Spatial Analysis of Island Building in the South China Sea Using Satellite Imagery              

Elliot Love GEG 419 Dr. Tang

Introduction There are two major foreign policy changes within the past three years that have created a very tense environment in East Asia. The first is President Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia” strategy which turns the United States’ foreign policy focus from the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region. This strategy aims to establish stronger ties with US allies, facilitate diplomacy, and ensure US predominance in a region that will play a major geopolitical role in this century. The second major change, or rather, escalation of policy, is the Chinese claim to island chains in the South and East China Seas. This on itself would not pose much of an issue, however, the islands are also claimed by Japan in the east, and Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, the Philippines, and Taiwan in the south. Where these two policies coincide is where the point of contention arises; the United States wants to establish stronger ties with its allies in the region, China wants to strengthen is peripheral power, by allowing China to claim these islands the United States would be subverting its own policy thereby dissolving its legitimacy as a hegemon in the region, and weakening its ties with countries like Japan and the Philippines. Neither the United States nor China wish to engage in overt, hostile actions against one and other, in fact in September 2015 the White House issued a statement expressing a desire to strengthen the economic ties between the two countries:

The United States and China recognize their shared interest in promoting a strong and open global economy, inclusive growth and sustainable development, and a stable international financial system, supported by the multilateral economic institutions founded at the end of World War II that have benefited the peoples of both nations.1

Both nations concede that the economic ties between them are essential to global economic stability and that they cannot engage in hostile military actions; at the very least both countries know that their threats are toothless, at the worst, both would be committing to complete global financial collapse in the event of war. Yet, their foreign policy goals are diametrically opposed and neither can simply back away from the region without losing significant geopolitical power. Into this environment both nations have to be very careful about their overt and covert actions, walking a fine line between provocation and deniability.

In essence, the near seas disputes of China are emblematic of modern warfare in the 21st century, the Russian involvement in Ukraine being a very prominent example. Globalization has made overt war between great powers almost impossible, countries therefor have to explore alternate routes towards achieving their political ends. In Crimea, Russia deployed its special forces to protect its port and its Russian speaking citizens, in Ukraine, Russian “volunteers” have crossed the border to fight in Donbass amid increasing evidence that active Russian regular army troops have been deployed as well, all plausibly denied by Russia.2 These are creative ways around declaring war, a trend which will continue to grow, and tactics which are used by both China and the United States. In the East China sea, China has used fishing vessels3 and outposts on the rocky Senkaku/Diaoyu islands to establish territorial claims; in the South China Sea, on which this                                                                                                                          1  The  White  House,  “FACT  SHEET:  U.S.-­‐China  Economic  Relations”  September,  2015.  2  The  Guardian  “Ukrainian  bloggers  use  social  media  to  track  Russian  soldiers  fighting  in  east,”  June  2015.  3  Sheila  A.  Smith,  “A  Sino-­‐Japanese  Clash  in  the  East  China  Sea”  Council  on  Foreign  Relations,  April  2013.  

analysis will focus, China has engaged in island building in order to establish bases and a legitimate claim over those waters. The strategy is both overt in its political goals, and covert in its use of unconventional means to achieve those goals.

Background There are two major island chains in the South China Sea: the Spratly Islands and the Paracel Islands. On the surface they are mostly submerged reefs and shoals, in most contexts calling them islands is a very liberal use of the term. The core of the issues lies in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) which was passed by the UN in, “the desire to settle, in a spirit of mutual understanding and cooperation, all issues relating to the law of the sea.”4 According to UNCLOS, of which almost all of the nations in Southeast and East Asia have ratified, each nation is entitled to a 12 nautical mile exclusive buffer from its territorial shores in which no nation can violate without expressed permission from the possessing country. In addition, there is a 200 nautical mile “exclusive economic zone” from the shore under which the possessing country maintains all rights to any natural resources and economic activity within that buffer. Under UNCLOS, if China were to control the Spratly and Paracel islands they would effectively have control of both the natural resources (coal and oil), and the economic activity of the region, placing China in a much stronger geopolitical position that it currently occupies. Chinese claim on these islands is currently tenuous at best, geographically speaking Vietnam and the Philippines have a stronger claim since the islands are closer to their shores than China’s (see figure 1). In order to bolster their claim the Chinese have engaged in a practice known as island building, where they pour sand and concrete on the submerged reefs in order the create land upon which they can build an outpost. Since 2014, the island building effort has really intensified, entire airfields have risen out of areas that were once under water. By doing this, the Chinese hope to establish a precedent for legitimacy in which they can establish an exclusive economic zone and control the South China Sea.

