Subi Reef Lighthouse (Photo : Reuters)
After building a tsunami alert center on one of the disputed islands in South China Sea, China continues its expansion activities in the region despite the protest of its neighbors in Asia.
On Tuesday, China’s Transport Ministry held a completion on Subi Reef to mark the switching “on” of a lighthouse, Xinhua News Agency reported. The 55-meter tall facility was constructed in October 2015. The reef itself is an artificial island that China built on dredged up sand in just the last few months.
Before Subi was converted into an island, it submerged at high tide. Beijing insisted that a lot of the construction it has done on the disputed islands in the region are to meet its international obligation on maritime safety, scientific research, and search and rescue.
But while the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea prohibits setting a 12-nautical-mile limit around manmade islands constructed on reefs that used to be submerged like Subi, China was angry at the U.S. when the USS Lassen, a guided missile destroyer, sailed within 12 nautical miles of the reef in October 2015.
Besides Subi, China has two other ongoing lighthouse projects in the area. One is on Cuarteron Reef and the other is on Johnson South Reef. Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said that because the South China Sea is a vital maritime area and important fishing ground where $5 trillion worth of trade passes on vessels, the lighthouses “can provide efficient navigation services such as positioning reference, route guidance and navigation safety information to ships, which can improve navigation management and emergency response.”
Lu added that the region’s navigation safety is threatened by high traffic density, complex navigation condition and severe shortage of response forces and aid, which in turn, slows down the area’s social and economic development, reported Agence France-Presse.
