China has opened a hardware store in a controversial location South Chinese Ocean island, local authorities said, as Beijing steps up efforts to expand civilian facilities and cement claims to the strategically important waterway.
The Xinyi Hardware Store covers an area of approximately 100 square meters (1,076 square feet) and is located on Wooded island in the Paracel Islandsa disputed group of islands known in Chinese as the Xisha Islands and in Vietnamese as the Hoang Sa Islands.
The store, located next to the cargo terminal at Sansha Yongxing airport, opened for business on Thursday, said the Sansha city government, which oversees Paracels and Macclesfield Bank and the Spratly Islands – another disputed archipelago, known in Chinese as the Nansha Islands.
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According to the Sansha government, the store offers “several thousand” products, including electrical appliances, fire safety equipment, water pipes, door and window accessories and paint.
Wang Hailong, deputy director of Sansha Tianqin Service Management, which is responsible for civilian services on the island, said the company spent about two months on market research “to understand what kind of hardware soldiers and civilians on the island and in the surrounding area need.”
Woody Island, known in China as Yongxing Island, lies about 300 km (186 miles) off the southern island province of Hainan and is the largest of the 30 or so islands that make up the Paracels. The archipelago is controlled by Beijing, but also claimed by Taipei and Hanoi.
To bolster its claims to the resource-rich waters, Beijing in 2012 announced the creation of the city of Sansha on Woody Island, which will administer the disputed islands and territories in the South China Sea.
Since then, Beijing has steadily stepped up efforts to protect both civilian and army facilities on the island, which Chinese media described as “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.
The island also has a civil-military airport with a 3,000-meter runway capable of accommodating a fully loaded Boeing 737 aircraft and a quay with a capacity of 5,000 tons.
According to the latest census, the island had 2,333 inhabitants in November 2020.
The construction of infrastructure on Woody Island has often led to protests from rival parties, most notably Vietnam.
A hotpot restaurant opened on Woody Island in April last year in a move that angered Hanoi. Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry 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 covering China and Asia for over a century. For more SCMP stories, 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.
