But analysts are scratching their heads over the timing and location
Photograph: CSIS Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative/Vantor/Planet Labs
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S INCE OCTOBER China has turned a once desolate sandbar in the South China Sea into a 600-hectare atoll. A spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry says the massive engineering project is “aimed at improving living and working conditions on the islands and growing the local economy”. That seems implausible. By China’s own figures, all of the South China Sea’s islets are inhabited by not many more than 2,000 of its citizens (not including thousands of troops). Nearly all have been sent by China to help it stake its claim to the waterway.
Map: The Economist
Instead, Antelope Reef, as this cay is known, is beginning to look a lot like China’s large military airbase at Mischief Reef. One of three airbases which China built during a spree of island-building from 2013 to 2015, Mischief Reef is just a bit larger than Antelope Reef is now. And like Mischief, the new, mostly circular outline of Antelope’s lagoon, visible on recent satellite photographs, contains a long strip that could accommodate a 2,700-metre runway. If dredging at Antelope Reef continues through April, it will soon become the largest island in the South China Sea.
Why China’s dredgers have returned to the South China Sea after nearly a decade is something of a mystery. To be sure, China has been busy over that period, using its existing bases to chase fishing boats and coastguards from other littoral countries out of the waterway. The Philippines, which won a judgment at an international tribunal in 2016 ruling China’s claims to the sea to be without legal basis, has come under particular pressure. But most dredging ended in 2015. “This was a surprise for us,” says Gregory Poling, an expert on the South China Sea at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think-tank in Washington.
Curiouser still is Antelope Reef’s location. Unlike Mischief Reef, it is not at the southern end of the South China Sea in the Spratly island chain—claimed wholly or in part by China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam—where China was most active during its previous reclamation campaign. Antelope Reef is in the Paracels, in the northern part of the South China Sea, claimed only by China and Vietnam. Unlike the Spratlys, where the claimants occupy a few tense and isolated outposts, China has controlled all of the Paracels since 1974.
One theory then is that the choice of Antelope is about China’s relations with Vietnam. China already has one airstrip in the Paracels, but it is farther away from the Vietnamese coast. Antelope Reef sits closer to suspected oil and gas deposits and rich fishing grounds plied by Chinese and Vietnamese fishers. China has long sought to prevent Vietnam from benefiting from the South China Sea’s natural resources.
But it is also possible that China is simply responding to Vietnamese actions. Over the past four years, Vietnam has embarked on a reclamation campaign of its own on islets that it controls in the Spratlys. It has created so much new land that Mr Poling of the CSIS says that Vietnam was on track to surpass China in total land area at some point this year. With the new terraforming at Antelope Reef, China will probably keep its lead. “They’re sending a message to Vietnam: any reclamations you can do, we can do better,” says Ian Storey, another South China Sea expert, of the ISEAS –Yusof Ishak Institute, a think-tank in Singapore.
When asked about the dredging at Antelope Reef in March, a spokesperson for the Vietnamese foreign ministry called it illegal. Her Chinese counterpart responded by telling reporters that the Paracels were China’s “inherent territory”. But in recent years the two Communist states have mostly preferred to handle their differences behind the scenes. A few days before the sparring foreign-ministry statements, the countries’ respective defence ministers boarded a Vietnamese navy vessel in the Gulf of Tonkin before it embarked on a joint patrol with Chinese counterparts. No evidence of a spat there.
America’s silence has been more surprising. The Obama, Biden and first Trump administrations were all critical of China’s development of disputed islets in the South China Sea. But in its new national defence strategy, released in January, the Pentagon said that its focus in future would be the “first island chain”, stretching from Japan through Taiwan, the Philippines and Malaysia. The Paracels would seem to fall just outside that line. America’s silence might be among the first signs that, beyond America’s new defensive perimeter, the White House is intending to give China a free hand. ■
논증 분석
유형: causal
핵심 주장
China가 South China Sea의 Antelope Reef에 새로운 군사 공군기지를 건설하고 있으며, 그 시점과 위치는 Vietnam과의 경쟁 구도 및 America의 전략적 후퇴와 맞닿아 있다.
논리구조
- 전제: China는 2025년 10월 이후 South China Sea의 황량한 모래톱 Antelope Reef를 600헥타르 규모의 환초로 변형시켰으며, Chinese foreign ministry의 ‘생활 여건 개선’ 주장은 설득력이 없다.
- 진단: Antelope Reef의 개발 양상—원형 석호 윤곽과 2,700미터 활주로 수용 가능한 긴 띠 형태—은 Mischief Reef 군사 공군기지와 매우 유사하여 군사적 목적이 명백하다.
- 논거: China의 준설 작업이 거의 10년 만에 재개된 것은 전문가들에게도 놀라운 일로, CSIS의 Gregory Poling은 ‘우리에게도 놀라움이었다’고 밝혔다.
- 논거: Antelope Reef의 위치가 이례적이다: 이전 매립 캠페인이 집중되었던 Spratly Islands가 아닌 Paracel Islands에 위치하며, China는 1974년부터 Paracels 전체를 단독 지배해왔다.
- 논거: 한 가지 이론은 Antelope Reef가 Vietnam 해안에 더 가깝고 석유·가스 매장 추정 지역 및 어장과 인접해 있어, China가 Vietnam의 천연자원 이용을 차단하려는 의도라는 것이다.
- 논거: 또 다른 이론은 Vietnam의 맞대응 논리다: Vietnam은 최근 4년간 자국이 통제하는 Spratlys 도서에서 자체 매립 캠페인을 전개해 China의 총 육지 면적을 추월할 기세였으며, ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute의 Ian Storey는 ‘China가 베트남에 메시지를 보내고 있다’고 분석한다.
- 반론: Vietnam은 Antelope Reef 준설을 불법이라 규탄했지만, 두 공산주의 국가는 최근 수년간 차이를 물밑에서 처리하는 경향이 있었으며, 불과 며칠 후 양국 국방장관이 Gulf of Tonkin에서 공동 순찰에 참여했다.
- 진단: America의 침묵이 가장 놀랍다: Obama, Biden, 1기 Trump 행정부와 달리 현 Pentagon의 국방전략은 ‘제1도련선’ 방어에 집중하고 있으며, Paracels는 그 선 바깥에 위치한다.
결론
America의 전략적 방어선 재설정이 Paracels를 사실상 포기 지역으로 남겨두면서, China는 South China Sea 북부에서 Vietnam을 견제하고 군사력을 확장하는 데 자유로운 손을 얻을 가능성이 있다.