The South China Sea (15 page)

In November 1975, for the first time, the dispute between Beijing and Hanoi over the islands appeared in public when the Chinese paper
Guangming Ribao
criticised the Vietnamese territorial claims. At the time China simply didn't have the capacity to conduct a sustained military operation as far south as the Spratlys. Nonetheless, it was quietly making preparations. During the rest of the decade it consolidated its positions in the Paracels, enlarging the harbour and opening a runway on Woody Island in 1978. A decade later it would be able to make its presence felt in a decisive way.

For the first 30 years of its existence, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy had been a junior service, dedicated to coastal defence. The Beijing leadership assumed that any war would be won on the land and the navy's role would be like guerrilla warfare at sea: hundreds of small boats harrying attackers from all angles and cutting off their supply lines. (The 1974 Paracels operation had been highly unusual and required months of special training.) But by 1982, the combination of Deng Xiaoping at the apex of the Communist Party and Admiral Liu Huaqing in charge of the navy would bring about major change. Liu had been a loyal Communist since childhood and made a name for himself in the most sensitive political and counter-infiltration sections of the military and in battles against nationalist forces during China's civil war.
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The war also brought him into contact with Deng and their partnership became mutually beneficial. The story of the next decade was, to quote Professor John Garver, the ‘interaction of bureaucratic and national interests’
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or perhaps, to paraphrase the
Catch–22
character Milo Minderbinder, ‘what's good for Liu is good for the Navy and what's good for the Navy is good for China’. Deng wanted China to regain its economic strength – for which it needed resources and reliable trade routes. He was also worried about the risk of the country being encircled by the Soviet Union and its allies, including Vietnam. Liu was ambitious and, along with the rest of the naval leadership, seeking prestige. Expanding China's position in the South China Sea was an objective that pleased them all.

In contrast to Mao, who had favoured self-reliance and built up industries in China's heartland, far from external threats, Deng's economic reforms favoured trade and, therefore, the coast. The first special economic zone was created in Shenzhen, close to Hong Kong, in 1980 and was followed by 14 more in other coastal cities in 1984. The first industry opened to foreign investment was offshore oil and the first two rounds of bidding, in 1982 and 1984, focused on blocks off the coast of Hong Kong and Hainan. Deng's policy depended upon access to international trade routes and as early as 4 March 1979, possibly after lobbying from Liu, he had issued the first instructions for the navy to organise long-distance missions.

As soon as Liu took charge of the navy, he began to formulate the strategy he called ‘active green-water defence’. This meant controlling the sea between the inshore ‘brown water’ and the ‘blue water’ far offshore in order to allow for defence in depth and shield the rapidly growing coastal cities from attack.
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Liu defined ‘green water’ as the area between the Chinese coast and what he called the ‘first island chain’ – stretching from Japan to Taiwan and on to the Philippines, Borneo and Singapore. New ships were commissioned, bases along the southern coast and in the Paracels were expanded and intelligence was gathered. According to the Chinese Navy's own published history, in April 1983 the Oceanographic Bureau was ordered to begin surveys of conditions just north of the Spratly Islands. Then, in May, two ships were sent as far south as James Shoal, the submerged coral reef over 1,500 kilometres from Hainan Island and just 100 kilometres from the Malaysian coast but declared the ‘southernmost point of Chinese territory’. On board were dozens of navigators and naval college instructors.
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In 1984, research vessels surveyed most of the area of the Spratlys, almost up to the coast of the Philippines. In February 1985
a flotilla made a long-distance cruise to Antarctica. By 1987, the navy was ready for expeditionary warfare.

The Chinese leadership was concerned that, even as it was becoming more dependent upon the South China Sea, it was losing ground in the Spratlys. In June 1983, Malaysia had joined Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines by occupying reefs. The list of options for a navy seeking forward bases in the South China Sea was getting shorter. It was time for action and the moment was opportune. The economy was growing and providing extra resources for the navy. Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms had ended the threat from the Soviet Union and relations with the United States were better than they'd ever been. China had nothing to lose in provoking a conflict with Vietnam. Ever since Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia in December 1978 and China's punitive invasion of northern Vietnam two months later, relations between the two had been little better than hostile.
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Vietnam was internationally isolated because of its ongoing occupation of Cambodia and was unlikely to get more than verbal support from its main ally, Moscow. According to the China watcher Taylor Fravel, in early 1987 a decision was taken in Beijing to occupy territory.
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Now all the leadership needed was a pretext.

