Xinhua, the official news organ of the Chinese Communist Party, carried a commentary that stated the following:

As ironic as it is, Washington has always defended its arbitrary move by referring to international law, but it has so far not approved the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which establishes legal order and regulations on international waters.

The calculation behind such a move is crystal clear: The United States is unwilling to be bound by an international treaty, which it claims as severely flawed, because the sole superpower has already controlled such maritime resources as oil and gas deposits through military power.

First of all, the United States has not ratified the UNCLOS, because it created a supranational bureaucracy to administer rights to the seabed that is not on a given nation’s continental shelf.  That supranational body is unaccountable to nations.  The United States resists a self-funding supranational body, because it makes the supranational body unaccountable to sovereign nations.  It itself is effectively sovereign.

Second of all, the rights of innocent passage are customary international law that have been observed since at least the 18th century.  UNCLOS mostly codifies what has been customary law since then.

Xinhua is mistaken.