Warming of ties slows Beijing’s Panatag Shoal plan
BEIJING—China’s next big target for construction of an artificial island in the South China Sea has long been assumed to be a cluster of rocks poking above sapphire waters near the Philippines.
For several years, Chinese Coast Guard vessels and fishing trawlers have hovered around the reef, known to the world as Scarborough Shoal and to Filipinos as Panatag Shoal. Giant dredges, suitable for building a military base, were recently rumored to be on their way there.
But the election in May of a new President in the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, who has since showered threats and epithets on the United States, has changed China’s calculation.
That does not mean China has given up on the long-term goal of what could be a vast military base on Panatag Shoal. But for the moment, the plans appear to be postponed.
More important for Beijing right now, Chinese analysts say, is friendship with Mr. Duterte and an effort to wean his country away from its treaty alliance with Washington.
Transforming a shoal right under his nose would ruin any chance of that, these analysts say.
Irrational move
“It would be irrational to build it into a fortress now,” said Zhang Baohui, a professor of international relations at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.
“The government would like the Philippines to at least remain neutral in the rivalry between the United States and China. Now at least they have a chance,” he said.
In July, an international tribunal in The Hague delivered a harsh rebuke to China’s activities in the South China Sea, including its construction of artificial islands in the Spratly archipelago, not far from the Philippines.
But China has ignored the decision.
The Obama administration praised the ruling as legally binding but refrained from trumpeting it.
The reasoning was that little could be done, short of risking military confrontation, to stop the construction of facilities like hangars for fighter jets and buildings for radar and surface-to-air missiles.
Military bases
Three of seven artificial islands in the Spratlys are designed as military bases, the American military says.
Among them, Zamora Reef (Subi Reef) has a harbor bigger than Pearl Harbor, and another, Panganiban Reef (Mischief Reef), has a land perimeter nearly the size of the District of Columbia’s, a submarine warfare officer in the US Navy, Thomas Shugart, said in a paper issued this past week.
Together, the three islands could probably accommodate as many as 17,000 military personnel and support aircraft able to deter or counter an American military intervention, said Shugart, who is serving as a senior military fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington but writes as an independent analyst.
Even bigger prize
Panatag Shoal, with a deep lagoon covering nearly 155 square kilometers, offers an even bigger prize as a potential Chinese military base.
“The picture would become even worse were China to build and militarize a similar island base at Scarborough Shoal,” Shugart wrote.
Both China and the Philippines claim the shoal, which the United States used as a firing range during the Vietnam War. Until 2012, Chinese and Filipino fishermen operated there.
Then China seized the shoal, and Chinese Coast Guard vessels have chased away Filipino fishermen ever since.
Overlapping claims
Vietnam, Brunei and Malaysia also have overlapping claims in the South China Sea.
Addressing the UN General Assembly on Saturday, Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Binh Minh called on the claimants to exercise self-restraint and solve the disputes by peaceful means.
Pham said the parties should abide by international law, including the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and respect diplomatic and legal processes.
Just 280 km from the Philippine coast and Subic Bay, where the United States stations fighter jets and naval vessels, Panatag Shoal is in a particularly strategic place.
Its conversion into a military base would enable China to project military power across the South China Sea from a triangle of bases formed by the shoal, the Spratly archipelago to its south and the Paracel Islands farther to the west and closer to the Chinese mainland, Shugart said.
Anticipation regarding China’s plans for Panatag Shoal has been building since March, when, at a meeting in Washington, US President Barack Obama warned President Xi Jinping of China against taking action that could activate American treaty obligations to the Philippines, said a senior US state department official.
In the heated arena of South China Sea politics in China, the shoal—known as Huangyan Island here—has become a touchstone for both hawks and more moderate voices.
Two fiery speeches at campuses in southern China in July by a popular current affairs television personality, Jin Canrong of Renmin University in Beijing, drew support from online chat forums.
Construction next year
He said that China would begin construction on Panatag Shoal next year, and that despite the warnings from America, “the spirit of President Xi is, ‘We must do it.’”
Jin described piling sand on coral at Panatag as an ambitious project that would take four years but said that China needed to complete it to achieve de facto military control over the South China Sea.
In an interview after his speeches, Jin said the tribunal ruling would have no effect on China’s plans for Panatag Shoal.
Still, Mr. Duterte’s openness to talking with China, and his cantankerous attitude toward the Americans, would probably delay the construction plans for Panatag Shoal, Jin said.
A pause, he said, would allow for talks between China and Southeast Asian nations on a so-called code of conduct to lay down rules of behavior in the South China Sea.
On the heels of Mr. Duterte’s election, China and the Philippines began preparatory talks last month at a meeting in Hong Kong between former Philippine President Fidel V. Ramos and Wu Shicun, the president of the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, a Chinese government think tank.
The spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, Lu Kang, said on Friday that China looked forward to Mr. Duterte’s visiting Beijing soon. Reports from New York Times Service and AP/TVJ
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