Figure 1. An overview of East Asian Island Disputes

                                                                                                                         4  United  Nation  Convention  on  the  Law  of  the  Sea,”  December  1982.  

Methodology This analysis will focus on island building in the Spratly Islands, specifically on two islands: Fiery Cross Reef and Mischief Reef. Since high resolution imagery was very difficult to obtain (without a budget), I relied mainly on imagery available through the Asian Transparency Maritime Initiative (AMTI) which is a project funded by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). AMTI deals solely with this specific issue and has been tracking changes to the islands using high resolution imagery from DigitalGlobe, a private remote sensing company. I made attempts to contact AMTI in hopes that I would be able to access the original images made available through DigitalGlobe but I had to settle for lower resolution alternatives. I attempted to use Landsat 8 images in order to do this study but the spatial resolution was not very good for this particular application. I used two images for each island, one showing the island before the island building process and one after. For each image I conducted a supervised classification in ERDAS Imagine in order to show the before and after effects on land use and how the island building process had transformed the area. Since I was not able to access the original image through DigitalGlobe the supervised classification was met with varying degrees of success, however, the general trend was very apparent. In addition, I have also conducted a visual analysis exercise and attempted to identify two Chinese warships to demonstrate that assets could be identified through satellite images and that the Chinese have deployed those assets in disputed waters.

Analysis

Mischief Reef

June 2013 (unclassified)

March 2015 (unclassified

June 2013 (Supervised Classification)

March 2015 (Supervised Classification)

Even from the unclassified images it is already very apparent that significant land mass has been added to the submerged reef in just under two years. In the first classified image the yellow represents submerged reef, the light blue shallow water and the grey is the sea. You can very clearly sea that there is nothing on this “island” in mid-2013. By early 2015 there is

significant activity and it can very definitively be considered an island at this point. In the second classified image the yellow still represents submerged reef, the blues are shallow water, and the grey is the ocean, however the addition of the red classification shows the island building activity that is was not present in the first classification. There are some errors, you can see them off to the west of the island, however the red clearly highlights the island building activity and the ships that are docked in the reef.

Fiery Cross Reef

July 2009

June 2015

July 2009

June 2015

Fiery Cross Reef is a much more detailed example of island building. From the original images you can see what appears to be a small fishing outpost or something similar, but beyond that there is no apparent development on the island. In 2015 there is an entire complex built complete with shipping containers, buildings, a dockyard, even a complete airfield. In the first classified image from 2009 the yellow shows sand, the red shows the rocky outcroppings and the fishing post, the blue the shallow water and the grey the deep ocean. The small fishing outpost is really the only thing that stands out in this image, there is really no other development of note. The 2015 classified image is a completely different story. Gone is the original fishing outpost, now instead there is an entire complex on land that did not exist in 2009. The blue and grey are again shallow and deep water respectively, the white is the cloud cover, and the yellow is sand. The red shows the developed parts of the island which is a dramatically different picture that the previous classification. You can clearly see the buildings, the docks, and the airfield from this classification. There are small errors in this image but overall it is a very accurate and detailed classification.

Asset Identification

Type 052 Destroyer in Fiery Cross Reef

This vessel I have identified as a Type 052 destroyer based off of the identifying features. The main gun in the front, the rockets and two guns in the center, two in the rear, the location of the sensors and radar, and the aircraft pad in the rear lead me to identify it with relative certainty.

Type 071 Amphibious Transport Dock in Mischief Reef

This vessel is a Type 071 Amphibious transport dock and I can identify this with absolute certainty. In addition to the identifying feature such as the elongated flight deck in the aft, the short stern, the singular gun in the front and the instrumentation; this photo also contains the pennant number, 999, located on the aft of the deck, which identifies this ship as Jinggang Shan, commissioned in 2011 and part of the South Sea Fleet.

