South China Sea Forum

[Eliter]

Nansha Qundao,Nansha Islands,Spratly Islands 2014

 

[Rechoice]

Nansha Qundao,Nansha Islands,Spratly Islands 2014

Pls learn how to post pic here.Please Click Here to learn about the new method to post pictures in threads.

Source: South China Sea News & Discussions | Page 507

 

[boke]

唧唧歪歪的在这里拽的，在中国南海抢占岛礁最多的越南，不要以为得了便宜还不卖乖能有什么好下场，不怕你闹，29个岛礁，记清楚了，你闹的再欢也没用，中国的领土一寸都不会少，必定全部收回。就奇了怪了，美国人都敢做的事情你们敢肆无忌惮，你们凭什么？越南的实力还是越南的民心？贼就是贼，盗就是盗，就算你给自己洗脑的再彻底，那也是活在自己的梦里。中国会让你们回到现实的！

 

[Rechoice]

唧唧歪歪的在这里拽的，在中国南海抢占岛礁最多的越南，不要以为得了便宜还不卖乖能有什么好下场，不怕你闹，29个岛礁，记清楚了，你闹的再欢也没用，中国的领土一寸都不会少，必定全部收回。就奇了怪了，美国人都敢做的事情你们敢肆无忌惮，你们凭什么？越南的实力还是越南的民心？贼就是贼，盗就是盗，就算你给自己洗脑的再彻底，那也是活在自己的梦里。中国会让你们回到现实的！

This is engliish forum, not webo, kid. Stop lying here with cheap propaganda.

 

[cirr]

Yongshudao 17.11.2014：

 

[Globenim]

Yongshudao 17.11.2014：

View attachment 153011

Thee speed of this construction is almost worrysome. As if we they where digging trenches knowing about some plans of Vietnam, Japan or maybe even the Philipines to escalate or provoke a war.

 

[ahojunk]

Yongshudao 17.11.2014：

View attachment 153011

Do you have new pics of the other reef/island reclamation?

 

[ahojunk]

Airbus Defence and Space imagery dated 14 November 2014 shows Chinese land reclamation operations under way at Fiery Cross Reef in the South China Sea. Multiple operating dredgers provide the ability to generate terrain rapidly. Operating from a harbour area, dredgers deliver sediment via a network of piping.

 

[Rechoice]

Last update 17:50 | 06/11/2014
0
China urged to stop illegal activities on Truong Sa
On October 6, a Vietnam Ministry of Foreign Affair representative presented a diplomatic note to the China Embassy in Hanoi, opposing China’s illegal activities on Chu Thap (Stone Cross) of Truong Sa (Spratly) archipelago.

In response to the wrongful act, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Le Hai Binh stated, "Vietnam has sufficient legal and historical evidence to affirm its sovereignty over Hoang Sa (Paracel) and Truong Sa (Spratly) archipelagos.
China’s aforesaid act has seriously violated Vietnam's sovereignty over the Spratly Islands and international law, running counter to the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the East Sea (DOC) as well as the agreement on the basic principles guiding the settlement of sea-related issues between Vietnam and China, disrupting the status quo and complicating the situation, detrimental to regional peace and stability.”

"Vietnam resolutely opposes the above unlawful act and asks China to respect the sovereignty of Vietnam, strictly implement the DOC, immediately put an end to the construction that have broken the status quo in Truong Sa islands, and prevent similar occurrences, " Binh emphasized.

VOV/VNN

 

[ahojunk]

China building airstrip-capable island on Fiery Cross Reef
James Hardy, London and Sean O'Connor, Indiana - IHS Jane's Defence Weekly
20 November 2014

Key Points

• China is reclaiming land at Fiery Cross Reef in the Spratly Islands, according to satellite imagery
• The reclamation, which started in August, is creating a land mass large enough for a 3,000 m-long airstrip

China is building an island at least 3,000 m long on Fiery Cross Reef that could be the site for its first airstrip in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.

Satellite imagery of the island taken on 8 August and 14 November shows that in the past three months Chinese dredgers have created a land mass that is almost the entire length of the reef.

Fiery Cross Reef lies to the west of the main Spratly island archipelago and was previously under water; the only habitable area was a concrete platform built and maintained by China's People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN).

