No, they do not claim it as an inland water. They want to do exactly one thing there. Drill oil. They won’t impeded shipping there.
What is there plan, close the shipping lanes that their economy utterly depends on? But if someday, someone tries, we can have a war over freedom of navigation. But that is not on the table currently.
And the Phillippines are no longer an American territory, and about 2 decades ago kicked us out and closed our bases. So no,, now they can’t come running that somebody wants their island. And as far as 20 miles from “mainland” Phillippines. WTF is mainland Phillippines? It’s an archipelago. So which island is China within 20 miles of??
Was it another unclaimed, uninhabited, unused, unowned sandspit that they built a colony on? Or did they invade it. Maybe the PI should have thought ahead before they kicked us out. If we were there, i doubt the Chinese would have moved. Decisions have consequences.
And as for China invading the PI? Seriously? Is there the slightest indication that they will? It’s far more likely that they’ll simply buy them.
Actually, they do, and they've started harassing non-Chinese fishermen in the region. They're not going to make it a closed military zone, they'll just insist that only Chinese commercial shipping is allowed through those waters, just as only Chinese shipping is allowed to navigate China's canals and rivers.
As a China-watcher who's read a fair amount of Chinese history, what sticks out is China's grabbiness with respect to territorial issues. The amusing thing is that it was a Chinese grad student who disabused me of the notion that China is a peaceful country. In a moment of candor, he said, quite logically, that big countries like China don't get that way by peaceful means. The National Review's John Derbyshire had this to say about China:
The Chinese people respond eagerly to these ultra-nationalist appeals: That is precisely why the leadership makes them. Resentment of the U.S., and a determination to enforce Chinese hegemony in Asia, are well-nigh universal among modern mainland Chinese. These emotions trump any desire for constitutional government, however much people dislike the current regime for its corruption and incompetence. Find a mainlander, preferably one under the age of thirty, and ask him which of the following he would prefer: for the Communists to stay in power indefinitely, unreformed, but in full control of the "three T's" (Tibet, Turkestan, Taiwan); or a democratic, constitutional government without the three T's. His answer will depress you. You can even try this unhappy little experiment with dissidents: same answer.Every culture has a religion. The Chinese are remarkably irreligious in the conventional sense, except for a cargo cult version of paganism that should be familiar to anyone who's heard of the prosperity gospel. What passes in China for religion is a cult of national greatness - the model for Imperial Japan's world tour in the 1930's and 1940's. I believe China's neighbors are about to discover anew what their ancestors had to put up with on a routine basis before European adventurers set firm boundaries on Chinese territorial expansion 200 years ago. Our interest in the matter is the same as our interest in preventing Japan from annexing China during the pre-war era - it's never a good idea to allow an aggressive and ideologically hostile power to grow too big. More security for them means less security for us.Is there anything we can do about all this? One thing only. We must understand clearly that there will be lasting peace in East Asia when, and only when, China abandons her atavistic fantasies of imperial hegemony, withdraws her armies from the two million square miles of other people's territory they currently occupy, and gets herself a democratic government under a rule of law. Until that day comes, if it ever does, the danger of war will be a constant in relations between China and the world beyond the Wall, as recent events in the South China Sea have illustrated. Free nations, under the indispensable leadership of the United States, must in the meantime struggle to maintain peace, using the one, single, and only method that wretched humanity, in all its millennia of experience, has so far been able to devise for that purpose: Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum.
Well then, by your logic China should be able to make claim to Catalina. Hey, it’s over twenty miles off the mainland U. S.
China wants the Spratley Island group because it extends their military’s arm in the direction of choking off Western Pacific access to the Indian Ocean.
If you didn’t know that, why are you pestering folks on a topic you know nothing about.