Conclusions This analysis has accurately shown through supervised classification of satellite imagery that Chinese island building in the South China Sea has in fact intensified in the last two years. It is very clear from the images that islands which did not exist as recent as a year and a half ago, now serve full docks, buildings, and even airfields. It is clear through the images that there is much more activity in this region and it has been shown that this is, in fact, a concrete goal of Chinese foreign policy. The asset identification exercise has reasonably identified one Chinese Type 052 destroyer in Fiery Cross Reef, and has positively identified the Jinggang Shan, an amphibious transport dock, in the waters off of Mischief Reef within the last year.

All of these actions are power projection attempts from China attempting to establish control over its periphery using UNCLOS to try to establish legitimate claim over the sea. It has been shown that this is opposed to United States foreign policy aims and President Obama’s pivot to Asia strategy. The Spratly Islands are just one point of tension in a very complex geopolitical environment and has only served to destabilize the region. Recent developments include the US sale of arms to Vietnam5 and the Japanese reinterpretation of Article 9 of its constitution, the prohibition of war as a means of solving foreign disputes, seeking a right to self-defense in what it sees as Chinese aggression.6

It is unlikely that there will be a full-scale conflict between any of these nations, instead, China will continue with its unconventional strategy to try to wrest control away from Japan and the United States. There will certainly be flash points and tense moments as posturing and incursions occur within these seas, but it has been shown that everyone involved would have too much to lose to risk open conflict.

                                                                                                                         5  John  Bourdreau,  “Vietnam  Goes  Shopping  for  U.S.  Military  Hardware,”  Bloomberg  Business,    May,  2015.  6  Library  of  Congress,  “Japan:  Interpretations  of  Article  9  of  the  Constitution,”  September  2015.  

Bibliography

Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, Center for Security and International Studies, http://amti.csis.org/ Boudreau, John, “Vietnam Goes Shopping for U.S. Military Hardware,” Bloomberg Business, May, 2015. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-13/vietnam-turns-to-u-s-to-buy-weapons-40-years-after-war-s-end Cambell, Kurt and Andrews, Brian, “Explaining the US ‘Pivot’ to Asia” The Asia Group, August, 2013. https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/public/Research/Americas/0813pp_pivottoasia.pdf Dutton, Peter A. 2014 China’s Maritime Disputes in the East and South China Seas, House Foreign Affairs Committee, Jan 14, 2014. Dutton, Peter A., 2011, Three Disputes and Three Objectives, Naval War College Review, Autumn 2011, Vol 64, No 4. Guardian, The, “Ukrainian bloggers use social media to track Russian soldiers fighting in east,” June, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/03/bloggers-social-media-russian-soldiers-fighting-in-ukraine

Library of Congress, “Japan: Interpretations of Article 9 of the Constitution,” September 2015. http://www.loc.gov/law/help/japan-constitution/interpretations-article9.php Nguyen, Dong Manh, 2006, Settlement of Disputes Under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea: The Case of the South China Sea Dispute, The University of Queensland Law Journal, Vol 25. Smith, Sheila A., “A Sino-Japanese Clash in the East China Sea” Council on Foreign Relations, April 2013. http://www.cfr.org/japan/sino-japanese-clash-east-china-sea/p30504 The White House, “FACT SHEET: U.S.-China Economic Relations” September, 2015. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/09/25/fact-sheet-us-china-economic-relations United Nation, “United Nation Convention on the Law of the Sea,” December 1982. http://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/closindx.htm

Images Type 052 Destroyer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_052_destroyer#/media/File:Chinese_destroyer_HARIBING_(DDG_112).jpg Type 071 amphibious transport dock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_071_amphibious_transport_dock#/media/File:PLANS_Changbaishan_(LSD-989)_20150130(2).jpg CHINA PEOPLE’S LIBERATION ARMY NAVY (PLA(N)) AND MARITIME LAW ENFORCEMENT (MLE) 2015 RECOGNITION AND IDENTIFICATION GUIDE, The Office of Naval Intelligence: http://www.oni.navy.mil/Intelligence_Community/china_media/posters/PLA_Navy_Identification_Guide.pdf Original Satellite Images, Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative: http://amti.csis.org/island-tracker/ Maritime Hotspots Map: http://amti.csis.org/atlas/