Birth of Sansha city signals death of diplomacy in South China Sea dispute
Was it Deng Xiaoping who said that possession is nine-tenths of the law? No matter. China is actively applying this simple precept in the South China Sea, a disputed region where it knows that boots on the ground count for a lot more than expressions of ownership voiced at some meeting in a faraway capital.
The establishment by China of Sansha city on Yongxing Island - one of many disputed territories in the South China Sea - drives a bulldozer through the diplomatic and legal niceties about who owns what in one of Asia's most hotly contested areas.
The island is now officially home to a bona fide Chinese prefectural city - albeit an unusually small and isolated one - as well as two military bases. About 1,000 Chinese citizens were already on Yongxing, also known as Woody Island, even before it was granted its new status.
The Vietnamese, who also claim Yongxing, will continue to object vociferously. But common sense suggests that the island is at least nine-tenths China's. Even from the Vietnamese perspective, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that China has exercised squatter's rights. And we all know that squatters can be very hard to dislodge, especially the ones who genuinely believe they have a right to be there.
Perhaps more provocatively, Beijing has also elevated Sansha as the centre of a new administrative region encompassing the Xisha and Nansha islands and the Zhongsha undersea atoll, also known as the Paracel, Spratly and Macclesfield Bank. That means that Yongxing Island, a speck of land little more than one kilometre across, oversees an expanse of ocean territory the size of Sichuan province - and all the riches it contains.
Materially, these administrative changes will make very little difference, except to the lives of the Chinese troops and officials unlucky enough to be dispatched to this brackish backwater of the Chinese cosmos. Yongxing is just too small and too dependent on outside supplies to become anything more than a symbolic outpost.