The South China Sea,as ‘a non-volcanic passive margin basin’in the Pacific,has often been considered as a small-scale analogue of the Adantic.The recent ocean drilling in the north South China Sea margin found,however,that the Iberian model of non-volcanic rifted margin from the Adantic does not apply to the South China Sea.In this paper,we review a variety of rifted basins and propose to discriminate two types of rifting basins:plate-edge type such as the South China Sea and intra-plate type like the Adantic.They not only differ from each other in structure,formation process,lifespan and geographic size,but also occur at different stages of the Wilson cycle.The intra-plate rifting occurred in the Mesozoic and gave rise to large oceans,whereas the plate-edge rifting took place mainly in the mid-Cenozoic,with three-quarters of the basins concentrated in the West Pacific.As a member of the West Pacific system of marginal seas,the South China Sea should be studied not in isolation on its origin and evolution,but in a systematic context to include also its neighboring counterparts.