Within a month, President George H. W. Bush’s secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, announced that the damage at Clark was so severe that the U.S. forces would abandon it. American troops had been housed there for almost ninety years. There was brief hope that Subic Bay, which Theodore Roosevelt had placed there in 1901, could be cleaned up and reoccupied. But Philippine domestic politics then intervened. There was a sudden spasm of anti-American sentiment among the more radical members of the Philippine Senate, and that hope, too, became a chimera, and soon vanished. The Stars and Stripes were then lowered at the two ruined bases—at Clark in November 1991, and at Subic on November 24, 1992.
For the first time in a hundred years, there were no Americans at any base in the Philippines. Moreover, for the first time in five centuries, there were no foreign fighting forces in the Philippines. The island republic (which itself had only minuscule deterrent forces: a tin-pot navy of fifty elderly U.S. Navy surplus vessels and only five working jets in its air force) was now essentially defenseless. Overnight, the western Pacific had become a vacuum.
One that the Chinese military was only too ready to fill.
Confirmation that the Chinese were building themselves a deep-water navy came on that October day in 2006, in what the U.S. Navy still calls “the Kitty Hawk incident.” The details remain classified, but so far as can be established, the venerable eighty-thousand-ton carrier Kitty Hawk, at the time the oldest ship in America’s active fleet, was halfway between Okinawa and Palau. She and her escort group (a cruiser, two destroyers, seventy aircraft, perhaps a submarine or two, and a distant oiler for long-range operations) had left their home port—Yokosuka, in Tokyo Bay—some weeks before. They were performing routine exercises as Carrier Strike Group Five, reporting directly to the commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, a thousand miles away in Japan, and then to the four-star admiral commanding the Pacific Fleet, five thousand miles away in Pearl Harbor.
In October 2006, an aircraft from the elderly carrier USS Kitty Hawk operating in the Philippine Sea spotted, to general astonishment, a Chinese Song-class diesel attack submarine surfacing a mere five miles from the American strike group. This was the first indication of the Chinese ambitions for a “blue-water navy” of their own.* [U.S. Navy.; SteKrueBe.]
On this particular Thursday, the carrier commander ordered the launch of one of his Lockheed S-3 Viking submarine tracker aircraft, for no better reason than to practice looking around the immediate sea area where the strike group was operating. To the astonishment of the four crewmen aboard, a plane affectionately known as the Hoover (because of its engines’ low growl) received a message from one of the FA-18C Hornet fighters already in the sky: the white-water trail of a possible speeding periscope had been sighted. The Hoover flew swiftly overhead to check, and promptly spotted what was unmistakably (and in this case, unforgettably) a submarine surfacing from deep-water patrol, and not five miles from the carrier. It was a Chinese-made Song-class diesel attack submarine, brand new, deadly, almost exactly beneath the American carrier group, and clearly not there by accident.
News quickly reached Washington. “As big a shock as the Soviets launching Sputnik,” one Pentagon official in the Office of Naval Intelligence was quoted as saying. Memories of Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center attacks were promptly resurrected; seasoned naval officers said that those dreadful casualty figures would be thought of as minimal compared with the devastation of an American supercarrier being attacked while on patrol in international waters. An accurate torpedo strike could cause the mighty ship to roll over and sink, drowning more than five thousand sailors. The loss would be punishing on all kinds of levels.
This nightmarish possibility, however slender, has haunted America and its naval strategists in the Pacific Ocean ever since. A full-blown seaborne confrontation between the naval forces of China and the United States—the steps leading to such a hitherto-improbable scenario were initiated as far back as February 1992, eight months after the Pinatubo eruption closed down Clark Air Base and nine months before the Americans abandoned Subic Bay. America was easing herself out of the region; China was taking her place.
It began with Beijing’s formal announcement in February that 80 percent of the South China Sea was now to be formally considered Chinese territorial waters. Beijing had promulgated a sweeping and brand-new decree, its “Law on the Territorial Waters and Their Contiguous Areas.” Any objections to this unilateral nationalization of the area would be dismissed out of hand; any incursions by uninvited and hostile vessels would be certain to have consequences. It was a vivid demonstration of the way that a newly emboldened, and newly rich, China was about to begin behaving.
