Vietnam risks wider Spratlys dispute with more land reclamation: Chinese think tank
- The Beijing-based Grandview Institution says Hanoi ramped up island expansion in the South China Sea from 2021 using large dredgers
- Vietnam has occupied more Chinese islands and reefs, stationed more troops and built more facilities than any other coastal state to the waters, it says
In its report “Construction on Islands and Reefs Occupied by Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia in the Nansha Islands”, the Beijing-based Grandview Institution said that until 2019, Hanoi carried out only modest reclamation efforts on the 29 disputed islands and reefs it controlled in the Spratly Islands.
But then it embarked on major dredging and landfill work, adding dramatically to the original 0.7 sq km (173 acres) of land on the features.
“Vietnam has carried out large-scale land expansion on several islands and reefs, adding 3 sq km of new land, far exceeding the total construction scale over the previous 40 years,” said Liu Xiaobo, the report’s author and director of Grandview’s Centre for Marine Studies.
The assessment was based on data published in November by the US-based Asian Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
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Why the South China Sea dispute remains one of the region’s most pressing issues
China and Vietnam have conflicting claims in the Spratlys, a group of South China Sea islands that Beijing calls the Nanshas and Hanoi refers to as Quần đảo Trường Sa.