In March 1987, a meeting of UNESCO mandated countries to establish monitoring stations as part of a survey of the world's oceans. No-one, not even the Vietnamese, seems to have noticed that one of the sites proposed by China was in the Spratlys. On 4 April the Chinese Academy of Sciences sent off another mission to survey the islands. In May the navy sent a flotilla to join them, practising resupply and war-fighting along the way and depositing a concrete block on Fiery Cross Reef (Yongshu in Chinese), declaring it Chinese territory. More surveys took place over the following months until, on 6 November 1987, the Beijing leadership gave the green light for an observation post to be built on Fiery Cross Reef. Unusually for a civilian research centre, the construction plans included a two-storey barracks, a wharf, a helicopter hangar and a landing pad.

Fiery Cross Reef would not have been anyone's first choice for a research station. At high water it was almost entirely submerged, except for a single metre-high rock at its southwestern end. The rest was composed of a ring of sharp coral, 25 kilometres long and 7 kilometres wide. The main reason it
wasn't already occupied was that there was almost nothing there to occupy. But this did not deter Liu's navy. On 21 January 1988 four Chinese ships arrived with engineers and construction materials and set about creating something that could resemble dry land. The following day a Vietnamese ship arrived to see what was going on but left without incident.
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Up until that day the Vietnamese had probably felt quite secure in that part of the Spratlys: they occupied everything worth occupying. On London Reefs, 72 kilometres south of Fiery Cross, and on Union Bank, about 93 kilometres to its east, they controlled almost everything sticking out of the water. Fiery Cross was little more than a shipping hazard on the route back home. But they'd underestimated Chinese naval engineering. For nine days the new arrivals proved their commitment to the marine environment by blasting channels through the coral reef and then dredging up enough coral debris to form 8,000 square metres of dry land.
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The Vietnamese woke up to what was happening and on 31 January sent two ships to deposit a landing party on Fiery Cross Reef. But the mission failed in the face of severe weather and superior Chinese numbers. On 18 February the Chinese went one step further, landing sailors on the only feature on London Reefs that the Vietnamese didn't occupy: Cuarteron Reef (Huayang in Chinese), a bean-shaped rocky outcrop about a metre and a half above sea level. The Vietnamese were incensed and Hanoi made a public protest: Cuarteron was just 19 kilometres from their nearest outpost. The Vietnamese media warned that China would face ‘all the consequences’ if it didn't leave the two reefs. The sea was rough and the politics was about to get rougher.

Almost a month later, the Vietnamese, fearing a repeat of the Cuarteron incident, moved to secure the features on Union Bank that they didn't occupy. Union Bank is a large underwater mound, around 470 square kilometres in area, covered in coral reefs that stick out of the water in 31 places. The only feature on Union Bank that comes close to most people's definition of an ‘island’ is Sin Cowe Island which, in 1988, hosted a Vietnamese garrison. Seventeen kilometres southeast of Sin Cowe Island lies Johnson Reef (Chigua in Chinese, Da Gac Ma in Vietnamese) which is mostly underwater although a few rocks break the surface, the highest being just over a metre above the waves. Less than 2 kilometres to the
north of Johnson Reef is Collins Reef (sometimes called Johnson Reef North) and 15 kilometres to its northeast is Lansdowne Reef, both equally inhospitable and mostly submerged at high tide.
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On the night of 13 March, the Vietnamese Navy despatched three ships: one each to Johnson, Collins and Lansdowne reefs. Unfortunately for those on board, the ancient rust-buckets
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were detected by the Chinese side, which moved to intercept them with a larger and more heavily armed force. At first light on 14 March 1988, the Vietnamese successfully grabbed Collins and Lansdowne (and remain in control there to this day). The Johnson Reef operation turned into a disaster. The exact sequence of events is still disputed but it seems the Vietnamese landed first, in a small boat full of construction equipment, and planted their flags on the coral. Chinese troops then arrived and tried to remove the flags. The two sides shouted at each other and then scuffled. The Chinese accounts say a Vietnamese soldier shot and wounded one of the Chinese force that then retreated as the Vietnamese ships opened fire with machine guns. The Vietnamese say it was the other way around: the Chinese killed the deputy commander of the Vietnamese landing force and withdrew before their ships opened fire. Strangely, a propaganda film released by the Chinese Navy in 2009 to celebrate the navy's 60th anniversary gives more credence to the Vietnamese version. The video, now available on YouTube, was shot from one of the Chinese ships and shows the Vietnamese force standing knee deep in water as the tide rises over the reef. Huge spouts of water then erupt around the Vietnamese troops as the Chinese ships open fire. Within seconds the thin line of men has completely disappeared and 64 lie dead in the water: the machine guns are Chinese and the victims Vietnamese. The Chinese won the battle of Johnson Reef with a turkey shoot.

