What’s behind Beijing’s drive to control the South China Sea?

China’s startling attempt to assert control over vast waters has alarmed nearby countries and escalated tensions with the US. Howard W French reports from Hainan, the island at the heart of Xi Jinping’s expansionist ambitions

[Extract:]
... I had come in hopes of getting a glimpse of the closest thing in China to Pearl Harbor.

Just as a fast-expanding US used that naval base, beginning late in the 19th century, to project American power deep into the Pacific, an ocean that it would eventually come to thoroughly dominate, China is leveraging Hainan island to press some startling claims – not to mere dominance, but for rightful possession of virtually the entire South China Sea, a body of water that encompasses 1.35 million square miles, and through which more than $5tn in ship-borne trade passes every year.

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.