shen
Senior Member
I have a better one for you. In 2008 Beijing completed the Olympics. Some smart bureaucrat decided to deploy the surplus construction materials and resources to the SCS. Lol. If you want to find a reason it is always available.
But your Lol reason doesn't fit the timeline, mine does. March 2014, Philippines attempted to internationalize the dispute by filing with international court. August 2014, China initiate large scale reclamation.
In the field of history, which I'm familiar with, we differentiate between proximate cause and underlying cause. A simple example, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was the proximate cause of WWI. The complex pre-war alliance system in Europe was one of the many underlying causes of WWI.
In the SCS dispute case, the proximate cause of large scale Chinese reclamation in Sprately was clearly the Filipino escalation. If we go back to media coverage back Aug 2014, the reclamation was always linked with the Filipino court filing.
If we want to analyze the underlying cause of large scale Chinese reclamations, I think we can trace it back to the American "pivot" to Asia. Previous small scale Chinese bases in the Spratley was sufficient to deal with the capabilities of rival claimants. But after the only military superpower, the US, announced its "pivot" to Asia, which many in China view as American attempt to contain the rise of China, more capable Chinese bases are now necessary to counter possible future American military involvement in the SCS dispute.
Another reason is that although in the American "pivot" is short in substance, ie, few military resources are actually redeployed to east Asia, the very rhetoric of the "pivot" embolden certain regional actors to become less cooperative and more confrontational towards China. As any long term watch of Asian defense can see, the SCS dispute became far more heated after the "pivot". Therefore more capable Chinese bases are necessary in Spratleys to meet the worsened security environment.
In the words of one American expert.
"Robert S. Ross, an Associate at the John King Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at , argues that the ‘pivot’ toward China is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby U.S. policy “unnecessarily compounds Beijing’s insecurities and will only feed China’s aggressiveness, undermine regional stability, and decrease the possibility of cooperation between Beijing and Washington.” The United States is minimizing long-term diplomatic engagement and inflating the threat posed by Chinese power when it should really be recognizing China’s inherent weaknesses and its own strengths. “The right China policies would assuage, not exploit, Beijing’s anxieties, while protecting U.S. interests in the region.”