Taiwan warily watching Beijing’s Yongshu Reef reclaimation activity in the South China Sea

In mid January Taiwanese Nationalist Party legislator and defence committee head Lin Yu-fang called attention to Beijing’s airstrip on Yongshu Reef in the South China Sea.

China built it on landfill over about the past year to allow the 700-meter clearance required for takeoff and landing of its relatively powerful Sukhoi Su-27 fighter jets, Lin says in a statement to media. Those aircraft could scare off any peers from Vietnam, another aggressive maritime landfill builder, and defend an eventual air defense identification zone (ADIZ) that neighbors fear China plans to declare for itself over the 3.5 million-square-kilometer sea claimed by five other governments including Taiwan’s. Much of Asia prizes the sea for fish, shipping lanes and possible undersea fossil fuel reserves. It’s also been described as China’s security backyard.

“If the Chinese do deploy fighters in the South China Sea, the reaction from other nations in the region is likely to be very negative,” says Bonnie Glaser, senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington. So good on Taiwan for pointing it out, the public as well as neighboring countries – all leery of China – are supposed to think. Ma’s government may react later by adding special armed forces to its biggest South China Sea claim, Taiping Island, says Andrew Yang, former defense minister and a professor at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan. Currently the coast guard defends it.