The South China Sea (SCS) remains a contested international terrain among the global hegemons, the United States of America (USA) and China. Both countries have two contrasting denfiitions of the international practice of the Freedom of Navigation (FON) programme in the SCS. The USA sees the sea as open water for aircrafts and warships' navigation, while China sees it as their claimed territory that should not be navigated by USA aircrafts and warships. What emerges here is the following central question: What leads to the ongoing strategic competition and Cold War in the SCS? In attempting to nfid an answer to this question through interdisciplinary critical discourse analysis, it becomes evident that there is no uniform understanding among scholars in terms of the real imperative of the contestation between the USA and China in the SCS. As such, we analyse the SCS using the Great Power Competition Theory to grasp the full under