“CHINA’s aggressive behavior in building these artificial islands in the South China Sea tracks with its disregard of other norms of international law,” said retired Admiral James Stavridis, former supreme allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
In his best-selling book, Sea Power, published by Penguin books last year, Stavridis described “the specific on the construction of these artificial islands as staggering. Thus far—and construction continues—China has created nearly 3,000 acres of land out of the ocean. Just consider that the highly touted and massive US aircraft carrier (from which can be launched a wing of more than 70 jets and helicopters) are only about 7 acres of flattop.”
“Are these artificial islands similar to hundreds of unsinkable aircraft carriers in the South China Sea? Think that shifts the balance of the two competing militaries? You bet it does,” he said.
Stavridis said China’s artificial island buildup started in the past several years, and China already has built dozens of islands, mostly in the eastern and southern portion of the South China Sea.
“Instead of stone, brick and wood, this new ‘great wall’ consists of artificial islands strung out across the South China Sea—a region Beijing claims by virtue of historical right. China’s claim is encompassed by its ‘nine-dash line,’ a radical demarcation of maritime sovereignty that takes an enormous bite out of the legitimate territorial claims of Vietnam, the Philippines and other countries ringing the South China Sea,” Stavridis pointed out.
He explained that, “the crucial context of this behavior is that the South China Sea—Asia’s cauldron, as geostrategist Robert D. Kaplan calls it—is bubbling like the witches’ kettle in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.”
“The South China Sea,” he argued, “matters not only because it is contested territory, but because it’s hugely important to the smooth operation of the global economy. More than $5 trillion of the world’s annual trade passes through the South China Sea, all under the watchful eyes of the [oddly named] People’s Liberation Army Navy,” he said.
“Besides the obvious geopolitical and military issues, significant ecological damage is also under way, according to many scientists. One expert from the University of Miami, John McManus, called China’s building of man-made islands ‘the most rapid rate of permanent loss of coral reef area in human history.’”
Some of these provocations include lack of clarity on the claim itself—a claim that, again, international lawyers widely regard as preposterous—including an air defense identification zone over the East Asia Sea directed at the United States, Japan and South Korea, the placement of a mobile oil platform in Vietnam’s coastal waters; and the widely reported (and massive) cyber thefts of US intellectual property, industrial secrets and personal data, Stavridis pointed out.
According to him, “The final leitmotif of the South China Sea over the past two decades is the geopolitical contest between an outsized China that is rising inexorably and the handful of small but dynamic nations that share the littoral of the South China Sea with their massive and increasingly assertive neighbor.”
He clarified that the history of the waterways is not only about ships passing through it, and the small and great wars on the coasts; it is about the scattered island chains that provide a means for nations to claim chunks of the sea if they can only establish claim. “This is the story of the seemingly constant conflict over the Paracel and Spratly islands, for example, as well as over Mischief Reef.”
“What drives all this, of course, is the presence of hydrocarbons and fish in the South China Sea,” Stavridis said, adding that, “While most of the nations would be content with the rules and regulations generated by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which came largely into force in the 1980s, what is in dispute is access to the region’s ample fisheries near the seafood markets of Asia and the seabed hydrocarbons.”
“Some estimates put the total amount of oil and natural gas at levels similar to the Middle East, a mother lode of resources, especially for small players along the littoral. So it’s no surprise that there has been a constant game of occupying the island chain for nearly 50 years,” Stavridis said.
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.