The new island is more than 3,000 m long and between 200 and 300 m wide: large enough to construct a runway and apron. The dredgers are also creating a harbour to the east of the reef that would appear to be large enough to receive tankers and major surface combatants.

The existing structure on the reef's southwestern edge was home to a PLAN garrison and had a pier, air-defence guns, anti-frogmen defences, communications equipment, and a greenhouse. The concrete structure is currently not attached to the new island, but if previous Chinese land reclamation projects in the Spratlys are any guide, it is only a matter of time before it is joined up.

The Spratly Islands are claimed by Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam. All but Brunei occupy islands or have built structures on reefs and shoals to assert their claims.

The land reclamation at Fiery Cross is the fourth such project undertaken by China in the Spratly Islands in the last 12-18 months and by far the largest in scope. China has built new islands at Johnson South Reef, Cuateron Reef, and Gaven Reefs, but none are large enough to house an airstrip in their current form.

Ship tracking data from IHS Maritime shows substantial activity at the reef since May 2014. Analysts drew attention to two ships in particular: Jin Hang Jun 406 , a grab dredger that is fixed on a pontoon, and 3,086-tonne cutter suction dredger Xin Hai Tun . Both have been instrumental in dredging and cutting channels into the new harbour basin.

ANALYSIS
IHS Jane's previously reported on China's reclamation project in the Spratlys and noted that until recently Fiery Cross appeared to be acting as a staging post for other island building projects. Given its status as the largest PLAN facility in the Spratlys, this seemed to be an anomaly, something that the 14 November imagery has now corrected.

China has been at a distinct disadvantage compared with other claimants in the Spratly Islands as it is the only claimant not to occupy an island with an airfield. Taiwan has Itu Aba (Taiping) island, the Philippines has Pagasa island, Malaysia has Swallow Reef (a reef on which it reclaimed land and built an airstrip), and Vietnam has Southwest Cay.

The work at Fiery Cross thus brings parity but is likely to cause alarm among the other claimants. China has previously shown it is willing to spend blood and treasure to assert its territorial claims in this region. Given its massive military advantage over the other claimants in terms of quantity and quality of materiel, this facility appears purpose-built to coerce other claimants into relinquishing their claims and possessions, or at least provide China with a much stronger negotiating position if talks over the dispute were ever held.

 

[ahojunk]

Fiery Cross Reef image on Nov. 23, 2014

Looks like China is going full speed in the build up of Fiery Cross (or Yongshu) Island.

Quite likely there will be an airstrip on the west side which can be 3 km in length, a harbor on the east with docking facilities for tankers and large ships.

The reclamation will soon extend and encompass the existing Yongshu installation on the southern tip.

I think China will develop fisheries (fish farming, aquaculture) and tourism to get some return on its investment and strengthen its hold in this area.
.

 

[ahojunk]

It's about a week since the last post.

I am curious with China's progress in reclamation of the reefs in SCS.

Do we have newer pictures of Yongshu (Fiery Cross), Chigua (Johnson South), Nanxun (Gaven), Huayang (Cuateron), Dongmen (Hughes) or others?

I heard that reclamation at Subi is starting soon.

 

[Solomon2]

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2014
Dispatch from Vietnam: Will the US Foster a Natural Ally?
Michael J. Totten

Nearly forty years after the Vietnam War, Hanoi holds no grudges against the United States, in part because nearly all the country’s negative energy today is focused on China. And for good reason: China is big; it’s powerful; it’s right next door; and it has been hostile for two thousand years. Vietnam’s war with the US will never be repeated, but its long history of conflict with China, which is roughly as old now as Christianity, hasn’t been settled and might be revving up yet again.

Earlier this year, Vietnamese and Chinese naval vessels squared off in the South China Sea when China installed an oil rig in disputed waters. No one was hurt in this confrontation, but several Chinese nationals in Vietnam were killed later, in response to the incident, when furious mobs of Vietnamese rioters attacked Chinese-owned factories. Thousands of Chinese citizens left Vietnam in the wake of the violence. The government cracked down on what it rightly called “hooligans,” but relations between the two countries remain testier than they’ve been in a quarter-century.

This recent conflict may well blow over, but the tension that sparked it in the first place is not going anywhere. Vietnam and China both claim the Paracel Islands, and the Spratly Islands farther south are claimed by yet four more countries in Southeast Asia, but China claims almost the entire sea, more than a thousand miles from its own mainland, well south of Vietnam, and nearly all the way down to the coast of Malaysia.

