Translating into Chinese from the fourth paragraph of the following article
What’s behind Beijing’s drive to control the South China Sea?
On 26
May, CNN broadcast an unusual clip of a US navy intelligence flight over the
South China Sea. The P-8A Poseidon surveillance plane – one of the newest
weapons in the Pentagon’s arsenal – had taken off, with a CNN reporter on board,
from Clark airbase in the Philippines, once part of America’s largest overseas
base complex during the cold war. After about 45 minutes, the plane reached its
first target – which had, until recently, been an obscure, almost entirely
submerged feature in the Spratly Island group.
Fifteen thousand feet below, dozens of Chinese ships tossed at anchor. Their
crews had been working day and night for weeks, dredging sand and rock from the
ocean floor to fill in a stunning blue lagoon – turning a 3.7-mile-long reef
that had only partially revealed itself to the daylight at low tide into a
sizable man-made island nearly 1,000 miles away from the Chinese mainland.
At the approach of the American aircraft, a Chinese radio operator can be heard
addressing the pilot: “This is the Chinese navy. This is the Chinese navy …
Please leave immediately to avoid misunderstanding.” When the plane, which was
busily photographing the land-reclamation effort, failed to heed these
instructions, the operator grew exasperated, and the recording ends as abruptly
as it had begun, with him shouting the words: “You go!”
For many people who viewed this clip, it might have almost passed for
entertainment, but the plane continued on to a place called Fiery Cross, whose
history and recent development point to how deadly serious the struggle over the
South China Sea has become. Fiery Cross came under Chinese control in 1988,
following a confrontation with Vietnam at a nearby site, Johnson Reef, where
Chinese troops opened fire from a ship on a contingent of Vietnamese soldiers
who stood in knee-deep seas after having planted their country’s flag in the
coral. A YouTube video of the incident shows dozens of Vietnamese being cut down
in the water under a hail of machine-gun fire.
China had come late to the game of laying claim to parts of the Spratly
archipelago, which comprises hundreds of uninhabited coral reefs and sandbars
flung across a vast area between the coasts of the Philippines and southern
Vietnam, each of which has long controlled numerous positions in the area. But
in this bloody way, China announced that it was fully committed. Its position on
Fiery Cross Reef, staked out back in the 1980s, was initially justified under
the auspices of Unesco, which had called on the nations of the world to
cooperate in collectively surveying the oceans for meteorological and navigation
purposes. Fast-forward 28 years, though, and as seen from the American
surveillance flight, what had begun as an innocuous “ocean observation station”,
has now mushroomed in less than a year of dredging into the most important of
Beijing’s seven newly created positions in the South China Sea.
From a single coral head that peaked a mere metre out of the waves, Fiery Cross
has grown in stunning fashion, attaining a size of over 200 hectares of
reclaimed land – roughly equivalent to about 280 football pitches. Leaving
little doubt about its purpose, it has already been equipped with a 3,300-metre
airstrip, which is long enough to accommodate a wide range of Chinese combat and
transport planes, and a harbour big enough to handle even the largest of the
country’s ships.
The primary attraction of this locale, though, may be something that cannot be
perceived from even the most sophisticated surveillance plane, which from
China’s perspective is precisely the point. Fiery Cross appears to have been
chosen by Beijing as the keystone in its push into the South China Sea because
of the depths of its surrounding waters, which afford Chinese submarines far
greater stealth in evading acoustic and other forms of active tracking by the US
military.
There is no single explanation for why asserting its authority over the South
China Sea now matters so much to China. Controlling the many tiny islands is in
part a matter of controlling of the wealth assumed to lay beneath the sea in the
form of unexploited minerals and oil and gas, not to mention the immense
fisheries that exist in these waters. It is in part a matter of increasing the
country’s sense of security, by dominating the maritime approaches to its long
coast, and securing sea lanes to the open Pacific. It is in part a matter of
overcoming historical grievances. And finally, it is about becoming a power at
least on par with the US: a goal that Chinese leaders are themselves somewhat
coy about, but which is now increasingly entering the public discourse.
The best place to see all these reasons at work is the country’s southernmost
province, the island of Hainan.
* * *
China’s neighbours have watched with growing alarm as Beijing
has used maritime vessels, often setting out from Hainan, to harass and
intimidate the far smaller rival claimants whose littoral territories both
enclose the South China Sea and lend it definition. Recently, for example, China
sent a large flotilla of ships close to the shores of Vietnam as it deployed a
billion-dollar oil rig that an official of the China National Offshore Oil
Corporation described as “our national mobile territory”, while it made a show
of prospecting for crude in deep water. As it did so, China kept a collection of
much smaller, protesting Vietnamese vessels at bay by blasting them with massive
water cannons powerful enough to sink many ships. At other locations, not far
away, Chinese ships have intercepted vessels from the Philippines – sometimes by
deliberately ramming them – to stop them from resupplying troops who guard
disputed coral reefs that lie several times closer to Filipino shores than to
anything conventionally understood as Chinese territory. It was against this
backdrop that China began its own crash programme of dredging the oceans to
build man-made islands in at least seven locations in the South China Sea in
2014.