Yeh because it's there island. The war is over give it up. No internationally agrees with china. Therefore it's not there island. Also you forgot the important word there. Defend, They are defending not attacking anyone.
From the international perspective, china unilaterally declared the islands sovereign territory, and specifically claimed there were no military intentions for the island. China has contradicted its previous claims, and alienated the neighboring territories by claiming disputed territory. The international community is understandably displeased with china.
It's disputed because 3 countries claim ownership of the the island as it's within their "territorial" (with the exception of Taiwan which claims it because it's still pretends to represent "real China") waters.
China pretty much made claim to all of the waters it's claim extends as far as the shore lines of Malaysia.
China also extends it's claim over waters outside of the immediate territorial waters by building artificial islands so far only within the 200 n/M of their exclusive economic zone which it claims extends it's coastal waters even further (this isn't exactly the case for this specific island (it's land mass was artificially extended, and a large harbor was built) but an important background point for the entire dispute).
So far countries have refrained from militarizing the islands too much sure they might post a couple of sailors here and there but this is a long rang air defense system capable of shooting down aircraft as far as 400km away, this is basically an S-300/400 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-400_(missile)] "copy" with a much more advanced radar and better interceptors by all counts.
China never would have resorted to dredging if they had been able to occupy an island big enough to put an airport on. But all of the islands of that size were already occupied by one of the other countries, so China decided to build one rather than take one by force. The alternative is to abandon their claim on the islands entirely, which would be stupid because nobody else really has a better claim on a bunch of barren, uninhabited islands.
Honestly, this is one of those types of disputes where nobody has a clearly better claim than anyone else, so the nation with the biggest navy wins (the US did this all over the South Pacific, so we can't act all high and mighty). But there's nothing inherently important about those islands other than they grant territorial waters, so whoever has the biggest navy in the region will control them. Very different than what happened in Georgia or Ukraine (or Iraq, or Afghanistan...)
The US media usually portrays this as 100% Chinese aggression, when the truth is that every country that claims the islands is doing the exact same thing (albeit on a smaller scale).
People can repeat that the shoal is nearer the Philippines and I can repeat that, using the same examples I already have and others, it is quite irrelevant.
The borders in the area where decided by Westerners, China was shortchanged and is now using the Western approach: Land, claim, defend.
The reality on the ground is that China (and that really does include both the PRC and Taiwan) claims this area and that it physically occupies it. Unless the Philippines and others propose to start a war the area is therefore de facto Chinese.
PRC threw a tantrum about it, no doubt about it. But, it never 'surrounded' the island. Two completely different things.
As far as I know, the videos posted of the PLA's combats by official sources during the visit were nothing but their regular exercises, as they had some PLA foundation anniversary.
All of these countries have overlapping territorial claims in the area; portraying the illegitimacy of China's claims as "annexing" "their" territory is misleading when the other claims are just as illegitimate.
It's not like there's a local island population that could object to the occupation, so control effectively belongs to whoever establishes a permanent presence first. It's obviously not an ideal state of affairs, but it also doesn't indicate a propensity of the current Chinese government to invade populated territory any more than for the other countries.
Are you just going to ignore the fact that China has been illegally building dozens if not hundreds of military bases there in international waters and is now trying to claim that it owns this territory?
The physical island is a huge geopolitical asset or security risk. See island chain strategy. Also look up elevation map of Taiwan + Taiwan straight. Chinese coast is very shallow and hard to hide Chinese subs, whereas east Taiwan drops straight into deep water which enables China to hide subs which is important in controlling regional waters against US Navy. Regardless, the Chinese military planning certainly doesn't pretend the land isn't there. The government (from both sides) just doesn't recognize each others sovereignty.
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