Sea Control - Sea Control 237 - Sansha City in China's South China Sea Strategy with Zachary Haver & Dr. Ketian Zhang

Episode Date: April 4, 2021

Links:China Maritime Report No. 12: Sansha City in China's South China Sea Strategy: Building a System of Administrative Control, by Zachary Haver, CMSI  China Maritime Reports, China Maritime Studies Institute, January 2021.KetianZhang.com

Hey folks, Sherrod here. One note on the podcast feed, we're still working through the issue of having two existing C-Control feeds out there. So the legacy feed is labeled C-Control-SimSec. It's run through something called FeedBurner, and we have no control over what's populated in that feed. So the current feed, the one you should be listening to, is labeled simply C-Control. It includes the phrase SimSec's flagship podcast in its description. I encourage you to follow the current C-Control feed, and if you follow the legacy feed, you may have noticed our last three episodes haven't populated, so go back and give those a listen once you switch over. And as you transition over, I'd encourage you to rate and review the new feed as well. This week, we're

discussing Sancha City's role in China's South China Sea strategy with Zachary Haver and Dr. Ketin Zhang. This episode was edited and produced by a new member of our team, Taylor Fairless. I'd also encourage you to check out everything going on over at the main website, simsec.org. We just completed a retrospective series on the 1980s maritime strategy. Our Naval Intelligence Week is ongoing, and our next call for submissions for Project Triton is out. So our current topic, Maritime Infrastructure and Trade, is having a bit of a moment with all of the discussions surrounding Ever Given and the Suez Canal. If you're interested in contributing to the discussion, submissions are due April 19th. For more information, check out our website, simsec.org.

Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, the Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcast. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today, we're going to discuss a report from the U.S. Naval War College's China Maritime Studies Institute entitled Sanchez City in China's South China Sea Strategy, Building a System of Administrative Control. So joining me are the report's author, Zach Haver, and Dr. Ketian Zhang. Zach, Ketian, thanks for joining us.

Zach, would you mind starting by introducing yourself to our listeners, please? Thanks, Jared. Appreciate the invite today. I'm Zach Haver, a Party Watch Initiative Fellow at the Center for Advanced China Research. I work on Chinese maritime security and economic statecraft issues, and I'm happy to be here today. Well, thank you very much, Zach. And Ketian, could you tell us a little bit about your background, please? Sure. Thanks, Chair, for having me. So my name is Ketian, and I'm currently an assistant professor of international security at the Sharsk School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.

And my focus is on Chinese foreign policy and in particular China's use of coercion in its national security issues. Well, thank you both again for joining us here today. I'd just like to point out for the listeners, as always, our opinions are our own and not representative of any of the institutions with which we might otherwise be associated. Zach, I'm going to start with you and ask a methodology question before we get into the report content. How did you gather the information? Is this publicly available? Were you able to do interviews? And how did this come together? so all of this report was based on publicly available information um you know nothing on the classified front and uh it was all done remotely no no no interviews uh i don't think

they'd want to talk to me about some of the stuff that i was looking into but i i really leveraged all possible forms of information that i could get in open source this was everything from Chinese government documents to satellite imagery to travel blogs to bidding records and contracts and patents and you know their internal bulletins that they circulate around just anything that I could get my hands on essentially than cross-referencing all of that against each other and this project all really started with kindergartners. A couple of summers ago I was tracking everything that Chinese state media published about the South China Sea disputes. And around the start of the school year, I noticed that they were talking about this

kindergarten that was, you know, having the first day of classes in the South China Sea. And that kind of got my interest, because why are there children in the middle of this geopolitical dispute? That struck me as a little strange. And that started me down the rabbit hole, figuring out why are there kids in the South China Sea, and it blossomed into a major research initiative. Thanks. So let's start as simply as possible then, Zach. What is Sancho City? So Sancho City is a prefectural-level city under Hainan province that China established in 2012 to govern the majority of its maritime and territorial claims in the South China Sea. Its jurisdiction covers the Parasol Islands, the Spratly Islands,

Knackersfield Bank, and Scarborough Shoal, as well as the water surrounding these different regions. In total, the city claims to govern somewhere around 280 islands, reefs, shoals, and other features, and that amounts to about around 2 million square kilometers of maritime space, which is most of the Nine-Dash Line area that China claims in the South China Sea. If you read the report, and I recommend the listeners will have it linked in the show notes, go ahead and read it. You'll find Woody Island was selected as the headquarters of the city.

