Western Pacific, 10 February 2025 Observing better, the team discovers that it is a large yellow cage for aquaculture. It was laid next to the one that looks a lot like an abandoned and renovated oil platform, but which shows evident signs of a very recent human activity, complete with heliport and lifeboats evidently in full operation.
The researchers wonders what that installation in an area usually buried in commercial navigation do us (only fishing boats are exempt), which moreover is not reported in the maps and on whose structure the writing on the Atlantic Amsterdam surface appears, the same name as an oil platform that had been built by France in 1982 and that should not be there.
Above all, the crew is interrogated on Chi and why it appeared in the so -called PMZ, a bearing area halfway between South Korea and China contested between Beijing and Soul and for this reason subject to an agreement signed in 2001 between the two Asian powers to resolve the disputes on the relevance of territorial waters. However, the answer does not remain evaded: half an hour after the discovery, two ships without banners and three other smaller boats appear on the horizon, shortly surrounding the South Korean ship and physically preventing them from accessing the site where the cage is located.
The men on board intend to force the South Korean Naviglio to do immediate bales. The researchers remain disoriented, but at least now they have understood who laid that structure. To understand it, the unequivocal signs that some members of the crew of what seemed to be the Beijing Coast Guard launched to the Koreans were enough: brandishing long kitchen knives, they suggested to keep away. After two hours of tension and mutual threats, the South Korean unit returns to the base without further delay.
The case, of course, does not remain in silence. Also because Soul has already denounced the presence in the Chinese illegal installations area between 2024 and 2025 many other times, which raised the guard level in the South Korean executive for the potential (and inevitable) territorial disputes that could arise with Beijing.
To the protests of the South Korean ambassador to China, the dragon responds through its spokesman of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Guo Jiakun, trying to downsize the thing: “The aquaculture plants set up by a Chinese company in the PMZ do not violate the agreement between China and South Korea. We hope that South Korea considers the question in a questionable way”. The thing ends there, but only apparently.
The basic problem, in fact, is that this episode is not isolated and instead has a significant geopolitical weight. It is in fact the tangible sign of a precise, large and silent strategy by China in the context of the yellow Sea. More: according to analysts, this pacific stratagem indicates the Chinese will to continue in the construction of offshore artificial islands, prelude to the creation of real military structures masked by civil installations, which Beijing would then like to equip with surveillance radar, landing tracks and even missile systems.
In this way, the Chinese navy could one day control the entire yellow Sea, at the expense of its neighbors, South Korea in the first place. The term yellow Sea, in fact, indicates that part of the Pacific Ocean, north of the Eastern Chinese Sea, delimited by the Asian continental coast and the Korean peninsula, which extends for a total surface of about 417 thousand square kilometers, lapsing the coasts of the People’s Republic of China and the two Koreas. Ironically, the Koreans call this western sea area. In a neoimperialist push, and in clear antithesis with that denomination, Beijing, since the day after the abbreviation of the agreement for the PMZ a quarter of a century ago, continued to promote – and deliberately intensify – provocative activities in the area, due to a pressure strategy aimed at strengthening its military projection in those waters, and at the same time aimed at limiting the freedom of action as well as its of the fearsome fleet of the United States.
Some examples of Beijing’s conduct in the yellow Sea: he masked military boats and soldiers by civilians, has provided the installation of thousands of reporting buoys; He has periodically organized military exercises with war units and is currently proceeding with the creation of areas in fact inaccessible to commercial fleets, because they are declared forbidden to navigate. To these maneuvers are added repeated raids in foreign waters, and the construction of permanent structures such as those described above.
The tactic of the Chinese therefore indicates a precise will to alter the regional balances in its favor, reducing the operating margin, both military and commercial, of foreign forces – be they Korean, Japanese, US or others. These deliberately ambiguous acts, not properly hostile but not even friendly, are functional to test the hold of the pro-western alliance in Eastern Asia, and to probe the possible methods and timing of reaction of the opponents.
According to the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, “China does not need an open conflict: it is enough to slowly alter the rules of the game. Each new installation or violation is not an exception, but part of a strategy of normalization of the anomaly “. In other words, the goal is not only military, but above all psychological and diplomatic. The numbers do not lie: in only 2024, over 330 Chinese ships have illegally entered the South Korean territorial waters. In 2023, 130 Chinese planes crossed the South Korean aerial space, many of which right above the yellow Sea. The South Korean authorities, forced to repeat their interception jets repeatedly, report unprecedented pressure this year.
The delimitation of a bearing area agreed between the parties, therefore, remains on paper and no longer seems to be enough for the popular republic, which aims to complete the yellow Sea control. An area of clear geopolitical relevance that could prove to be decisive, especially in the case of escalation between Washington and Beijing on the Taiwan dossier.
Therefore, Japan has also extended the surveillance operations of its navy to the western borders of the Chinese Sea, formally inserting the yellow Sea in the strategic plans 2025 for “the containment of Chinese activities”, thus explicit the problem. The Japanese premier himself, Shigeru Ishiba, hardly condemned the episode mentioned at the opening in which South Korean researchers randomly stumbled.
In an official note released by the Foreign Ministry in late June, Tokyo defined the moves of Beijing “extremely deplorable” and submitted a formal diplomatic protest to the Chinese leadership, thanks to the intended signed in 2008 between China and Japan, which provided for cooperation on the joint exploitation of the energy resources of the area. An agreement that, however, has never been fully implemented. “Changing the status quo coercively can compromise regional stability” reported a spokesman for the Japanese government, citing the open violation of the spirit of international cooperation by Beijing.
The problem remains: the legal boundaries of the vast “bearing” maritime area in the heart of the yellow Sea are uncertain, and the situation is far from being resolved according to international law and with peaceful means. In addition to Tokyo, Washington is also preparing to manage Chinese expansionism in an atmosphere of growing uncertainty of law: it is for this reason that the seventh fleet of the US Navy now maintains a continuous presence in the seas around the Korean peninsula, where it performs periodic reconnaissance missions called “freedom of navigation”. Even for the Pentagon, in fact, the yellow Sea is an area with a strategic value and does not go unguarded for this reason, especially in an atmosphere of possible escalation in the Taiwan Strait.
