China About to Make a Move? : Obscure Spratly Islands provide Beijing with a tempting takeover target

For most Americans, as for most Asians, the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea remain a place of obscure insignificance. Yet the Spratlys could soon become alarmingly well-known. Strategists count a number of potential flash points in Asia. The Spratlys may be moving toward the top of the list.

The barren Spratlys, which include about 200 islets, reefs and atolls, sprawl across 150,000 miles of the South China Sea, an area about the size of Montana. Vietnam, China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Brunei and Malaysia claim sovereignty over all or part of the territory.

Why would anyone covet the Spratlys? Because the seabed around them is believed to contain large deposits of oil and natural gas. That’s enough of a prize for some of the claimants to be ready to fight for.

Seven years ago China, which now occupies eight of the islets, and Vietnam, which occupies 25, fought a brief naval engagement in the area. China won. More recently China again paraded its power to chase off an aging Filipino ship that had brought some journalists to view Chinese gun emplacements on the aptly named Mischief Reef. The show of force was a reminder that, more than any other country, China is capable of putting military might behind its assertions of sovereignty.

China’s military modernization of recent years projects a force that would assure its being the dominant naval power among Asian states in the South China Sea. The Spratlys are about 750 miles from the Chinese mainland, and only about 150 miles from the Philippines, but nonetheless lie within the area that China has long claimed as its traditional sphere of influence.

Three years ago China promised to settle competing claims to the Spratlys by negotiations. Its recent behavior calls that agreement into question. Perhaps more compellingly, it has shown others in East Asia that it is ready and capable of asserting itself as an active, indeed, as the dominant regional power. The United States, along with the European Union, has called for a peaceful resolution of the Spratlys dispute. What seems more likely is that China will use strength of arms to seize ever more of the territory. An East Asia that has long feared that one day it might face a militarily revived Japan may be about to discover what the real military threat in the region is.