Is there a significance to Woody Island's selection as the headquarters, Zach? The main significance is that it's the largest natural feature that China occupies in the South China Sea. Most of the other islets are quite a bit smaller than Woody. And when the city was established, all of the artificial island bases had not been built yet down in the Spratly Islands. So Woody Island was just the natural choice there, especially since China has had a presence on Woody since the 1950s. So there's already a fair amount of built up infrastructure there. As a feature, it serves as a useful testing ground, both for developing the smaller islets that China occupies, as well as the larger, more complex artificial island bases where the stakes are a little bit higher for these development projects.

Thanks, Kitian. I'm going to come to you for the next question then. And Zach had mentioned that this is a prefecture-level city. Where does Sondra City sit in the hierarchy of administrative organization as far as China is concerned? Where are the different levels? And does the prefecture level have an analogous American level? Sure. So before I start, I really wanted to applaud Zach for this wonderfully done report and highly recommend everyone to read it in depth because it is such in details and used all sorts of sources available. So it's a really solid research report. So in regard to the question of where this central city sits in terms of the sort of

governmental hierarchy in China, as Zach put it in the report, it is a prefectural level city. What that means is that in the Chinese hierarchy of its governance, the highest level of the city is the capital, Beijing. And then below that, you have cities that are essentially capital cities within a province. So the Chinese political structure is sort of divided into different provinces, which is similar or analogous to the states here in the United States. But of course, the Chinese government hierarchy is a centralized format as opposed to sort of the federal format here in the States. So below the capital city, then you have the provinces, and within the provinces, there is usually a capital city within that province, which tends to be the larger city, which tends to be the political and economic center of that province.

So this is a little bit different from here in the States, where the capital city of the state tends to be smaller and of mostly political purpose as opposed to economic purposes as well. So below the capital city of the province in China, you have various cities that are usually horizontal in terms of their statuses. So they are still at the city level, but they're smaller in terms of sizes, political and economic significance as compared to the capital city within a certain province. And under the city, then you have the counties within that province. And this, again, is different from the states here where the counties tend to be a little bit larger than the city itself. So the central city is not the capital city of the province, but rather a city or similar to a city within a province that is not a capital city. So that's sort of where central city sits in terms of the hierarchy of the administrative organization within the Chinese politics. So Zap wrote in the report, the city's development aligns closely with China's broader strategy in the South China Sea.

Ketian, how would you describe that strategy? I think what's released from my research, the China's broader strategy in the South China Sea can be described in a phrase that's a carrots and sticks strategy in which China tries to use relatively more coercive or negative means of statecraft to demonstrate its resolve and administrative control and presence in the South China Sea. while using carrots, such as economic and diplomatic incentives, as inducements to lure either disclaimants in the South China Sea or other Southeast Asian countries toward its claims or to reassure those countries that China has good intentions, so to speak. So with regard to the establishment of the central city, I think it's closer with regard to the sticks side of things which is really to demonstrate China's resolve in other words willingness to administer control within China's perceived sovereignty in the South China Sea

and using the establishment of the city to both demonstrate China's control and to signal to the other especially clements in the South China Sea of China's control within the South China Sea. So is the establishment of the city and the imposition of this administrative control, is that a form of lawfare? Do you think that's a fitting description? I would say definitely, because the establishment of the central city, as perceived by the Chinese government, is a form of strengthening Chinese administrative control or a defect of control, so to speak, within the South China Sea. So it is a form of lawfare. But I would also say that it might be a little bit broader than that as well. Going back to my previous answer with regard to the broader strategy, I think it also falls into the carrots and sticks, at least the sticks part of China's overall grand strategy, which tends to be more coercive and involves the use of both military and non-military means to

demonstrate China's resolve. Thank you. Zach, higher level authorities gave the city four specific missions which received Xi Jinping's endorsement. Those were rights defense, stability maintenance, environmental protection, and resource development. Can you explain in greater detail what each of those entails, and is it normal for cities at the level that Kedian has described to receive those kind of specific tasks from the Chinese government? Yeah, so the city has these four missions that were assigned to it from provincial and central authorities. These missions have been tagged onto the city since its founding day and have then received continuing support from higher levels, including personal endorsement from

