China's Island Factory

The boat pitches up and down and rolls from side to side in the heavy swell. The noise of the big diesel motor, just below the floor, is hammering at my head.

My nose is filled with the smell of dried fish and diesel fumes, my T-shirt glued to my chest with sweat. Proper sleep is impossible.

For more than 40 hours it has been like this. Our wooden fishing boat has tossed its way across the South China Sea. Most of the time we barely exceed walking pace. “Who would be a fisherman?” I wonder out loud.

I stare out at the endless rolling waves. On the horizon the sky is dark and threatening. Then my eye is caught by something sticking up above the waves. It looks like an oil or gas-drilling platform. What on earth is it doing here?

As we get closer, to my right, I am sure I can now see something pale and sandy beside the platform. “That looks like land!” I say. It can’t be. I look at my GPS.

There is no land marked anywhere near here, only a submerged reef of the Spratly Island chain. But my eyes are not deceiving me. A few kilometres away I can now clearly see the outline of an island.

“What is this place called?” I ask our Filipino skipper.

“Gaven Reef,” he says.

“Get closer!” I shout over the din of the engine.

He turns the boat directly towards the islet. But the dark clouds are rolling in fast. Moments later we are enveloped. Water cascades off the fishing boat’s roof. The islet disappears.

“How long will the rain last?” I ask the skipper.

“Four or five hours, maybe longer,” he says.

My heart sinks. All this time, all this way, only to be beaten by the weather. But I know I have seen it, an island where there wasn’t one just a few weeks ago – even the skipper has never it seen before.

The captain turns the boat back to our old course – south, into the rain. We plough on. The waves are getting bigger. After four hours the rain begins to recede. Ahead I can see another island.

This one I am expecting. This place is called Johnson South Reef. On my GPS it again shows no land, just a submerged reef.

But I’ve seen aerial photographs of this place taken by the Philippine navy. They show the massive land reclamation work China has been doing here since January.

Millions of tonnes of rock and sand have been dredged up from the sea floor and pumped into the reef to form new land.

Along the new coastline I can see construction crews building a sea wall. There are cement-pumping trucks, cranes, large steel pipes, and the flash of welding torches.

On top of a white concrete blockhouse a soldier is standing looking back at us through binoculars.

I urge the skipper to get even closer, but a volley of flares erupts in the sky – it is a Chinese warning.

The appearance of these new islands has happened suddenly and is a dramatic new move in a longstanding territorial struggle in the South China Sea.

At the beginning of this year, the Chinese presence in the Spratly Islands consisted of a handful of outposts, a collection of concrete blockhouses perched atop coral atolls.

Now it is building substantial new islands on five different reefs.

We are the first Western journalists to have seen some of this construction with our own eyes and to have documented it on camera.

On one of these new islands, perhaps Johnson South Reef, China seems to be preparing to build an air base with a concrete runway long enough for fighter jets to take off and land.

Plans published on the website of the China State Shipbuilding Corporation are thought to show the proposed design.

China’s island building is aimed at addressing a serious deficit.

Other countries that claim large chunks of the South China Sea - Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia - all control real islands.

But China came very late to this party and missed out on all the good real estate.

Beijing only took control of Johnson South Reef in 1988 after a bloody battle with Vietnam that left 70 Vietnamese sailors dead. Hanoi has never forgiven Beijing.

Since then China has shied away from direct military confrontation.

But now Beijing has decided it is time to move, to assert its claim and to back it up by creating new facts on the ground - a string of island bases and an unsinkable aircraft carrier, right in the middle of the South China Sea.

There are many competing claims to territory in the South China Sea, but only China and Taiwan claim to own it all.

Beijing’s claim - not only to the Spratly Islands, but also the Scarborough Shoal and the Paracel Islands - is marked out on its own maps by the infamous “nine-dash line”, which encompasses a huge tongue-shaped expanse stretching right up to the coasts of the Philippines and Vietnam and even Borneo.

The Philippines and Vietnam also claim large areas of the South China Sea. Both say most of the Spratly Islands belong to them.

For decades China has done little to enforce its vague and sweeping claim. Now that is changing.

In 2012 the Communist Party reclassified the South China Sea as a “core national interest”, placing it alongside such sensitive issues as Taiwan and Tibet. It means China is prepared to fight to defend it.

This is confirmed by Prof Yan Xuetong of Beijing’s Tsinghua University - a pro-government academic well known for presenting the Communist Party’s view to the outside world.

China will fight, he says, if it feels its sovereignty in the South China Sea is under threat.

He blames Philippine President Benigno Aquino for “provoking Beijing”, by trying to bring America into the dispute.

“For him it is a personal problem,” Yan says.

“He rejects any bilateral negotiations. He says they are weak and we are strong. He will only negotiate together, with the Philippines and US as allies. He wants someone to stand at his side.”