Reading Between the Lines: The Next Spratly Legal Dispute
Published: March 21, 2019
In August 2018, the HMS Albion sailed through the Paracel Islands to assert freedom of navigation and challenge China’s claim to straight baselines around the island group. The United Kingdom’s challenge was the first operation by a non-U.S. vessel in the South China Sea that was analogous to the United States’ now well-publicized freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs). Three months later, the USS Chancellorsville undertook an identical challenge to Beijing’s baselines around the Paracels. Similar operations had been undertaken by the USS Decatur in October 2016 and the USS Chafee in October 2017.
The public discussion of South China Sea FONOPs most often focuses on those that take place within 12 nautical miles of disputed features. Those operations are meant either to challenge China’s demand for prior notification for innocent passage through the territorial sea or to assert that there is no territorial sea around naturally submerged banks and reefs. But the steady pace of U.S. and now UK operations challenging China’s declared baselines around the Paracels warrants just as much attention, both because of the egregiousness of that claim and because of a fear that Beijing will soon declare similar baselines around the Spratlys.
Article: https://amti.csis.org/reading-between-lines-next-spratly-dispute/
Scholarly article but if China asserts this area as being their's, you can see it's actually pretty far away from China, surely, they won't be calling all of this its own.
How about these "artificial islands" one hears about? I'm curious as to what they even are.
What exactly are China’s artificial islands, and why are they so important? As it turns out, China’s island-building plan sits on a contentious intersection of technology, politics, and the environment.
How do you build an island?
For those wondering what an artificial island is made of, the answer is the same thing most islands are made of: sand. The process for building these islands is remarkably simple, although the technology involved is imposing.
The first requirement for an island is a base to build on. Naturally formed islands don’t float in the water; rather, an island is simply the top, visible part of a land mass that is mostly underwater.
To construct its artificial islands, China builds atop already existing, islands, rocks, and even coral reefs. Building an island that can support airstrips and other military installations requires a lot of sand, however. To gather it, China uses a fleet of dredgers, ships designed to pick up and move materials from the seafloor. These dredgers use large tubes with cutting attachments at the end to grind up material on the seafloor and suck it up. From there, the material is carried through pipes or hoses and dumped on top of reefs, rocks, and other existing formations.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/chinas-artificial-islands-news-rumors/
