Dredge sent
WORLD: Beijing has deployed a powerful new dredge in the South China Sea as it prepares to accelerate its programme of seizing disputed islands next year.
CHINA: Beijing has deployed a powerful new dredge in the South China Sea as it prepares to accelerate its programme of seizing disputed islands next year.
China wants to expand its territorial claims in the area because the islands are rich in natural resources and are important strategic posts for navigational and military purposes.
A report in the People’s Daily newspaper, which is controlled by Beijing, boasts of the new territory that has been claimed this year in a signal to neighbours and the West that it will not abandon its island-building projects.
The new dredge will be used to increase the size of the islands it has claimed. China has already built military air strips, munitions warehouses, radar facilities and missile platforms. It has also installed libraries, sports stadiums, cinemas and housing.
China claims it needs the islands for sea rescue, disaster prevention and relief, for oceanic research, weather observation and ecological protection and for navigational safety and fishing.
According to the Global Times, the state-run English-language daily, China has started building on more than 29 hectares of newly reclaimed land this year.
Five years after Beijing established the city of Sansha in the Paracel islands in the South China Sea, it says that the ecology has improved, with 2.5 million trees planted on the land and 600 corals grown in the sea to lure seabirds and sea turtles. Fishermen have been moved into permanent, concrete homes, powered by a floating nuclear plant.
On Woody Island, home to the government seat of Sansha, the population is growing. Enrolment at a local school, which has its own bus and flies the national flag, has jumped from six pupils last year to 32 this year, with teachers assigned from the mainland.
Chinese tourists are also visiting. An airport opened on the island at the end of last year, and has welcomed more than 680 civilian flights, the report states.
Satellite pictures released this month showed that China had developed about 30ha of land that could be used for military purposes in the Spratly and Paracel islands. The images, released by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, based in Washington, showed hangars, missile storage centres and radar bases.
Malaysia, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam and Brunei all make territorial claims for the Spratly Islands, which lie east of Vietnam, west of the Philippines and south of China.
Beijing insists that they belong to China and has used dredges to enlarge atolls, reefs and shoals before building on them. In October Chinese fighter aircraft took part in drills around the Paracel Islands. – The Times