With the three ships that supported the Vietnamese operation also destroyed, the Chinese had a freer hand over the next few weeks. They already occupied three reefs: Fiery Cross, Cuarteron and Johnson. By 8 April 1988 they had occupied three more: Kennan or McKennan Reef – a part of Union Bank 19 kilometres east of Vietnamese-occupied Sin Cowe Island; Subi Reef – 15 kilometres from the Philippine-occupied Thitu Island; and Gaven Reef – part of Tizard Bank on which sit both Itu Aba Island, the largest of the Spratlys and the only one occupied by Taiwan, and Namyit Island, occupied by Vietnam.

The list demonstrates the degree of planning and resources that the Chinese state had devoted to the operation. In the face of armed resistance and bad weather it had occupied six mostly submerged coral reefs and constructed living platforms, resupply facilities and defensive emplacements in just over two months. Moreover, each of the six was strategically located within a few kilometres of the main islands held by China's rivals and yet each had been entirely unoccupied before 1988. The survey missions had done their jobs excellently. China now had much more than a toehold in the Spratlys.

Liu was triumphant. His ‘green water’ strategy was now a reality. Deng rewarded him with the rank of full admiral, a place on both the Party and state Central Military Commissions and a seat in the National People's Congress. Four years later, after Deng's retirement, he became a member of the innermost circle of the Chinese Communist Party: the Standing Committee of the Politburo. In all these roles he continued to push for more and more resources to be devoted to the navy. He demanded, and got, bigger ships, better technology and support for his dream of a fully capable ‘blue water’ navy. But what had China as a whole gained? It now had new bases in the South China Sea, but what else? The best that can be said is that the occupations have prevented other countries advancing their positions. No-one else has been able to drill for oil or monopolise fishing activity in the region but despite all the effort that has gone into seizing and building bases, neither has China.

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From the day he was elected, the Philippine president, Fidel (‘Eddie’) Ramos, had to contend with a powerful wave of anti-American feeling. Resentment at Washington's earlier support for the Marcos dictatorship had combined with a deeper current of nationalism, resulting in the Philippine Senate voting, in September 1991, to evict the United States from its two vast military sites. Clark Air Force Base had actually already closed on 15 June 1991 when Mount Pinutabo erupted, showering it with thousands of tons of volcanic debris. The vote meant it would not be repaired. On 24 November 1992, the Stars and Stripes was pulled down at Subic Bay Naval Base for the last time. The next day the Philippines was, in
effect, defenceless. Worse, the annual subsidy that the US had provided to the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) disappeared too. Underfunded for years, the navy and air force were in no position to fill the gap left by the Americans’ departure. The navy of a country of innumerable islands comprised around 50 vintage Second World War American surplus patrol and transport ships and the air force possessed five functional F-5 jets, built in 1966.

After years of economic stagnation interspersed with political chaos, Ramos’ vision was to try to use the country's untapped oil potential to lift its people out of grinding poverty. Ever since the first explorations of the early 1970s there had been hopes that further riches lay offshore. So, in May 1994, the Ramos government secretly approved an application from a Philippine company, Alcorn Petroleum (a subsidiary of an American company, Vaalco Energy), to conduct a paper assessment of the oil and gas potential in an area off the coast of Palawan. Although it didn't involve any survey or drilling work at sea, this was, arguably, a violation of the Manila Declaration, a 1992 agreement between the then six members of ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) to ‘exercise restraint’ in their actions in the South China Sea. In 1992 China had awarded drilling rights to an American company, Crestone, in an area further to the west and Vietnam had awarded another American company, Conoco, blocks that overlapped the Crestone concession (see Chapter 5 for more on this). Nonetheless, after news of the survey leaked out, China protested against what it saw as an infringement of its own sovereignty. The fuse was lit for a regional crisis.