreted in China as an attempt to contain its rise.