It has been axiomatically accepted that the basement of a continental shelf is the offshore extension and geologically part of the same continental lithosphere. While this notion may hold true in places, our analysis of the distribution of Jurassic-Cretaceous granitoids throughout the entire eastern continental China in space and time led us to the conclusion that the basement of the Chinese continental shelf (beneath East China Sea and South China Sea) is of exotic origin geologically unrelated to the continental lithosphere of eastern China. This exotic terrane of a sizeable mass with large compositional buoyancy could be either an oceanic plateau or a micro continent, which was transported by, or along with, the paleo-Pacific plate moving in the course of NW direction and subducting beneath the eastern margin of the continental China in the Mesozoic, responsible for the granitoids with emplacement ages of ~ 190 Ma to ~ 88 Ma.
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