The inference in Washington was stark: Beijing had clearly decided that with the closure of the Philippine bases, and the relative lack of American hardware in the area, the United States was now either unwilling or unable fully to protect the waters lying between the Philippines and the Chinese coast.
China’s thinking here was part of a much larger regional doctrine, one dominated by the country’s abiding historical and philosophical faith in what it likes to call the First Island Chain. This chain, which one can see on any map and is constructed by the tectonic forces of the Ring of Fire, is a ragged line of islands that runs from the tip of the Kamchatkan Peninsula in the north to Borneo in the south. China sees this as an inalienably pan-Asian feature of geography, but also as a protective outer cloak, a carapace, that shields China from its mostly non-Asian adversaries to its east.4 Secure the chain, goes China’s current belief, and you secure Asia. Make the green waters within it your own, and you are kept safe.
Map of the Western Pacific: U.S. and Chinese Military * [Nick Springer/Springer Cartographics LLC.]
The admirals and generals in Beijing believe this western Pacific demarcation zone should be kept sacrosanct. In China’s vision of an ideal world, there would be no American forces whatsoever, no non-Asian forces whatsoever, in the waters anywhere inshore of the line. Already China and its more conservative neighbor nations take a dim view of the enormous American presence within the region. The American warships in Japan; American Marines on Okinawa; American soldiers and aircraft in Korea; and until 1991, the presence of both kinds of equipment in the Philippines; together with American GIs dotted about in hundreds of bases just about everywhere—all these have long amounted to what Beijing considers an unpardonable and unsustainable affront.
Just for now, rhetoric was the only weapon China was using in the region, with hostile declarations made at conferences, fierce rhapsodies published in the government press, claims to historical rights, and predictions of a glorious and laowei-free—a foreigner-free—future offered in schools to Chinese children. Yet in the South China Sea (one and a half million square miles of shipping lanes and oil and gas fields and untold seafloor mining possibilities), more than mere rhetoric is being employed, and a flash point is being born, a danger to all.
For at the heart of the new South China Sea problem is another demarcation zone made up of scores of tiny islands that constitute what since 1947 has been known to the Chinese as, somewhat bizarrely, the Nine-Dash Line. The outside world each year sends thousands of its cargo vessels and oil tankers through the crowded shipping lanes here. But Beijing says this territory belongs to China, and its leaders are taking extraordinary and dangerous-looking steps to make sure this is so. If a flash point is in the process of being made, then its axis is the Nine-Dash Line.5
This dashed, or dotted, line was first drawn onto maps in 1947, by officials of what was then the Chinese Nationalist government, the Kuomintang. The intention was to show the world that, under the terms of the Cairo and Potsdam declarations, China was taking charge of those islands in the South China Sea that were once seized by Japan and had now been surrendered. The line joining them all, drawn by some long-forgotten Chinese bureaucrat, was udder-shaped, dewlap-shaped, cow’s-tongue-shaped—the name depended on the local language used to describe it—and first ex
tended southward from the waters to the east of Taiwan. It proceeded down inside the main Philippine territory of Luzon, farther down inshore of the island of Borneo, before recurving northward, steering well clear of any islands claimed by Indonesia, heading up along the Vietnamese coast toward the Gulf of Tonkin, and finally stopping some two hundred miles shy of the large Chinese-owned island of Hainan. (There were eleven dashes on the original map, with two more drawn in the gulf between Hainan and Vietnam; these two were later erased.)
Informal though that first Kuomintang map may have been, its boundaries were immediately adopted by the Communist government when the People’s Republic was declared in 1949. The Nine-Dash Line became, by the stated policy of the Politburo, the outer limit of Chinese sovereignty, and it has remained so through successive Beijing regimes, no matter what others might say.
