16 Facts About Spratly Islands

Spratly Islands are one of the major archipelagos in the South China Sea which complicate governance and economics in this part of Southeast Asia due to their location in strategic shipping lanes.

Spratly Islands are all of similar nature; they are cays : sand islands formed on old degraded and submerged coral reefs.

Spratly Islands contain almost no arable land, are largely uninhabited, and very few of the islands have a permanent drinkable water supply.

Spratly Islands consist of islands, reefs, banks and shoals made up of biogenic carbonate.

Dismemberment and subsidence of continental crust into horsts, rotated fault blocks and half-grabens that underlie the Spratly Islands and surrounding sea bottom occurred in two distinct periods.

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Geological surveys show localised areas within the Spratly Islands region are favourable for the accumulation of economic oil and gas reserves.

For example, Spratly Islands Island is larger during the northeast monsoon, and smaller during the southwest monsoon .

One region of the Spratly Islands Archipelago, named Truong Sa, was proposed by Vietnam's Ministry of Science, Technology, and the Environment as a future protected area.

Military groups in the Spratly Islands have engaged in environmentally damaging activities such as shooting turtles and seabirds, raiding nests and fishing with explosives.

Spratly Islands described it as where sea products and shipwrecked cargoes were available to be collected.

Parts of the Paracels and Spratly Islands were again controlled by Republic of China after the 1945 surrender of Japan, since the Allied powers assigned the Republic of China to receive Japanese surrenders in that area, however no successor was named to the islands.

Also following the defeat of Japan at the end of World War II, the ROC re-claimed the entirety of the Spratly Islands after accepting the Japanese surrender of the islands based on the Cairo and Potsdam Declarations.

In 1946, the Americans allegedly reminded the Philippines at its independence that the Spratly Islands were not Philippine territory, both to not anger Chiang Kai-shek in China and because the Spratly Islands were not part of the Philippines per the 1898 treaty Spain signed with the United States.

Under President Lee Teng-hui, Taiwan stated that "legally, historically, geographically, or in reality", all of the South China Sea and Spratly islands were Taiwan's territory and under Taiwanese sovereignty, and denounced actions undertaken there by Malaysia and the Philippines, in a statement on 13 July 1999 released by the foreign ministry of Taiwan.

Spratly Islands pointed out that other countries did not need to do full land reclamation since they already control islands, and that the reason China engaged in extensive land reclamation is because they needed it to build airfields since China only has control over reefs.

In 2017, the United States despite not being a claimant in the Spratly Islands dispute, has used freedom of navigation operations to challenge what it deemed as excessive and illegal maritime claims from multiple Asia-Pacific states including Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Maldives, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Vietnam.