China Just Tested Its Invisible Navy… And No One Noticed
Like Christmas Day, we woke to find a surprise - our work was being covered by a Youtuber.
Thousands Of Chinese Boats Mass At Sea, Raising Questions
"We've seen like two, 300, up to a thousand (Chinese fishing boats congregate), but anything exceeding a thousand I thought was unusual."
Maritime and military experts told AFP the massing of Chinese fishing boats on December 25, about 300 kilometres northeast of Taiwan, was on a scale they had never seen before.
Another incident detected in early January involved around 1,000 Chinese fishing vessels clustered in an uneven rectangle, about 400 kilometres long, for more than a day in the same area of the East China Sea.
Thousands of Chinese Fishing Boats Quietly Form Vast Sea Barriers
China quietly mobilized thousands of fishing boats twice in recent weeks to form massive floating barriers of at least 200 miles long, showing a new level of coordination that could give Beijing more ways to impose control in contested seas.
The two recent operations unfolded largely unnoticed. An analysis of ship-tracking data by The New York Times reveals the scale and complexity of the maneuvers for the first time.
Last week, about 1,400 Chinese vessels abruptly dropped their usual fishing activities or sailed out of their home ports and congregated in the East China Sea. By Jan. 11, they had assembled into a rectangle stretching more than 200 miles. The formation was so dense that some approaching cargo ships appeared to skirt around them or had to zigzag through, ship-tracking data showed.
China has debuted its new landing barges
Just to their right, a line of strange looking ships loom in the mist. The enormous ships are unmoving, raised above the waves by thick pylons. Drop-down bridges connect them to each other, the front one extending down to the sand. Jason Wang, chief executive of Ingenispace, a geospatial analysis company, said the ships were a clear sign of China’s “creativity…They can produce the ships really fast – four to six months – and get them into theatre,” Wang said. “They can also iterate improvements faster than everybody else.”