Asian Maritime Battle Heats Up
New satellite imagery reveals Chinese advances in ongoing land reclamation project in the South China Sea, reports The Australian.
Intensifying concerns about Beijing’s territorial ambitions, the images show a ¬dra¬matic expansion in China’s construction of artificial islands on disputed South China Sea reefs.
The images clearly show that Beijing has created entirely new islands on a number of reef in the Spratlys, including Fiery Cross Reef, Gaven Reefs, Johnson South Reef, and Hughes Reef.
The Wall Street Journal collected the images and placed them next to satellite footage from early 2014 to make clear the extent of the construction projects. China’s isn’t just building piers and airstrips on existing land (as Taiwan is doing on Itu Aba, for example) – it is creating islands and then building on top of them.
The pace and scale of its South China Sea build-up shows that Beijing, despite having recently reined in its rhetoric and avoided confrontations at sea and in the air, hasn’t tempered its ambitions to project power in the region.
In one case, Fiery Cross Reef, the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative estimates China expanded the size of the existing land more than tenfold, making the new island more than three times larger than Itu Aba (previously the largest of the Spratly Islands).
While the islands off northern Taiwan in the East China Sea (Senkaku if you are Japanese, Diaoyutai if you are Chinese) have hit the headlines most prominently, disputes in the South China Sea have primarily focused on the Spratly Islands, a collection of over 750 reefs, atolls and islands scattered across the sea, and claimed in part or in full by six different countries; China, Taiwan, Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam.
“The Chinese have built up a head of steam on the land reclamation in the South China Sea over the course of 2014; if anything, it looks to be accelerating,” said a senior US official.
Historical images from Google Earth and others reveal that work at all four reefs began after President Xi Jinping took power in 2012. Construction at two of the sites began in the past year, despite protests from neighbours, warming military ties with Washington, and a Chinese drive to improve ¬relations in its periphery.
China claims most of the potentially energy rich South China Sea, through which $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year. The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also have overlapping claims.
