Experts Fear a Defensive Zone Over China’s Homemade Islands

As China builds its own territory, its plans for defense are worrying.

Sailors with the Chinese regime's People's Liberation Army Navy stand on the deck of a missile frigate in Manila on April 13, 2010. Experts are worried the Chinese regime will establish a new defensive zone in the South China Sea. TED ALJIBE/AFP/Getty Images

The Chinese regime is now building airstrips on its homemade islands in the South China Sea. While China’s neighbors largely reject its claims to the region—and particularly its efforts to simply build new territory—many experts are worried about what problems the islands will bring in the near future.

One likely possibility is that the Chinese regime will try to do in the South China Sea what it did in the East China Sea, and establish an air defense zone it can defend militarily, according to Dr. Andrew S. Erickson, an associate professor in the Strategic Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College.

Erickson presented the case in a recent article in The National Interest. As a founding member of his department’s China Maritime Studies Institute, his words carry some weight.

Satellite images posted by intelligence company IHS Jane’s on April 15 show the Chinese regime has built a 1,650-foot section of a runway on Fiery Cross Reef. It noted the final runway could be close to 10,000 feet long, which “would be well within the parameters of existing People’s Liberation Army Air Force runways on mainland China.”

Erickson notes the runway is just one of many the Chinese regime is constructing on its homemade islands. Similar projects are underway on Subi Reef and possibly Mischief Reef, and similar developments are being made on the nearby Paracel Islands.

“One logical application for China’s current activities: to support a SCS [South China Sea] Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ). Beijing already established an ADIZ in the East China Sea in November 2013,” Erickson writes.

“Many nations—including the U.S.—have established such zones to track aircraft approaching their territorial airspace (out to 12 nautical miles from their coast), particularly aircraft apparently seeking to enter that space,” he writes.

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