Straits Times has updated their SCS reports with several articles, including the before and after reefs:
http://www.straitstimes.com/tags/asias-territorial-disputes
Makes a good (long) read.
Oh boy, the national debt angle. For perspective China owns about 8% of the total US national debt. The majority is US owned. China used to buy US bonds as a way to soak up the excess Dollars it earned in trade with the US, hoping that by doing so this would maintain the value of the US Dollar high in trade while keeping that of the Yuen low and thus keeping the terms of trade favorable to them. The problem with this, as the Japanese found out the hard way, is that this trade imbalance ends up inflating the living daylights out of their own economy. Btw, this is a policy the US government aggressively promoted because it allowed the US government to run current accounts deficits without worrying about inflating the US economy and a large reason why nations resent US claims of “dumping”. US policy creates these situaitons. China no longer buys US debt to the degree it once did. Japan in the 1990s held a far higher proportion of US debt that China ever did and Japans decades long economic doldrums inform current Chinese trade and monetary policy.