AI just predicted the price tag for Beijing’s South China Sea ambitions

Name: Chinese military ship accused of shining laser light at Philippine coastguard vessel
Uploaded: 2023-03-03T06:00:17.000Z
Duration: 1 min 50 s
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Computer simulations suggest building and maintaining a logistics network across dozens of islands would cost billions of yuan

Beijing aims to strengthen claims on sovereignty in the disputed waters by promoting economic development, infrastructure

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Computer simulations suggest that building and maintaining a logistics network across dozens of islands would cost billions of yuan. Photo: Getty Images

Stephen Chenin Beijing

Published: 2:00pm, 3 Mar 2023

A research team in China has used artificial intelligence to simulate the construction and operation of a logistical infrastructure network that Beijing plans to build to boost economic activities and sovereign claims in the disputed South China Sea.

The total cost of those facilities would range from 6 to 20 billion yuan (US$870 million to US$2.9 billion) over a decade, depending on the government’s ambitions, according to the computer simulation.

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Chinese military ship accused of shining laser light at Philippine coastguard vessel

To save money, China could control as few as 17 small islands, said Zhao Bing, an associate professor at the Transportation Science and Engineering College, Civil Aviation University of China in Tianjin, who led the research team.

But in the most expensive scenario, a Chinese logistics network covered 80 small islands in the Spratlys and Paracels.

In this case, it would cost 20 billion yuan to build new harbours, warehouses and fleets of cargo ships as well as maintaining regular plane services between the Chinese mainland and 20 island airports, said Zhao and her team in a paper published on February 14 in the Chinese journal Operations Research and Management Science.

The logistics network they simulated would enable China to send support personnel and materials to any isle within six hours after a typhoon or other unexpected events, the researchers said.

But calculating the costs of such an endeavour over a vast area presented challenging mathematical problems.