Interesting BBC's Media Pictorial of the SCS dispute

[danb]

Hi. During lunch at work last night I was looking at Asian news on the internet. I stumbled across this BBC presentation. It was called China's Island Factory:

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/2014/newsspec_8701/index.html

 

Decided to check it out. Wasn't sure what the article was going to about except perhaps....making Islands, you think? When I first opened the story up the presentation went to a full screen presentation style. I don't think I have ever seen that done before. Initially I thought the computer was screwed up but when I accessed the story at home it showed the same"full screen pictorial presentation style". In this case it is more of a visual presentation then a printed word presentation if you know what I mean. Thought the visual media content was interesting. The presentation is about the South China Sea boundary dispute. There was a photo labeled "The Nine-dashed Line. I looked up what that phrase was alluding to and it lead me to this familiar map. I read that originally there were eleven dashes on the map but was later revised to just nine dashed lines (shown here in green). Sorry that the map is so big but didn't know how to make it smaller. If anyone can help me out with making the map smaller and keep the green dash lines I would appreciated it.

 

Also read that Vietnamese called the whole collections of dashed lines as the cow's tongue. An interpretation of this SCS dispute can be found here:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-dotted_line

 

That article provide some interesting points to what has happened in that area over the last seventy or so years. Danb

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ce/9_dotted_line.png/800px-9_dotted_line.png

[Randy W]

Yep, that's what the article is about - making islands.

 

 

I copied a few excerpts from it, in case someone doesn't want to read the whole thing, but it's a very interesting article and well worth the time to read through.

 

Ahead I can see another island.

This one I am expecting. This place is called Johnson South Reef. On my GPS it again shows no land, just a submerged reef.

But I’ve seen aerial photographs of this place taken by the Philippine navy. They show the massive land reclamation work China has been doing here since January.

Millions of tonnes of rock and sand have been dredged up from the sea floor and pumped into the reef to form new land.

Along the new coastline I can see construction crews building a sea wall. There are cement-pumping trucks, cranes, large steel pipes, and the flash of welding torches.

On top of a white concrete blockhouse a soldier is standing looking back at us through binoculars.

I urge the skipper to get even closer, but a volley of flares erupts in the sky – it is a Chinese warning.

The appearance of these new islands has happened suddenly and is a dramatic new move in a longstanding territorial struggle in the South China Sea.

At the beginning of this year, the Chinese presence in the Spratly Islands consisted of a handful of outposts, a collection of concrete blockhouses perched atop coral atolls.

Now it is building substantial new islands on five different reefs.

We are the first Western journalists to have seen some of this construction with our own eyes and to have documented it on camera.

On one of these new islands, perhaps Johnson South Reef, China seems to be preparing to build an air base with a concrete runway long enough for fighter jets to take off and land.

. . .

China’s island building is aimed at addressing a serious deficit.

Other countries that claim large chunks of the South China Sea - Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia - all control real islands.

But China came very late to this party and missed out on all the good real estate.

. . .

But now Beijing has decided it is time to move, to assert its claim and to back it up by creating new facts on the ground - a string of island bases and an unsinkable aircraft carrier, right in the middle of the South China Sea.

. . .

Pagasa’s most important asset lies at the far end of the island - a ramshackle village with about 30 families.

Manila claims more than 200 people live here, but I found only about 100. The civilians started coming in the late 1970s and gradually they have built a little colony here – though not out of patriotic zeal.

“We get a free house, and free food. The government gives me a job, and there is a school for our children,” says Melody, who lives here with her husband and three children.

. . .

The Philippines has nine permanently occupied outposts. Vietnam has eight, Malaysia also has a handful off the coast of Borneo - and China, so far, has seven.

Even stranger, the biggest island in the Spratlys, Taiping Island, is controlled by Taiwan. There is a large military base on it and a concrete airstrip.

Like the Philippines, Vietnam is settling civilians on several of the islets it controls. Civilian colonies certainly make military confrontation more difficult and less appetising.

Shooting soldiers, as China did at Johnson South in 1988, is one thing. Shooting women and children is quite another.

Whether these heavily subsidised micro-colonies really strengthen legal claims to places like Pagasa has yet to be tested. Clearly, Manila and Hanoi believe they do.

. . .

A few hundred metres away the dark outline of a ship is silhouetted against the pale dawn sky.

It is the Sierra Madre, a Philippine ghost ship stranded on the reef.

To the south, I can see the lights of two Chinese coastguard cutters steaming towards us. But they are too late.

In a moment we are over the reef, and the water is now too shallow for the large Chinese ships to reach us.

I had seen photographs of the Sierra Madre before I set out. But the reality is still a shock.

The ship’s sides are peppered with massive holes. Waves slosh through them right into the ship’s hold.

. . .

The absurdity of the Sierra Madre is almost comic. Or perhaps it’s tragic.

Even the 11 Filipino marines stranded on board seem embarrassed by their circumstances.

There is little of the normal marine bravado, just a quiet acceptance of their fate.

“It is hard for my men,” the young lieutenant in command of the group tells me. “We are far from home, there is sometimes little to eat, so it puts a great strain on the men.”

A few hundred metres away we can see the shiny new Chinese coastguard cutters roaming up and down.

This is not a contest of equals.

For the past year the Chinese ships have been blockading the Sierra Madre, preventing resupply ships, with food, water and building materials, from getting through.

Had we approached from the south-west they would have cut us off. We only made it by arriving from the opposite direction, under cover of darkness.

The Philippine navy now drops supplies to the stranded ship by parachute, once a month.

But the marines say much of the time they live off fish they catch on the reef.

 

[Randy W]

The map seems fine, even on my cell phone. There are plenty of other versions around, but I'm unclear on what you'd want to do there.

[Randy W]

. . . and the Global Times responds

 

Truth behind Chigua Reef construction

 

Perhaps, because of the large number of construction activities by Hanoi and Manila on reefs in disputed waters, the governments of the two countries have yet to decry China's building effort and Washington has not made a public declaration so far. But China should still prepare well for any possible emergency in the South China Sea.

Radical forces in the Philippines and some Westerners sharply scolded China for "building factories and what appears to be a runway for the takeoff and landing of military jets" and anchoring warships, which would have a severe impact upon the geopolitical landscape of the South China Sea. However, any notion of defying Beijing's sovereignty over the Nansha Islands or underestimating its resolve and ability to safeguard this sovereignty, is misplaced in its conception. China has exercised maximum restraint within the nine-dash line of the South China Sea. After all, we are constructing facilities on the reef under our maritime jurisdiction and we haven't driven Philippine and Vietnamese forces away from the reefs under their control.

What Manila and Hanoi need to understand is that it is impossible for China to remain indifferent in light of their far-reaching aggressive activities on the Nansha Islands. They will be better off not instigating nationalistic sentiments among their populations, which will not work against China, but will instead only embarrass themselves.

At present, there is no short-term solution to the disputes in the South China Sea, so the Philippines and Vietnam should avoid walking into a dead end they can't escape.