News Snapshot:
China, which lays claim to almost all of the South China Sea, despite overlapping territorial claims in the waterway from at least six other governments, including the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and Taiwan, has been building up reefs and sandbars into fortified man-made artificial islands since 2014. The Chinese military bases constructed on artificial islands in the contested South China Sea waterway are too small, too distant from the mainland and too vulnerable to potential enemy strikes, according to a Beijing-based monthly magazine, Naval and Merchant Ships . Published by the country’s State Shipbuilding Corporation, which builds naval vessels...