Related Essay
Hanoi’s Break with Beijing
Hai Hong Nguyen andCharles Knight | ESSAY
Hanoi’s days of deference to China may be ending—and a new strategic alignment emerging—in the wake of increased tensions between over Beijing’s aggressive maritime claims.​

Chinese maps show a so-called “nine-dash line” that supposedly delimits these claims over the sea. The line is also known as the “cow’s tongue line” for its vague U-shape. The United States insists rightly that this line is inconsistent with international maritime law, but Washington takes no position on who owns either the Paracels or the Spratlys. I spent quite a bit of time looking into it myself and had to give up in frustration. There are no right answers. These are legitimate disputes that need to be resolved amicably.

Vietnam refuses to recognize China’s claim over the Paracels, but at least Vietnam recognizes that China is making what it sees as an invalid claim. China, on the other hand, doesn’t even recognize that Vietnam has an invalid claim, making peaceful resolution all but impossible.

Robert D. Kaplan’s latest book, Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific, describes maritime Southeast Asia as a major upcoming theater of conflict. “The composite picture,” he writes, “is of a cluster of states that, with problems of domestic legitimacy and state-building largely behind them, are ready to advance their perceived territorial rights beyond their own shores. This outward collective push is located in the demographic cockpit of the globe; it is here in Southeast Asia, with its nearly 600 million people, where China’s 1.3 billion people converge with the Indian Subcontinent’s 1.5 billion people. And the geographic meeting place of all these states is maritime: the South China Sea.”

Most modern wars are fought over power and ideology rather than resources, but a conflict in the South China Sea would be old school. It could begin and end with relatively minor naval skirmishes or it could escalate. Nobody knows. Either way, China and Vietnam are both growing economically and militarily more powerful, and they’re both expanding their presence in the South China Sea at the same time the United States is scaling back, creating a situation ripe with potential for a serious face-off.

“China makes us nervous sometimes,” says Huy Dang, a Hanoi resident from the south who works for General Motors. “Our common sense tells us not to trust the Chinese. We don’t use Chinese products. They’re bad quality.”

But what about the Chinese government and military? Do everyday Vietnamese feel threatened by the colossus to the north?

“Sometimes,” Dang says. “They’ve been here for thousands of years and they’re a big country. Living next to a very aggressive neighbor that’s crazy and big, we feel their presence. We think there will be military conflict over the dispute in the sea. It could be a short conflict like in 1979, but if they keep threatening us we might do something. They have to know they don’t scare us. But a war like the one between Vietnam and America is not going to happen. We live in the modern world now and this is a civilized country.”


If any country in Southeast Asia resists China militarily, it will be Vietnam. No one else is interested or capable, but Vietnam has the ability and will to push back against its “big brother.” Vietnam wouldn’t exist as a sovereign state today if it weren’t eminently capable of pushing back hard. It would have been absorbed long ago like Xinjiang and Tibet. Not only did the North Vietnamese successfully outlast American intervention in the 1960s and ’70s, but Vietnam repelled the Chinese invasion of 1979 in less than a month.

“When small countries worry about big countries, it’s a question of life and death,” says Hoang Anh Tuan, head of Vietnam’s Institute for Foreign Policy and Strategic Studies at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “China has invaded Vietnam around twenty times. We’ve had a war on average every hundred years, but since 1949 we’ve had six conflicts. That’s one on average every ten years. The intensity of China’s aggressiveness has been ten times greater since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.”

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is a serious place where Americans can feel quickly at ease. Its foreign-policy professionals are open and friendly. They see the world similarly enough to Americans that I clicked with them easily. With the end of the Cold War and the end of communism in all but name in Vietnam, Hanoi is a natural ally.

I asked Tuan, who holds a Ph.D. in history, if he expects another war with China. He said of course.

“Why wouldn’t there be another war?” he said. “We’ve had wars with China for twenty centuries. We don’t want any more—we need peace in this country—but we have to prepare for the worst-case scenario. We will only fight if we’re forced to fight, but China is forcing us into a corner.”

