China may not have troops or planes in Syria but that doesn’t mean it won’t be a part of World War III.
Even as the eyes of the world are now trained squarely on the Mid-East where the Russian and Iranian assault on Aleppo is set to draw the Saudis and the Turks into a ground war, the dispute over a tiny chain of islands in the South China Sea is still simmering.
China has announced that their military is fully prepared to defend the islands in the South China Sea, having conducted several successful test flights at a newly-built airfield in the area. China’s Navy chief, Wu Shengli, said that China is confident that it is capable of defending the sovereignty and security of the islands against outside threats.
When last we checked in on the dispute over Beijing’s land reclamation efforts in the South China Sea, several dozen protesters from the Philippines were camped out on Pagasa island in a demonstration aimed at raising awareness of what they say is an illegal occupation of the Spratlys.
To let China tell it, it’s the other way around.
That is, the Filipino troop presence in the archipelago represents an illegal occupation of territory that belongs to Beijing and China would be well within its rights to forcibly expel the occupying army.
Submitted by Ryan Opsal via OilPrice.com,
The South China Sea is continually paraded as a region rich in oil and gas deposits; however, no one really knows what’s there with any degree of accuracy. Furthermore, these possible deposits are shrouded in conflict that will not abate anytime soon, and will most likely worsen with an intensification of the security competition between China and the United States along with its regional allies, which is tightly related to these disputes.
One topic we’ve spent quite a bit of time discussing is the rise of the PLA navy.
2015 was the year Xi reasserted China’s maritime might - and not just in the South Pacific.