Xi Jinping when he toured the province early to mid-2013, essentially right after coming to power. And so the first of these missions, rights defense, is kind of the most straightforward articulation of what the city is supposed to be doing in the South China Sea, which is defending China's maritime and territorial claims. Rights defense mostly focuses on the maritime side of things, which is defending China's various claims in the South China Sea. It has a number of different claims ranging from historical rights to various baseline claims and regulation of military activities in certain waters. And these are long-standing interests that the Chinese state has articulated for decades. And the city is on the front lines of defending these. It's not alone

in doing so. It works closely with the People's Liberation Army, the China Coast Guard, and other forces to accomplish this. But the actual day-to-day specifics of looking after these contested waters falls squarely on the city's shoulders, at least to some degree. But when the city is accomplishing this through its various maritime law enforcement, maritime militia forces, and working with the higher level authorities, it's not trying to cause too much trouble in the South China Sea. It's cognizant that there's a broader diplomatic context occurring here and that the central authorities don't want a war in the South China Sea. They don't want to stir up so much trouble that the United States becomes more militarily involved. And so that's where

the second mission comes in, stability maintenance, which really means pushing China's claims while making sure things don't escalate beyond a manageable level. And a big part of that for the city is nature as a civilian administrative entity um because it's not the military it's anything that it does and even when it uses uh coercion at sea it's below the level of military force and so that allows it to push china's claims without driving up tensions too much um city leaders and various levels of authorities have repeatedly referred to the civilian aspects of the city's activity, ranging from sending fishermen down to the Spratlys to anything else, is very directly tied to the city's mission of defending China's rights and interests,

as well as China's broader sovereignty and national defense interests. On the environmental protection front, things get pretty interesting here because there's a couple dynamics at play. On the one hand, China is trying to position itself as a responsible steward of the marine environment in the South China Sea and the ecologies and environments of the islands and reefs that it occupies, which is an effort to try and make their claims look more legitimate in the international sphere, even though at the same time China has destroyed very large reefs in its island building campaigns and so there's that side of it but perhaps more interestingly is that all of its environmental protection efforts make the island's reefs more habitable able to sustain human activity economic activity and support the troops and other personnel that are stationed there and that's important for the city's forces and the PLA and anyone else to be able to effectively do their

jobs on the front of the South China Sea and also has potential implications for international law because under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea for a feature to be considered a full-on island and get all the benefits that comes with that under international law in terms of the maritime claims you can make based off that feature it needs to be able to naturally sustain human habitation and economic activity. And so you need to have seawater desalination and power and a functioning ecosystem, quite literally, to be able to support that. And so environmental protection plays a really big role in that. And also when it comes to other parts of environmental and ecological protection, like managing fishery resources, that is a major

security interest for China because both economically and in terms of food China relies a lot on the fisheries so the South China Sea is to other countries in the region and enforcing various fishing bans and exclusion zones can serve as a pretext for cracking down on foreign vessels operating in the city's waters and also cracking down on the unlicensed activity of chinese special vessels such as smuggling and poaching and on the final one it's resource development and that mainly refers to the fisheries resources that i just mentioned as well as hydrocarbon resources sitting at the bottom of the south china sea there's a couple dynamics at play there as well the city has prioritized economic development as one of its main pushes

that it's going for which is actually a little bit ironic because under chinese law uh to be considered a prefecture level city you need a certain population you need a certain amount of gdp and meet some other metrics and the city does not meet those metrics and so it's kind of retroactively pushing to beef up its economy and part of that is development fishing and aquaculture and marine tourism that's tied to those industries and then of course there's a lot of hydrocarbon exploration activities and exploitation within its jurisdiction and at least with the fishing side of things that helps China maintain a continuous civilian presence in contested areas and that is not necessarily benign because as I'll talk about later the Chinese fishermen

operating the South China Sea often have direct communication links to maritime law enforcement like the Czech Coast Guard, as well as the People's Liberation Army Navy. And so having fishermen in disputed areas is very useful for monitoring these areas and sending in forces when necessary to chase out other foreign fishermen. Thanks, Zach. That was really comprehensive. And we're going to go deeper on some of those points you just made. Ketien, probably the most ink has been spilled writing about the South China Sea and the way the Chinese have militarized some of the islands and features there,

whether it's putting in airfields, radar installations, surface-to-air missiles. But I want to ask now about infrastructural improvements to support life in the way that Zach described there. And I'd like to cover those by categories, starting with habitability. Sure. I think a lot of what I'm going to cover here sort of dovetails with what Zach just described, i.e. sort of the one of the main purposes for establishing a central city is really to demonstrate that the land feature, especially what China considers to be an island, can be naturally habitable as much as possible. So one of the most important things, in addition to the militarization aspect of the land feature, is really to improve the habitability of the central city.