Communist economics crippled China for decades and made it weaker than it otherwise could have been, but even with all the self-inflicted calamities suffered during the Maoist period China still waged a series of adventures abroad, most famously its invasion and annexation of Tibet in the 1950s. Beijing is less ideological now, to be sure, but it’s also vastly more prosperous and can afford to invest extraordinary resources into building a superpower-class army and navy.

“If China gets away with it,” Tuan says, “who will be the next victim? We’re a front-line state. China could deploy hundreds or thousands of oil rigs inside its nine-dash line. A red line needs to be imposed, and if China crosses it, a price must be paid. And that price must increase every time China crosses it or it will become more aggressive.”

Tuan compares Southeast Asia to Central Europe during the run-up to World War II, and the West’s response to Chinese behavior to the appeasement of Nazi Germany in 1938.

“Germany paid no price for invading and annexing the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia. The appeasement strategy adopted by Britain and France didn’t work. If Britain and France would have imposed a price on Germany, we might not have had the Second World War. The world is appeasing China, but it’s better to stop China at the earliest possible stage. The price to stop an assertive China later will be much greater.”

China’s behavior is not even remotely equivalent to that of the Nazis, and in truth Tuan didn’t say it was, but I still had to press him. Does he believe China wants to conquer and rule Southeast Asia? Does he believe its plans resemble those of the Empire of Japan before it conquered the region and instituted its bloody so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere?

“No country is so aggressive and assertive at the very beginning,” he says. “If a rising power gets a small victory, it becomes more confident that it can go farther. I’m a strategist, so I look at China in the context of history over hundreds of years. Rising countries create their spheres of influence. Germany did it. Japan did it. The former Soviet Union did it. Now China is doing it. It is following the classic rise of emerging powers in history.”


The oil rig spat is unusual. Vietnam generally prefers to resolve such things quietly, but this time Hanoi was waving the bloody shirt, making as much noise as possible, and trying to make this as publicly painful for China as it could. Vietnam’s leaders are genuinely angry and frightened, not grandstanding or being theatrical.

They want American help, and not only because it would be convenient. Attitudes toward the United States have changed drastically since the 1970s. I knew that in advance before visiting this summer—it’s hardly a secret—but it still left quite an impression.

“I’m twenty-eight years old and don’t remember the war,” Huy Dang told me, “but I read a lot of history and have watched a lot of documentaries about it. It was a bad time, but that’s it, it’s over. If you were to ask ten people in Hanoi about it, eight of them would say it’s okay, it’s in the past.”

In fact, Vietnam is one of the most enthusiastically pro-American places I’ve ever been, and Ho Chi Minh City in the south (which the locals still call Saigon) is especially so.

My hotel manager beamed when he found out I was American. Pulling out a map of the city, he said, “Here is where Pete Peterson was shot down.” (In addition to being a POW, Peterson is a former Democratic congressman from Florida and the first US ambassador to Vietnam after the war.) “He was held in the Hanoi Hilton for seven years with John McCain. We love both of them so much. They’ve done so many good things for our country.”

The Vietnamese treat these former enemy soldiers and prisoners of war like rock stars, even heroes. They may be more loved in Vietnam than they are at home, especially Peterson. Most Americans aren’t familiar with him, but his is a household name in Hanoi.

We know what the Vietnamese think of Peterson now, but what about when he first arrived as ambassador in 1997? I asked him when I telephoned him in Melbourne, Australia, where he lives with his Vietnamese-born wife.

“They were gracious and open and made no attempt to make me feel unwelcome,” he says, “but it took them a while to realize my desire for reconciliation was sincere. I convinced them partly by traveling around the country and talking to people. The government found itself under lots of pressure from regular citizens to work with me because my travels and meetings got so much press coverage.”

He wouldn’t quite describe Vietnam as an American ally, but he said that it certainly wants to become one. “They want to be under an American security umbrella,” Peterson says, “and to be defended from China with an American trip wire, like South Korea.” But the anachronistic weapons embargo imposed in 1984 still hasn’t been lifted. Vietnam can’t buy all the equipment it needs, nor can it repair the equipment we left behind in the 1970s, which it is still using.

The embargo has been out of date for a while. The only time in recent history Vietnam used military force to attack another nation was when it invaded Cambodia in 1979 and demolished the genocidal Pol Pot regime. Vietnam’s actions were based on its own self-interest, but so what? The effect was the same either way. The most vicious regime in Southeast Asia’s history was expunged from the earth. And declaring war against the likes of Pol Pot hardly suggests a country will go to war against a friendly nation like Thailand. Vietnam certainly won’t attack the United States.


