A Game of Shark and Minnow - Who Will Win Control of the South China Sea? - NYTimes.com
The entire world has an interest in the South China Sea, but China has nearly 1.4 billion mouths and a growing appetite for nationalism to feed, which is a kind of pressure that no other country can understand. What will happen will happen, whatever the letter of the Asean code of conduct or however the arbitration turns out. Loresto and Yanto, meanwhile, still abide on the Sierra Madre, fishing for their subsistence and watching the surf to see what wave the Chinese will choose to ride in on.Ayungin Shoal lies 105 nautical miles from the Philippines. There's little to commend the spot, apart from its plentiful fish and safe harbor — except that Ayungin sits at the southwestern edge of an area called Reed Bank, which is rumored to contain vast reserves of oil and natural gas. And also that it is home to a World War II-era ship called the Sierra Madre, which the Philippine government ran aground on the reef in 1999 and has since maintained as a kind of post-apocalyptic military garrison, the small detachment of Filipino troops stationed there struggling to survive extreme mental and physical desolation. Of all places, the scorched shell of the Sierra Madre has become an unlikely battleground in a geopolitical struggle that will shape the future of the South China Sea and, to some extent, the rest of the world.
"You've got the wrong science-fiction movie," one former highly placed U.S. official later told me, when I described what we saw at Subi, and what it might mean for the guys on Ayungin. "It's not the Death Star. It's actually the Borg from 'Star Trek': 'You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.'"‰" The scholar Huang Jing put it another, more organic way. "The Chinese expand like a forest, very slowly," he said. "But once they get there, they never leave
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