Paracel Islands

They hold up the UN law when it ma- when it counts for them.

Uh, it has been interesting to read recently where China is talking about, "Oh, this goes against that law, this goes against that law," but nobody said, "Oh, well, if you're standing up for laws, then you must stand up for the UN Common Law of the Sea, which means what are you doing in the Spratlys and Paracels?"

Or what about building islands?

Well, that's the Spratlys and the Paracels-

Yeah

... and so on.

They don't have 3,000-meter runways and those kinds of things, but they are on a intensive effort to fortify their islands that in many ways, just in a sort of land mass sense, is even exceeding what China has done.

Meanwhile, up to the north in the Paracel Islands, China is on its own new-

Yeah

... island reclamation, bigger than apparently even Mischief Reef, where...

At the same time, the more Vietnam was seen to go into the which again was happening for a whole number of reasons, including that with the war against the Americans out of the way, some of the unresolved territorial issues between China and Vietnam started to reassert themselves.

For example, what the Vietnamese call the Paracel Islands, which had been under the control of the South Vietnamese government, were actually taken by China in a military action in, I think, 1974 or 75, which we didn't see the significance of that at the time.

Because actually, in the late 1950s, the Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong on behalf of Vietnam, agreed with the Chinese claim to these islands.

After the liberation of South Vietnam, the Vietnamese then said that they'd only agree when they renounced that and said they'd only agree to it under pressure and because they needed to.

Mm-hmm.

And my, my assignments kept bi- bringing me back around to this question that kept coming back to me, and this included all of those assignments you talked about of being a military attache, is why is China being so successful in this thing that we call the maritime gray zone, right? Why has their expansionism into the, the Paracel Islands, and the Spratly Islands, and all these different places, and yet we don't seem to really have a coherent strategy for how we're going to counteract this?

Mm-hmm.

And so I just, I really wanted to dig back into that, and that was what brought me back into this space around the South China Sea.

So it was sort of this almost, you know, they'd also try to play both sides of it almost.

Uh, but they've got their own problems.

Everything from China's largest construction project, you know, island-building project yet seems to be happening right now at Antelope Reef in the Paracel Islands, along with a huge paramilitary Coast Guard militia, the rest of those guys, build up there.

We've been tracking a huge Chinese fishing fleet off of central Vietnam over the last, you know, and growing out over the last four years.

I, I think the island that, that you're referring to is Antelope Island.

It's part of the Paracels.

It's closer towards, um, Vietnam.

Uh, and basically China is conducting what they did in 2013 to 2015, where they built these, uh, islands in the Spratlys in the southern portion of the South China Sea.