The Nine-Dash Line, drawn by China as a series of penciled lines on a postwar map of the South China Sea, showed the area of ocean still claimed by the Chinese as their own. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy insists it can act with impunity within the line; others, the United States included, dispute the claim, hotly.* [UNCLOS and CIA.]
And they say a great deal. There are scores of islands within the line, most notably the Spratly Islands down south, close to the Philippines, and the Paracel Islands up north, near Hainan. The governments of Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, Vietnam, and even Taiwan all insist they have historic claim to the Spratlys. Vietnam and Taiwan say the same about various Paracel Islands. China, however, dismisses all these claims with an airy wave of the hand: it wants them all. And however long it takes, and whatever resistance Beijing might encounter, it intends to get them all.
The first Chinese land seizure within the Nine-Dash Line was of a low horseshoe-shaped bank of uninhabited coral lying in shallow waters off the Spratlys, little more than a hundred miles from the Philippine coast. It lay well inside that country’s exclusive economic zone. It was known as Mischief Reef,6 and only very rarely did anyone make visits there.
But in January 1995, a Philippine fishing boat did sail to Mischief Reef, and discovered something unimaginable: four enormous platforms had been built in the shallows behind the reef, and on top of them, eight large prefabricated octagonal huts, dozens of feet above the water, and supported by steel stilts. Each hut had a satellite dish on the roof.
The fishermen were even more astonished when eight armed vessels suddenly appeared over the horizon, and a posse of angry Chinese sailors boarded their little boat and declared the crew prisoners, charged with trespassing. It did no good for the fishermen to protest that the reef was actually Philippine territory; the Chinese laughed at them. The men were detained for a week. When eventually they were released, it was only on the condition that they swear never to reveal what they had seen.
Once they were safely back home, they naturally told all. The Manila government was stunned and furious. The Chinese ambassador was hauled in to explain himself, and he angered the Filipinos further by cheekily suggesting that the huts were no more than shelters for itinerant Chinese fishermen, an explanation that no one in Manila believed.
But all the angry talk did nothing. Nor did the softer approach, which had the Chinese president Jiang Zemin visiting Manila in 1996 and singing a duet of “Love Me Tender” with Philippine president Fidel Ramos during a karaoke cruise around Manila Bay. Still, the structures on Mischief Reef not only remained but were reinforced with concrete and searchlights—and a few years later, they even acquired a helipad.
One of the region’s wiseacres, the Singaporean founder-premier, the late Lee Kuan Yew, who had a fondness for sardonic wisdom, offered an adroit summary of what was taking place: China, he said, was behaving “like a big dog going up to a tree and marking its presence, so that the smaller dogs in the region will know that the big dog has been past and will come back.”
The dog tries to name its trees, too. In the years since its annexation of Mischief Reef, China has given Chinese names to all the various specks of land in the region—and to further confuse navigators, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines have given them their own names, too. Most seasoned mariners who are passing through along the long-sea routes stick to the islands’ older chart names, nearly all of them in English: Scarborough Reef, Truro Shoal, Helen Reef, Robert Island, the Crescent Group, Macclesfield Bank, the Reed Tablemount, Bombay Castle, the Royal Charlotte Reef, Second Thomas Shoal, Rifleman Bank. The list is vast, the words conjuring up images of Victorian seamen, with their sextants and telescopes, spotting yet another low rise of coral and palm, or of shallowing green seas, and marking in indelible blue ink names from home, or of famous ships, or of long-dead sailors of renown.
Whatever the names, whatever the claims, China is now bulldozing her way through all objections, and literally. She plans to build airstrips, barracks, schools, even whole towns on these plainly titled islands, making each as permanent a part of China as appears symbolically possible. Buried in the middle of the Paracel group, for example, is Woody Island, the scene of much recent activity. It is among the largest islands in the South China Sea, though occupying a mere six hundred forty acres, and is low and flat, sandy, palm-covered and tropical, and quite undistinguished.
