surveillance confirmed the islands now boast military airstrips and facilities and are bristling with anti-ship and surface-to-air (SAM) missiles. As recently as October, a Chinese destroyer nearly collided with the USS Decatur as it was conducting a routine “ freedom of navigation” patrol in international waters near the Spratly Islands, prompting Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to cancel a scheduled trip to China.īack in 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping tried to calm regional nerves by publicly promising not to “militarize” the man-made islands. It has built seven artificial islands on shallow reefs in the South China Sea, all in areas claimed by other countries, and claimed exclusive maritime zones around them in contradiction to international law. officials, the ASEAN naval leaders were outraged - though not surprised - by what seemed like a deliberately insulting provocation by the Chinese.Ĭhina has done much more than talk, of course. Instead, the exercises gave an alarming preview of how Chinese hegemony would work.ĭuring a briefing for officers from the 10-country Association of South East Asian Nations, the chief of China’s Southern Theater Command presented a map including the “nine-dash line” border long used by Beijing to claim dominion over nearly the entire South China Sea - claims the ASEAN members do not recognize.ĭespite an international tribunal declaring in 2016 that the nine-dash demarcation had “no legal basis” in international law, the Chinese official insisted to his ASEAN counterparts not only that the 9-dash line delineated Chinese sovereignty, but that as head of Southern Theater Command, he was responsible for enforcing those boundaries. The hope was to ease years of tensions over disputed islands in the South China Sea.
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In late October, Southeast Asian navies held their first-ever joint exercises with their Chinese counterparts.