But analysts are scratching their heads over the timing and location
Photograph: CSIS Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative/Vantor/Planet Labs
Listen to this story
Your browser does not support the <audio> element.
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. ■