April 12, 2016<\/p>\n
HANGHAI\u2014Armed only with a set of revolving teeth, the Tian Jing Hao, Asia\u2019s largest dredger, has pulled off a stunning naval upset.<\/p>\n
Under the noses of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, this Chinese vessel led a civilian armada that built almost 3,000 acres of land atop submerged reefs in the Spratly Islands, altering a strategic balance that has held since the great naval battles of World War II established U.S. primacy in the Western Pacific.<\/p>\n
The construction began shortly after the Philippines challenged China\u2019s territorial claims in the South China Sea by filing a case at a U.N.-backed tribunal in The Hague in January 2014. Now, on the eve of a legal verdict, China has achieved its objective: a new geography in the world\u2019s busiest commercial waterway where China\u2019s claims overlap with those of five neighbors, also including Vietnam and Malaysia.<\/p>\n
However the five judges decide the case, China has permanently altered facts on the ground in its favor.<\/p>\n
The seven Spratly outcrops on which it has built runways, docks, radar and other facilities give China the ability to project new military force in its contest with America for regional mastery.<\/p>\n
Possession, after all, is nine-tenths of the law. And China\u2019s island-building may not have ended. The Pentagon fears that Chinese dredgers might be planning a fresh round of construction on Scarborough Shoal that it effectively seized from the Philippines in 2012, which would give the People\u2019s Liberation Army a jumping-off point just 140 miles from Manila. It\u2019s bracing, too, for China to declare an Air Defense Identification Zone over the entire South China Sea, which China could enforce from its artificial islands. China has pledged to ignore the tribunal\u2019s findings.
\nChina\u2019s land reclamation won\u2019t change the legal case in The Hague; semisubmerged reefs don\u2019t become islands even if you build on them. Nevertheless, slow-moving Chinese dredgers have outmaneuvered the world\u2019s most powerful navy. China\u2019s political leaders calculated, correctly, that America wouldn\u2019t risk war over a bunch of uninhabited rocks and reefs to stop them.<\/p>\n
Yet what the U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, Admiral Harry Harris Jr., has termed China\u2019s \u201cGreat Wall of Sand\u201d has raised the risk of future conflicts.<\/p>\n
A regional arms race is under way. China\u2019s smaller neighbors feel bullied and threatened by what\u2019s become the sharp end of Beijing\u2019s diplomacy: powerful cutters attached to the dredgers that have unleashed environmental devastation, hacking to bits pristine coral and threatening marine life such as the migratory yellowfin and skipjack tuna.<\/p>\n
Their resentments are only partially soothed by the softer side of China\u2019s regional engagement\u2014hundreds of billions of dollars it has earmarked for infrastructure investment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
April 12, 2016 HANGHAI\u2014Armed only with a set of revolving teeth, the Tian Jing Hao, Asia\u2019s largest dredger, has pulled off a stunning naval upset. Under the noses of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, this Chinese vessel led a civilian armada that built almost 3,000 acres of land atop submerged reefs in the Spratly Islands, altering …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[184],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=569"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2827,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569\/revisions\/2827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}