With talk of China possibly looking at Ream Naval Base as its second overseas military base after Djibouti, US academic Chen Xiangming notes that coupling a new canal with even a periodic naval visit at Ream would allow China to monitor the critical shipping lane of the Strait of Malacca from a close geostrategic point.
“History will ultimately prove who is the real host of the South China Sea and who is its fleeting passerby.” These implicit remarks by China’s top diplomat Wang Yi in 2016 have since turned out to be an explicit reference to China as the “host” with an extensive footprint in the South China Sea and the US as a “passerby”.
Even as the China-Philippines maritime tussle at the Second Thomas Shoal and elsewhere hits the news intermittently, China has strategically blazed a long, wide and permanent trail of geoeconomically influential land-sea corridors to and around the southwestern South China Sea, through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