So toward that end, I think what the Chinese government has done revolves around the two areas. And the first one is those who actually are living on the island, which tends to be on the smaller side, if we're really considering the size of a prefectural level city in mainland China, which tends to be in the size of millions. But you don't see that many people living on the central city. and it's a lot smaller than that but there are a certain amount of people living there which I think Zach can describe a little bit more in detail later and the second aspect that's also important for the habitability is really a tourism and I think that's a huge component of the Sanchez city so on the city we're in the city on the Nile Islands you're going to find

duels they actually from anecdotal evidence they brought teachers from they're oftentimes like volunteer teachers from, for example, high nonprofits, and they rotate for, say, half a year or so to teach whoever is on the island. And you also have hospitals and restaurants and a lot of the restaurants are actually catered towards tourists from, say, Milan, China. And a lot of them are government officials or those who are affiliated with government agencies. But there are also uh people who are willing to pay for such a trip to central city because it's considered to be kind of a rights demonstrating activity and a show of nationalism and patriotism to a certain extent um and we also have hotels that are also again catered towards tourism and uh there are

also living quarters on the island as well and as for a food which i think is something what Zach touched on earlier as well, it is trying to grow a little bit more food on the island itself. But I think from my understanding, the city still relies on quite a bit of transportation of food resources from the mainland or Hainan Island. And I believe that the food gets transported once a week or so, especially for those who are tourists. As for transportation, so obviously you have ships coming back and forth for food supplies and also for tourism purposes, but on the island, you also have, I guess, an improved infrastructure in terms of roads, civilian airports, etc. Because even though there is this tendency for civil-military fusion in China, the civilian aspect and the military aspect of Sanxia City is still, at least from my understanding, quite separate. The military does have its own pretty much niche area in terms of living areas, even food supply. I think the military has their own separate food supply lines, etc.

So the transportation is also kind of divided into the civilian or military aspect as well. And as for communication, obviously, you're going to see post offices and the stamps apparently become a pretty popular thing for those tourists because you get to send your postcard back to the mainland, which I think, again, demonstrates China's administrative control of territories in the South China Sea. And there are also telecommunication services, and I think some of the smart grid, microgrid technologies and systems that Jack will discuss more in detail later as well. When the city was established in 2012, it was really just the personnel there and the adults, the staff who work there. But in the years since, they've started letting both their children and their families and even their parents come, which is a huge change because when the city was established, the living conditions, both on the headquarters of Woody Island and all of the other features that are occupied by the city in both the Parasol Islands and Spratly Islands, were very, those were very harsh conditions. And they just simply could not support anyone but rugged-bodied PLA marine or, you know, the equivalent. But now it's a lot more habitable. You can actually have kind of more vulnerable population there.

And that really just goes to show how much they've invested in that infrastructure. Who are the tourists that you mentioned that are coming to the island? Are these mainland Chinese exclusively, or can the three of us take a trip there? Who's actually going to these islands? Uh-huh. So my understanding is that the majority of the tourists really come from either government officials or sort of affiliated government agencies. So, for example, agencies in Hainan, a province of China, gets a lot of sort of slots to go to Shenzhen City. And from what I've heard, for example, the research centers in universities in China that are working on maritime issues tend to have some slots to visit the city as well. But I'm not aware of any, say, commercialized and large scale organized tourist trips to Shanxi city as much as you see like a tourist trip to Beijing or Shanghai.

