Qualla: Spratly Islands

Spratly Islands: Introduction

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1939, the Spratly Islands were coral islets mostly inhabited by seabirds. That single sentence, drawn from the historical record, captures how much has changed. Today these same specks of sand and coral sit at the center of overlapping sovereignty claims by China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei. Military garrisons occupy features barely large enough to support a basketball court. Artificial islands bristle with runways and radar. Beneath the turquoise surface, the seabed may hold oil and natural gas reserves that no claimant is willing to let another exploit. The Spratly Islands have become the most militarized patch of open ocean on the planet.

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Spratly Islands: Geography of Dangerous Ground

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The archipelago sprawls across roughly 425,000 square kilometers of the South China Sea, though the total naturally occurring land area is a mere 177 hectares, expanding to about 200 hectares with reclaimed land. The islands are cays: sand formations built on old, degraded coral ...

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Spratly Islands: Six Flags Over Coral

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Each claimant administers its occupied features under different political frameworks. Brunei includes its claimed portion within its exclusive economic zone. China places the islands under Sansha, a prefecture-level city in Hainan Province. Malaysia administers its features as pa...

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Spratly Islands: Centuries of Passage, Decades of Conflict

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the nineteenth century, Europeans found Chinese fishermen from Hainan making annual sojourns to the Spratlys. Vietnamese and Malay fishermen also used the islands seasonally. Permanent military occupations began only in the twentieth century, accelerating after World War II wh...

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Spratly Islands: The Arbitration and Its Aftermath

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Philippines brought its dispute with China to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2013, invoking the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The tribunal's July 2016 ruling was sweeping: it found that China had no legal basis for historic rights within its nine-das...

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Spratly Islands: Coral, Concrete, and Consequence

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From the air, the Spratlys reveal a jarring contrast. Natural cays barely rise above the waterline, their pale sand fringed by reef. Nearby, artificial islands display the geometry of military infrastructure: runways, harbor walls, radar domes, and weapons emplacements. China's l...

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