Vietnam Building Islands in South China Sea

Vietnam has joined China in the race to stake territorial claims in the South China Sea by building artificial islands.

Reuters reports that the Vietnamese activity was detected in satellite photos from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The work is focused on two small islands that are being created by dredging up sand from the bottom of the ocean and placing it islets and atolls.

At one location, an island has essentially been created from scratch with Vietnamese workers using the dredged up sand to build up a previously submerged area. In another location, the dredged sand has been used to add more land mass to an already existing island.  

China has already established a number of similar islands using the same techniques. One of the islands is even large enough to support a landing strip for aircraft. China was not happy about Vietnam's construction of these islands and condemned them.

Reuters says the Vietnamese effort seems to have sometime in 2010, well before China began building their own islands in 2014. However, China has dedicated many more resources to the island building projects and as a result has established far more territory than Vietnam.

The revelation of the Vietnamese island in the South China Sea is sure to further increase tensions between the two Communist countries who fought a war in the 1970s.

Tensions were already strained by the fact that China had sent an oil rig to deep within Vietnamese territorial waters to explore for oil and natural gas under the sea bed. That led to a number of confrontations between both countries' coast guard and fishing fleets, which resulted in the sinking of a number of vessels that rammed each other.