So I would say the majority of the tourists are either governmental officials, not necessarily at the highest level, but sometimes at the provincial level or city level or even county level, and sort of the related agency analysts or university researchers working on maritime issues. But I think if you are an honorary Chinese and do have some connections with regard to either the local government agencies or the university research centers, etc., you probably might be able to get a chance. This is more of my assumption. The reason why it hasn't been opened up to mass tourism is just that there are so many Chinese on the mainland. But Santa City is so fairly small and I can't afford or accommodate all of those mass tourists. So as of right now, it's still quite, as I understand, restricted because it is a relatively long trip to actually even get there and then to be able to live there based off of the food that's been grown there, as well as flown to the city. I don't have any recollection of any foreigners being allowed to visit Central City. It could be, but at least I don't think it has been reported extensively in the public media. yeah and i'll just add to that um before they officially opened tourism i found evidence of

them offering tourism under the guise of official research activities where they said uh you know we're going down there to study sea turtles or something like that but really they were just going down there to sunbathe mostly and that was done because tourism was seen as a very provocative of activity but you know by around 2014 2015 they were fully opening up the tourism and i i agree i can't actually say who exactly gets those tickets uh it's certainly expanded a lot they have you know commercial flights coming in and they have cruise ships going there and they engage in all sorts of different activities and i i think there's quite a limited number of tickets of who can actually go on it but it it's all sorts of different kinds of people you know you see a lot

of older folks. You have young people. There's a lot of travel bloggers who go there, so it looks like it's on the expanding side, but it's still kind of hard to say definitively. Zach, I'm going to follow up then. You gave us a hint of what the answer to this next question is earlier. Who lives in Sancho City now? Yeah, so it's all sorts of different people. It's mainly soldiers, especially from the PLA Navy. You have maritime law enforcement officials, both from the city local Coast Guard force, as well as some other agencies. You have quite a number of bureaucrats who themselves are sometimes kind of shipped out from mainland China. Some of them are retired military personnel who have been transferred into civilian roles on the city. Then you have

their families to varying degrees, and you have fishing communities, some of whom are actual just fishermen, and they got fishing and are starting to transition to kind of marine tourism industry and supporting that instead of doing traditional fishing and also engaging aquaculture at the same time. Some of them are maritime militia members. Katian, more than 400 companies have registered in Sanchez City. What's the significance of that? I think this is really in line with the physical infrastructure development

in the Sanchez City, as in it is another form of a demonstration of China's presence in the South China Sea, especially in what it considers to be its maritime territory, because registering your companies in a central city does, or at least as perceived by the Chinese government, it's a way to demonstrate China's actual administrative control of sovereignty. And of course, these registration might also have, say, potential economic benefits were connections, interest with the Guarta getting connected, or the companies were economic interests within China themselves. But I would say the most important perceived significance from the perspective of the Chinese government for these companies really, I think,

is the demonstration of administrative control. Zach, can you explain the rights defense system and then the forces that are assigned to it is how do fishermen contribute to that system yeah so sancho city has a very uh organized system of defending china's maritime rights and interests in the south china sea and it's a multi-tiered system that involves both the military and civilian agencies the kind of top-down view you have the people's liberation Army at the top. In the middle, then you have maritime law enforcement forces. And then on the bottom, you have a mix of ordinary fishermen and professionalized maritime militia forces. On the PLA level, you have at least two different organizations at play. First, you have the Hainan

Province Sancha Garrison, which was established at the same time the city was established in 2012. It's headquartered on Woody Island and shares office space with the city government and the city party committee, and this garrison does not command combat forces. It's responsible for coordinating military-city relations, training and equipping the city's maritime militia force, actually commanding maritime militia operations, and similar sorts of activities. So it's not the one in charge of the warships and airplanes and whatnot. The combat forces in the city's jurisdiction fall under the Southern Theater's command navy contingent, the South Seath Fleet, They have a maritime garrison on Woody Island that's been there for quite some time, long before Sancho was officially established.

And in addition to this garrison, the PLA Navy has obviously a massive presence throughout the Parasol Islands and the Spratly Islands, ranging from warships to aircraft to radar units and military engineering units and anyone else that they need down there. And so these two organizations work together with the city's garrison working as the middle point between the PLA Navy and the rest of the forces in the city. In the middle, you have a range of local maritime law enforcement organizations. The main one is called SANTRA Comprehensive Law Enforcement. It was established sometime around late 2012, early 2013. in accordance with broader reforms that were going on in China at the time that's when they were merging the various maritime law enforcement agencies in China into the now unified China Coast Guard and so you can you can kind of think SAMHSA comprehensive law enforcement is the local equivalent to the China Coast Guard where they merged the China marine surveillance and fisheries

