That’s quite the loophole for international maritime border law: building an artificial island to automatically boost your maritime extension
Beijing has built up multiple artificial islands as military bases, and has used them to press its territorial claims and confront its neighbors across the nine-dash line, in strict defiance of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS)
Sounds like not a loophole, but just an outright violation
Why would be the new island the property of the builder if it’s in international water?
If the island is found (or in this case, built) within territorial waters but far enough from the mainland’s coast, the island’s coast recursively extends the claim of territorial waters per international law.
I thought man made was exempt from this
It’s not man-made. It’s an atoll that they’ve expanded.
Huh, today I learned the atoll was already there and was just being expanded. Makes sense that they patched out the legal loophole too, at least partially.
It’s the way they said built in the previous comment shrug. It’s 4am you know damn well I only skimmed the article
Wait, this was a reef? Like a coral reef? They built a military base by smothering a coral reef?
In less than a year, the PRC dredged more than a million tons of sand to reclaim approximately 1,500 acres of land. The teardrop-shaped island is now 3.7 miles long
That’s insane. I wish big superpowers would do this sort of thing to help island nations that are disappearing due to their historic pollution.
Instead we only do this for the military, which is responsible for enormous emissions causing sea level rise :(
Antelope Reef, or Lingyang Jiao to the Chinese and Đá Hải Sâm to the Vietnamese, is part of the Crescent archipelago in the Paracel Island chain. China has occupied the Paracels since 1974, but the territory is still disputed by Vietnam and Taiwan.
Oof
Uhh, I thought sea levels were rising. What is this paradox?
