Chinese control of South China Sea ‘short of war’ is complete

Great Power War ^ | 9/24/18 | USA Features

[SleeperCatcher]

In a meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis in June, Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed that Bejing “cannot lose even one inch of the territory” in the South China Sea. That’s about as plain a warning as one gets: China will defend, militarily, it’s outsized claims in a body of water through which one-third of all global trade passes.

The U.S. would have little difficulty in taking out militarily significant targets on any of the islands in question. But that’s not really the point.

Through the construction of these artificial islands-turned-military bases, China acted brazenly but in a calculated way: When the decision was made to begin dredging sand and building artificial islands, Xi and the Chinese Communist Party calculated that no one in the region, including the United States, would directly challenge the construction.

[piasa]

There’s a LOT worthwhile about them, that doesn’t have to be on them. Every bit of land adjacent to water includes territorial waters, depending on what country is the internationally recognized owner of the bit of land. And beyond territorial waters, are economic exclusion zones. It’s a vast area. Once a country has a toehold on such a bit, or makes a submerged reef into one by building on it or dumping tons of rock on it, it can claim all these other territories in all directions around it. The problem that’s raised now is that no longer can the true owner, say, the Philippines, or Vietnam, expect to be recognized as such when China has enough power and money to buy the international recognition to make it “official.”

[piasa]

If China does this all over the South China Sea, it can completely take over the sea to the point it has power over who can transit, who defends sea lanes [or cannot] ... and all that territorial water and EEZ contains vast amounts of oil a d gas and fish and maybe extractable minerals.