enforcement units in the city and potentially other forces into one unified law enforcement Command. Currently, this law enforcement force has four main ships. It's building a fifth one, has a number of smaller boats ranging from ship-borne boats to inflatables to just smaller patrol craft and unmanned vessels. And they work very closely with the China Coast Guard on the front lines of the South China Sea. They have joint operations. And some of these ships in the sansha comprehensive law enforcement are former chinese coast guard ships one of them is quite large and a lot of advanced capabilities and uh they they're responsible for upholding china's claims but also monitoring fisheries doing environmental protection related patrols

inspections that sort of activity and then finally you have the city's maritime militia which is as far as i understand is mainly funded by the local city government and then organized and trained by both the city's garrison and the equivalent provincial level garrison and this militia is they're kind of forward deployed on various outposts as staff manning you know monitoring stations and radars but also carrying out any other kind of necessary activities and at sea they do reconnaissance and patrols and they can support military operations law enforcement operations and their presence is increasingly a high-tech one they used to rely exclusively on manned patrols around the various little islands in the south china sea because you you don't

necessarily have a pla warship or a china coast guard ship near every future to given point that you can have the militiamen kind of as a network to then call in the broader forces and so they used to use patrols to exclusively use patrols to keep an eye on those waters and those islands but they've started developing uh integrated command platforms and monitoring platforms that use video surveillance and AIS and radar and other capabilities. They've worked with companies that are registered in Sancho City that Katina was talking about earlier. They've worked with some of those companies.

Some of them are private, some of them are state-owned. They've worked with them to develop these capabilities that they're centralized under local party-state leadership on a given feature, such as Tree Island up in the Chilean Islets or the Crescent Group farther to the west of Woody Island. So the information gets collected there and then often is fed back to the authorities on Woody Island to a joint defense command center that they have that integrates all the different forces under the city's control. um and in addition to these uh professionalized maritime fishermen who often have steelhole boats uh steelhole boats and formal training and you know all sorts of different kind of resources

that make them uh only ostensibly fishermen you also just have the normal fishermen that i talked about earlier um thanks to a initiative uh that highland province launched sometime around 2010 a very significant number of the fishing boats that were just normal fishermen operating with South China Sea have been outfitted with China's Beidou system which is more or less like GPS but it has some key differences and one of those key differences is that it has a two-way SMS service that allows these boats to communicate with law enforcement and law enforcement to communicate with these boats so while they're out doing their very normal fishing activities they are also the eyes and ears of the pla and the china coast guard um the system isn't perfect with the normal

fishermen because uh in the documents you can see the officials complaining about you know we trained the same fishermen like seven times how to use the this technique still doesn't get how and do it because you know some some of these fishermen are old they've been applying their trade in these waters for decades and sometimes they're just in little wooden boats um but you know they're working on it it seems to be effective um for the most part and all all of these fishermen and the city's coast guard force and then the pla forces at the top are integrated under what's called a joint defense system they call it military law enforcement and civilian joint defense they the city in in coordination with the various forces uh has implemented various mechanisms to

facilitate the sharing of information uh joint uh operations joint exercises and the centralized command of these operations um and that all occurs on woody island at least for the parasol islands component of the system and the system is strongest in the parasol islands because that's Sanchez City is the strongest. The China Coast Guard and the PLA Navy play a much larger role down in the Spratly Islands, but the city's joint defense system is nonetheless quite significant, especially because it involves the political leadership of the city. With the city's garrison that I talked about earlier, this garrison is deeply intertwined with the city's civilian leadership. Formally within the PLA structure, these garrisons are all over China and they're

kind of intertwined with their local city and provincial commands. And in the case of Sansha, the city's often party secretary and mayor serves as the so-called first party secretary of the garrison's party committee and then leaders from the garrison such as the commander and the political commissar will serve on the standing committee of the city's uh of the city's uh chinese communist party committee and that that's the highest leadership body in the city and so you just have a lot of overlap there between the civilian and the military and that that is really baked into how the city operates it's called military civil fusion and that goes from you know that integrated leadership that i just mentioned to joint command operations to uh them working on

