Meanwhile, an Australian expert has challenged claims that China’s build-up of artificial islands in the disputed South China Sea threatens commercial ships passing through the world’s busiest waterways, declaring that they are “completely fabricated”.
Greg Austin, a visiting professor at the University of New South Wales based in Canberra, says despite the “shock” expressed by strategic analysts China has not embarked on an operation to expand its territory and is defending what it sees as its historical claims.
But Carlyle Thayer, an expert on the South China Sea from Australia’s defense force academy said that china is “definitely” expanding its territory through construction of the islands and has attacked rival claimant states, including Vietnam, on a number of occasions.
Professor Thayer cites charts by the U.S. office of naval intelligence showing that all the land reclamation by rival claimants’ amounts to less than 4 per cent of china’s activities.
He added that china’s routine challenges to planes flying over the region have no basis in international law and that its three-kilometer-long runways on the islands are by far the largest, allowing bombers to be based there.