The onetime significance of Woody Island derived mainly from the fact that so many countries have wanted to plant their flags on it, for reasons more symbolic than strategic. It is in theoretically international waters, close enough to the Chinese coast to appear on old Chinese maps, including those of the famous Muslim eunuch-sailor Zheng He, who went off to Africa in the fifteenth century and brought back a giraffe for the imperial court in Peking. Woody Island was close enough to Japan for it to be occupied in the 1940s; then the Nationalist and later the Communist Chinese took it over in the late 1940s. The French abruptly seized it on behalf of the Vietnamese in the mid-1950s, and then the Vietnamese claimed it for themselves.
A few fishermen’s huts, steles, and beacons were thrown up by the temporary Woody Island tenants, and from time to time soldiers were garrisoned there. Someone built an airstrip, initially quite basic, and it was given a wash and brush-up by the Chinese in 1990. But little truly substantial or permanent-looking occurred there, until that time when the previously ever-watchful Americans turned their backs, or left the area after the eruption of Pinatubo. Then the visits began, and the construction—all pretty timid at first, but culminating in the arrival of a party of Nine-Dash Line–minded Chinese who moved there surreptitiously in 2006 and started to turn Woody Island into something quite different and, from the American perspective, dangerously so, and almost overnight.
Low, sandy, and useless, Woody Island is now the city of Sansha, and it serves proudly as the administrative capital of all China’s supposed properties in the entirety of the South China Sea. This means it directs all the day-to-day businesses of a vast empire of claimed real estate—and ironically, though it is the smallest of all Chinese regional capital cities by population, it wields power over by far the largest administrative area. It has 630 permanent residents, mostly fishermen, but its reach now extends across a notional seven hundred thousand square miles of ship-busy, oil- and gas-rich, island-speckled ocean, a territory the same size as Alaska or Algeria, and very much bigger than Texas.
Sansha is not merely modern and clean, and designed to be a magnet (if just now a little improbably) for tourists of the future; it is also rapidly gathering military muscle. It has a modern airfield with a runway now almost two miles long, and it can handle the newest fighters and transport aircraft. There is a large and well-protected modern dock, easily able to accommodate both frigates or destroyers, and which will likely be used as a forward operating base for the scores of new patrol corvettes that China’s naval dockyards are now said to be turning out “like sausages.” The island, in short, appears to have been turned into the beginnings of a significant military headquarters, one that augments the large strategic submarine base on Hainan Island to the north,
and that is well able to police and control the seas between the Chinese mainland and faraway Borneo.
And as if that were not enough, Sansha already seems to have spawned a subsidiary down south in the much more widely contested Spratly Islands. In 2014, Chinese sappers were seen to be dredging on the western edge of this huge area of shallows and reefs and banks, beside what is generally known as Fiery Cross Reef. Within weeks, satellite images showed a dock and a two-mile-long airstrip; within months, the Chinese navy corvettes were to be seen on every horizon. Fishermen on the nearby islands in the Philippines were scared of being harassed and told by Chinese soldiers they could no longer work their traditional fishing grounds.
The change in status of the sea and its islands and islets and reefs appears to be relentless, unstoppable. Much the same thing as took place on Fiery Cross is now happening nearby, on Johnson South Reef, where there was a deadly confrontation with Vietnamese sailors in 1988—there, too, dredging and concreting are under way, and yet another new island is being manufactured. One by one, strings of newly engineered, artificially expanded islands are sprouting up: seven so far, seventeen habitable others still to go, and yet more on Beijing’s radar.
Coral reefs and uninhabited islands all across the South China Sea are currently being seized and claimed by China, whose construction teams are blasting and dredging and pouring cement to create new “weather observation stations” or, rather, the United States believes, military staging posts.* [Armed Forces of the Philippines.]
And it is all being done most cleverly, with Machiavellian stealth. The steps that China is taking are individually small enough to make retaliation difficult—an American carrier strike force going after the occupation of a lonely mid-ocean reef would seem ludicrously disproportionate. But when these steps are viewed collectively, they become deliberate strides and, with so many already taken, well-nigh impossible to reverse. It is a typically Chinese strategy: infuriating and clever, and right out of Sun Tzu’s handbook.