infrastructure projects together and sharing resources and implementing preferential policies that support the families of soldiers that are deployed in the city and all whole other host of things and the the bottom line here is that the the city is very much uh a civilian administrative entity in a formal sense but in practice it's essentially a civilian offshoot of the military occupation presence that's in uh the parasol islands and spratly islands um it's it's not i'm not saying it's completely subordinate to the pla or anything like that it's just they're deeply intertwined and they work with each other on a day-to-day basis and that's a very important dynamic to keep in mind especially as the u.s implements more export control measures

against chinese entities involved in the south china sea because in those cases if you think you're exporting a piece of technology to you know a chinese city that chinese city might be Sancha City, and then it's actually working directly with the PLA. And we've seen this in a couple of cases. I put out an article recently where I found that some satellite communications tech from U.S. defense contractors are being used by the city's Coast Guard force, the Sancha Comprehensive Law Enforcement, and some of this is military-grade tech. So the civilian and military linkages here are really crucial to understand. You mentioned the smart microgrid on Woody Island multiple times in the report. What does that grid consist of, and what is the significance of it?

Yeah, so Sanchez City has invested quite heavily in smart microgrid technology, and for context, smart microgrids are localized power grids that generate, store, and distribute power, usually using distributed energy resources like wind and solar. and crucially they can operate without connection to a centralized power grid and this makes them ideal for environments like the south tennessee where you're on little islands and they're very resilient as well compared to centralized grids so when you have extreme environmental conditions in south tennessee which include very high temperatures and salinity and humidity on top of very harsh sunlight and heavy rain and quite frequent typhoons you need a very resilient power supply system. And for the same reason, over the last decade and even longer, the US military has been investing quite heavily in microgrid technology on its various military

bases throughout the world. Smart microgrids are microgrids that then further integrate monitoring and control technologies, various algorithms, and sometimes artificial intelligence and whatnot to optimize the operations of these grid to make sure you have a constant supply of high quality power and before the city had a smart microgrid on woody island power supply was a constant headache for them they relied basically just on diesel generators which are expensive because you need to import fuel in from the chinese mainland or from hainan and they're easily disrupted and they break down a lot especially these intense environmental conditions and at that time the city only had one chip that that chip got disrupted by weather conditions

or typhoons or there was some kind of actual conflict in South Tennessee, that would be a major issue for the island. And so they really needed to improve their energy security. And that's where the smart microgrids come in. And they started planning these microgrids as soon as the city was established around 2012. What they ultimately ended up creating is a microgrid that integrates solar photovoltaics, which is solar panels, diesel generators, battery storage, in smart control tech on woody island and when looking at satellite imagery you can see a lot of this you know set up on the roofs of buildings on the island and this was the the initial step of the project that continuously upgraded the grid since then it looks like they're working on

intranet of energy capabilities there which is the energy applications of intranet of things which is the idea of where you connect all your devices and other capabilities to the internet and they share data and it's all very efficient and high-tech and whatnot. And this process involved a whole host of different actors ranging from the city to grid operators to both private and state-owned companies, some of which are household names like Huawei. They've been involved in this. You have PLA units, you have state laboratories like the Guangzhou Institute of Energy Conversion, just a whole host of people who have been involved in this from the ground up and continue to work on this grid. And they're still working on it now. They have a number of projects

they're working on. One of the interesting ones looks to have been a testing wave power off the coast of Woody Island, which is something they've expressed interest in before. And then we've seen satellites they've had some of these platforms operating off the coast of woody island and essentially the more distributed energy resources you have at play ranging from solar and wind to waves to recycling heat produced by generators and anything else that just makes these grids more efficient makes them more cheap better for the environment and that's a big part of this because these islands are so small that you really can't pollute them too much because then they become unlivable so you really need a clean source of power because without a clean source of power

you can't do anything because it's a dangerous cycle between water and electricity where on these islands you need water to in order to have electricity because you want fresh clean water to run your generators and run other facilities that generate electricity but then you can't have any of that without electricity in the first place. So the microgrids are just a really smart solution to this. And the city has explicitly talked about using Woody Island as a test bed essentially for the rest of the South China Sea, both on the smaller islets where we've seen a range of solar panels and wind turbines being rolled out on them and smart grids as well. At least one other feature has a closed system smart grid that is it's a wind couple wind turbines some solar panels