China is the only country Vietnam worries about, and the US should share its concerns.

Beijing’s claim to the entire South China Sea could pose a serious threat to maritime navigation. The Chinese are following Vladimir Lenin’s advice. “Probe with a bayonet. If you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, then push.” So far Beijing has met only mush.

There’s nothing unusual about China’s desire to dominate the South China Sea. China is the natural hegemon of the region. Its dominance would be no stranger than America’s role as the honcho of the Caribbean, which likewise triggers anxiety in small
nearby countries.

The difference is that China’s behavior off its coasts is less like America’s today than America’s when the US was still in its expansionist period, when talk of annexing Cuba sounded plausible to some ears and when Puerto Rico was actually annexed. But even then the US wasn’t an authoritarian one-party state, as Beijing is. Washington brought multi-party elections to Puerto Rico, including the right of Puerto Ricans to vote on their own status—statehood, status quo as a territory, or independence. The idea of Beijing allowing Tibetans or Uighurs to vote on their own status is laughable.

Theoretically, China could dominate the South China Sea in a benign way at some point in the future the way the US does the Caribbean, but China would first have to transform itself politically, and it would also have to push the US Navy out of the area.

The latter might happen before the former. “American naval dominance in the South China Sea is somewhat exaggerated,” Peterson says. “We left it unattended for more than a decade, which is part of what President Obama’s pivot to Asia is about. China wants to grab as much as it can get away with, and its view is that possession is nine-tenths of the law. So it’s putting in oil rigs and daring someone to do something about it.”

Our own strategic interest there is straightforward. More than half the world’s shipping traffic goes through a place where there could be a shooting war that could shut down the entire sea and deliver one hell of a shellacking to economies everywhere in the world. Our primary interest then, more than helping smaller nations resist China, is keeping the peace.

It might happen without us having to do much, if Vietnam were to feel that its ties to the US were stronger.

And there’s always the “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention.” Thomas Friedman described it in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree. “No two countries,” he wrote, “that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s.” The theory is that countries that reach such a bourgeois state of development are less interested in waging wars than nations gripped by ideological lunacy. A nation with McDonald’s may very well go to war against warmongering creepjobs like Saddam Hussein, but against another bourgeois country? Not likely.

Friedman’s theory is perhaps too cute by half, but it has mostly held up over the years. It was nearly violated when Israel and Hezbollah fought in 2006. McDonald’s has franchises in both Israel and Lebanon. But the 2006 war was not fought between the sovereign states of Lebanon and Israel. It was fought mostly in Lebanon, but not against Lebanon, and Hezbollah, which detests and boycotts McDonald’s, started it. But the current war (can we call it a war yet?) between Russia and Ukraine seems to put the Golden Arches Theory to bed. Still, bourgeois economic integration generally makes armed conflict less likely, even if it isn’t fail-safe.

China and Vietnam might muddle through until they open up their political systems, like South Korea and Taiwan already have, and become more averse to war than they are now. In the meantime, however, both are richer and more powerful than they have ever been, and more aggressive as well. And, with Vietnam, that could be a boon to US policy.

Our relations with China are likely to be difficult and challenging for decades, but it’s long past time to snap up an alliance with Vietnam. It’s ours for the taking, just sitting there and waiting for us to just say yes.

Michael J. Totten is a contributing editor at World Affairs and the author of five books, including Where the West Ends and The Road to Fatima Gate.

 

[ahojunk]

This Michael Totten's article is extremely biased against China.

The oil rig is closer to Triton Island than Vietnam. Vietnam is illegally occupying the most islands/reefs in the SCS.

All the other claimants to Spratly Islands already have airstrips in except China and Brunei. They have been extending their reefs and the Americans didn't say a thing. Now that China is doing it, they are making a big fuss (although China is doing it at great speed).

China needs a base for patrol and search and rescue in the SCS. If a disaster happens in the SCS and China does nothing, the rest of the world will criticize.

Damn if China does and damn if China doesn't.

I don't think Vietnam is interested in providing any search, rescue or disaster relief services in the SCS.

 

[cirr]

Real estate development on Chiguadao（Johnson South Island），right in the middle of the SCS：