China has opened a hardware store on a disputed South China Sea island, according to the local government, as Beijing ramps up efforts to expand civilian facilities and cement claims in the strategically important waterway.
Covering an area of about 100 square metres (1,076 square feet), the Xinyi Hardware Store is located on Woody Island in the Paracel Islands, a contested archipelago known in Chinese as the Xisha Islands and in Vietnamese as the Hoang Sa Islands.
The store, situated next to the cargo terminal of the Sansha Yongxing Airport, opened for business on Thursday, according to the government of Sansha city, which oversees the Paracels as well as the Macclesfield Bank and the Spratly Islands – another disputed archipelago known as the Nansha Islands in Chinese.
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According to the Sansha government, the store provides “several thousand” products, including electrical items, fire safety equipment, water pipes, door and window accessories and paint.
Wang Hailong, deputy manager of Sansha Tianqin Service Management, which is in charge of civilian services on the island, said the company spent about two months on market research “to understand what kind of hardware is needed by soldiers and civilians on the island and nearby”.
Located about 300km (186 miles) from the southern island province of Hainan, Woody Island, known as Yongxing Island in China, is the largest outcrop among the 30 or so islands that make up the Paracels. The archipelago is controlled by Beijing but also claimed by Taipei and Hanoi.
To assert its claims to the resource-rich waters, Beijing in 2012 announced the establishment of Sansha city on Woody Island to administer the disputed South China Sea islands and features.
Since then, Beijing has steadily stepped up efforts to expand both civilian and military facilities on the island, which Chinese media said would become “an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the South China Sea”.
In 2017, an Israeli satellite imagery company captured a photo of HQ-9 surface-to-air missiles on Woody Island. Beijing has not confirmed the deployment.
The island has a post office, banks, a meteorological observatory, schools, a library, parks, hospitals and power plants.
It is also home to a civil-military airport on the island, which features a 3,000-metre take-off runway that can accommodate a fully loaded Boeing 737 airliner, and a 5,000-tonne wharf.
According to the latest census, the island had a population of 2,333 as of November 2020.
Infrastructure construction on Woody Island has often sparked protest from rival claimants, particularly Vietnam.
A hotpot restaurant opened on Woody Island in April of last year in a move that drew Hanoi’s ire. The Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said at the time that the country was “working to ensure its sovereignty and jurisdiction over the waters to protect its legitimate rights”.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 2024. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