and a new seawater desalination facility they're all connected together as a specific system on tree island up in the shielding islets and i have reviewed evidence recently that shows they are continuing to implement even more microgrids than woody islands where woody island it covers just the island generally serves both military and civilian populations but some of these systems that they're rolling out now like that seawater desalination plant i just mentioned are solar and wind and the control technology is geared to specific application like keeping that seawater desalination plant online or keeping a monitoring system online so various specific applications there and that that's intended for use both in the elsewhere in the parasol islands and we've

seen talk of it down in Spratly's and at least on one of the artificial island bases you can see some solar panels and some wind turbines that's on one of the smaller ones down in Spratly's not the you know huge artificial islands they've created but it's definitely in the works and it really goes to show how they're setting up the infrastructure necessary to have a long-term presence there that allows them to do you know any sort of activity that they want to engage in ranging from keeping their ports online and their cold storage for fishing it you know keeps their computer rooms online it keeps the radars running it allows you to have air conditioning because that's actually quite the challenge down there because air conditioning in general

is a huge power suck and when you're in south china sea which is very hot and very humid you want air conditioning because otherwise it's very unpleasant to be on those islands um yeah it's just a big step forwards for them because when the city was established the power supply situation was so bad that in peak load seasons often in summer when you need a lot of ac they would have to turn off electricity to non-essential uses on woody island to keep the key things like you know the computer radars and whatnot the government offices keep those running and so that to give an example if say our you know the indo paycom facilities in hawaii to keep those running if you had to turn off all the cities in hawaii to keep those running that's not

a sustainable long-term situation and that's where those microgrids are coming in for china's islands it allows them to have both the civilian and the military systems online at the same time and just really facilitates all other forms of activity there. Down to the final question, and we'll run a little short on time here. Zach, I'm going to ask you this first, and then Ketia, and I'm going to ask for your thoughts on it as well. How do you expect Sancho City to continue to develop? Essentially more of the same. They're on a good path. They've achieved a lot of results. There's still a lot of deficiencies that they talk about, but the main thing is continuing building the structure, building the economies, integrating the military and civilian aspects

of their presence. That's just what they've done so far. They show no signs of stopping based on information they've put out recently. We can expect or should at least watch for further activity down the Spratly Islands because, as I mentioned earlier, the Spratlys are still mainly the domain of the PLA and the China Coast Guard, whereas the Parasau Islands are more under the authority of the city, but we've seen signs of further administrative expansion down the Spratly Islands with a new district that was established last year in April, and so that leads to the conclusion that there's potentially going to be some more civilian administrative activity down there, and so that's what we should be keeping our eyes on. And then, Ketian,

final word to you, same question, how do you expect the city to continue its development? Sure. And I think I absolutely agree with Zach on sort of the trajectory of a central city, i.e. sort of more civilian set of things and improved infrastructure for the system of sustainability of the city. But I think it's also important to note that a central city is nowhere near to becoming a what a normal prefectural level city in China would look like. It does really have, I would say, the economic vibrance of a city in any mainland Chinese cities. I think at the end of the day, it is still more for the purpose of China's demonstration of ministerial control and the level of civil-military fusion on Woody Island or a central city in general. It's much larger than what you would normally see in a Chinese city. So I would say it's still, even though the purpose is really to demonstrate control and to act as if this is a normal city, as you would see in the Chinese cities, I think it's far from being a normal as compared to what you normally would see in an actual city that's dominated by a sort of devalue administration and economic, normal economic activities, et cetera. I'd like to thank my guests, Dr. Ketien Jung and Zach Haver. Ketien, where can we find you online and what are you working on next?

So if you're interested in my works, you can feel free to see my website at the Schar School, but also I have a personal website that's ketienjung.com. And with regard to my next projects, I'm working on a book manuscript that explains China's coercion in all kinds of national security issues in general. And I'm also working on a book chapter that explains and examines China's grand strategy in the past 30 years. And a very separate subject is on the Chinese Communist Party's alliance patterns during the Chinese Civil War. But that's just another story for another day. Thank you. I look forward to reading all of those. Zach, where can we find you and what's your next project? I'm on Twitter at Zachary Haber.

and my next project can't give the details right now but it's forthcoming soon I didn't mention this earlier but I'm also a reporter covering the South China Sea for Radio Free Asia and we should have a pretty big story breaking hopefully

sometime in the next month, South China Sea related, that's my job and I look forward to sharing that with you in the audience Well thank you both again for joining us and listeners, thanks for tuning in, we'll see you next time © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Thank you for watching.