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http://atimes.com/2016/02/china-can-unstealth-us-fighter-jets-in-spratlys/
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The Strait of Malacca is a narrow waterway between Malaysia and Sumatera island of Indonesia. Virtually the entire commercial sea traffic between the Far East and Europe, the Middle East, and India and passes through the Strait of Malacca....
And so, in the fall of 1995, Beijing is proceeding on an accelerated implementation of its ambitious and multi facetted program to consolidate control over the Strait of Malacca as a key to controlling the China Sea, the eastern Indian Ocean and chocking Western commercial traffic. Even the completion of the first phase, in which Chinese forces stay out of the Strait themselves, will put Beijing in effective control over this major choke point. Subsequent steps by the PRC and its allies to complete the surge have demonstrated a sophisticated combination of use of military power in peacetime with the exploitation of state-sponsored terrorism to achieve strategic tangible results.
The Spratly Islands -- the Nansha Islands in Chinese -- is a multitude of small islands and reefs, mostly uninhabited, that spread over a vast area (700km by 600km) between the coasts of Vietnam and the Philippines (Palawan island), just north of Malaysia and Indonesia (Sabah island). These islands have long been claimed by numerous countries, each of which presently occupies a few islands and reefs within the huge ocean space. The importance of the Spratly Islands grew in the late 1980s following the discovery of huge oil fields -- conservatively estimated at 100 million barrels -- just underneath the ocean space. The importance of these oil deposits will significantly grow, both economically and strategically, as the overall economy and especially industrialization of east Asia continues to expand at a rapid pace.
The new era of the importance of the Spratly Islands was heralded in 1988, when the PLA Navy in two brief clashes (March and November) seized six positions near Johnson Reef from the North Vietnamese and attacked Vietnamese naval patrols respectively. The Johnson Reef is placed at the center of the Spratly Islands. By the early 1990s, the PLA High Command was operating in accordance with Beijing's growing sense of urgency. One of the first major projects reflecting growing interest in activities in the South China Sea was the major upgrading of SIGINT collection capacity. At first, the large SIGINT complex on Hainan Island was vastly expanded. Then, the PRC built another SIGINT station on rocky Island (Shi-tao) near Woody Island (Lin-tao) in the Paracel Islands. This is the highest point in the area, and the local station vastly improves coverage of the entire Spratly Islands area, the Philippines, and the Strait of Malacca. These new facilities were largely operational in the summer of 1995.
Meanwhile, the PLA began taking a closer look at contingency plans to consolidate control over the Spratly Islands. They found them to be a daunting challenge because of the PLA's acknowledged military shortfalls -- particularly the absence of high performance air power (from aircraft carriers or far away land bases). Indeed, the milestone July 1993 book Can the Chinese Army Win the Next War? stressed "how urgent and complex the Nansha Islands question is for China's Naval leaders. However, the new generation of leaders, filled with a strong spirit of nationalism, will never abandon their efforts to bring about the return of the Nansha Islands to the bosom of the motherland." http://www.freeman.org/m_online/bodansky/beijing.htm
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