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Despite all the other issues demanding China’s attention this year: the virus, its trade war with the US, Hong Kong’s national security law, and a host of economic problems, the South China Sea It has revived in recent months as a stage for serious tensions.
With United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo now, for the first time, labeling China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea as illegal, Alexander Neill examines China’s plans to extend its reach in the region.
The South China Sea, home to vital shipping lanes, has been a hot spot for years, with several countries claiming ownership of their small islands and reefs and, with it, access to resources.
In recent years, China has been steadily firmer on what it claims are its centuries-old claims in the disputed region, and has been rapidly increasing its military presence to support those claims.
Former commander of the US Pacific Command, Admiral Harry Harris once referred to this as the “Great Wall of Sand,” a “nine-stroke line” that creates a protective ring and supply network around it. of Chinese territory at sea, as the wall did on land.
But while China and the US have exchanged increasingly thorny comments about the South China Sea, overall, they have made such differences.
Despite its trade conflict, the United States had avoided taking sides in China’s territorial disputes with other countries, apart from demanding freedom of movement for its ships.
Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
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Criticism of China’s early management of the outbreak, led by the United States, has angered China.
Many Western leaders appear to be persuaded by Pompeo’s argument that China was exploiting the pandemic to duplicate its overall coercive behavior.
And those mounting tensions have been unfolding in the South China Sea.
Military tensions at a worrying moment.
In early April, a Chinese Coast Guard vessel rammed and sunk a Vietnamese fishing vessel near the Paracel Islands, which China and Vietnam claim to be theirs.
Later, a Malaysian oil exploration project also discovered that its operations were halted off the Borneo coast by a Chinese marine prospecting vessel, the Haiyang Dizhi 8, backed by the Chinese Navy and Coast Guard.
Consequently, the USS America, an amphibious assault ship of the US Navy, which was joined by an Australian frigate, was deployed in nearby waters.
The escalation continued with the deployment of two U.S. Navy-guided missile destroyers, the USS Bunker Hill and the USS Barry to the Paracel and Spratly Islands (known as Xisha and Nansha in Chinese) respectively.
The warships carried out Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOP) with the aim of challenging what the United States sees as a pattern of China’s illegal claims in international waters.
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A 2019 protest in Manila, Philippines, against Chinese “aggression” in the South China Sea
More recently, China closed a strip of marine space to conduct naval exercises in the waters surrounding the Paracel Islands. The United States angrily said that this violated Chinese commitments to avoid activities that exacerbate disputes.
Meanwhile, the US Navy deployed not one but two aircraft carrier strike groups, the USS Nimitz and the USS Ronald Reagan, for joint operations in the region.
In addition to the US Navy fighters conducting carrier operations and the sea-crossing P8-Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, the US Air Force dispatched a B-52 strategic bomber as a measure .
China’s state media reacted with a predictable vitriol.
The rise of the United States Navy in the South China Sea increases the risk of an incident between the two rival powers and a rapid escalation of hostility.
The situation is particularly dangerous in light of a recent pattern of China’s increasing assertiveness about its “core concerns.”
Its recent use of lethal force on its disputed border with India, and the imposition of the National Security Law in Hong Kong, have led many to wonder how restricted China is likely to be in its response to these challenges.
What is the objective of the South China Sea of China?
Beijing views the South China Sea as a crucial part of its maritime territory, not only as a stronghold for its Hainan Island-based maritime nuclear deterrence, but also as a gateway to the Silk Road. , part of the China Belt and Road Initiative.
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Chinese tourists in front of a Chinese flag in the Paracel Islands
The South China Sea is critical, for example, to the future success of the Greater China Bay Area economic development plan, which incorporates Hong Kong.
China’s plan to populate the South China Sea was launched in 2012 when “Sansha City”, the all-claimed administrative center of the Chinese in the South China Sea on Woody Island in Paracels, was updated from county at prefecture level.
The government relocated the small fishing community there into modern housing, built an elementary school, a bank and a hospital, and installed mobile communications. Tourists have been visiting on regular cruises to the islands.
The second phase of the plan started in April this year, when China created two other county-level administrative districts subordinate to the city of Sansha, including the establishment of the Nansha District People’s Government, based at Fiery Cross Reef and the administration of all the features claimed by the Chinese of the Spratly Islands.
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In the six years since China began to recover several reefs and atolls in Spratlys, satellite and aerial surveillance has revealed one of the world’s greatest feats of maritime engineering and military construction.
In addition to the military installations on the islands, including 3,000m runways, naval bunks, hangars, reinforced ammunition bunkers, missile silos, and radar sites – images show carefully arranged accommodation blocks, tile-roofed administrative buildings blue ceramic, hospitals and even sports. complexes on the reclaimed islands, which have become visibly greener.
Subi Reef now houses a farm, which includes a six-acre parcel of fruit and vegetables pollinated by imported bees from the mainland, a herd of pigs, flocks of birds, and fish ponds.
Meanwhile, the Chinese Academy of Sciences established an Oceanographic Research Center at Mischief Reef in January 2019.
China’s leading hydrologists have announced that the water table at Fiery Cross, which was once little more than a rock in the sea, has expanded rapidly and will allow water self-sufficiency in 15 years (link in Chinese).
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An overview of the Fiery Cross Reef
Island residents already enjoy access to 5G mobile data and the availability of fresh fruits and vegetables shipped in refrigerated containers.
The images also show large fishing fleets docked in the larger lagoons of the Subi and Mischief reefs.
Perhaps in a short time, fishing families could permanently stay on the southernmost islands of China, their educated children alongside those of party and government officials.
A Chinese waterway ‘irreversibly’?
The most symbolic evidence of China’s push towards the South China Sea is literally set in stone, transplanted from mainland China.
In April 2018, 200-ton commemorative megaliths were revealed, erected in each of the three largest island bases in the Spratly Islands amid some secrecy.
Extracted from the Taishan stone and shipped to the Spratly Islands, the monuments resonate with President Xi Jinping’s Chinese dream of national rejuvenation.
Mount Taishan is seen as the holiest of China’s mountains, a symbol of Chinese civilization intact for thousands of years.
All this shows that China has entered a second phase of a calculated plan to make this great strategic waterway in Southeast Asia irreversibly Chinese.
Recent US Navy exercises in the South China Sea aimed to demonstrate the US determination to protect the “freedom of the seas”: that the US Navy. Operate and ultimately protect the marine space in these international waters.
Along with the United States’ naval maneuvers, Pompeo’s announcement formally declaring that China’s claims across the region are “completely illegal” raises the question of what the United States is prepared to do next.
At a minimum, Pompeo wants to build a diplomatic coalition to demonstrate China’s self-isolation, not only with some of the other claimants, but with larger powers as well.
The United States could quickly reduce the new Chinese district of Nansha to concrete and coral rubble, but this would imply a war for which neither the United States nor China have an appetite.
Alexander Neill is a military analyst and director of a strategic advisory consultancy in Singapore.
