South China Sea: Beijing opens hardware store on disputed Woody Island

According to the Sansha government, the store provides “several thousand” products, including electrical items, fire safety equipment, water pipes, door and window accessories and paint.

Wang Hailong, deputy manager of Sansha Tianqin Service Management, which is in charge of civilian services on the island, said the company spent about two months on market research “to understand what kind of hardware is needed by soldiers and civilians on the island and nearby”.

Located about 300km (186 miles) from the southern island province of Hainan, Woody Island, known as Yongxing Island in China, is the largest outcrop among the 30 or so islands that make up the Paracels. The archipelago is controlled by Beijing but also claimed by Taipei and Hanoi.

To assert its claims to the resource-rich waters, Beijing in 2012 announced the establishment of Sansha city on Woody Island to administer the disputed South China Sea islands and features.

In 2017, an Israeli satellite imagery company captured a photo of HQ-9 surface-to-air missiles on Woody Island. Beijing has not confirmed the deployment.

The island has a post office, banks, a meteorological observatory, schools, a library, parks, hospitals and power plants.

It is also home to a civil-military airport on the island, which features a 3,000-metre take-off runway that can accommodate a fully loaded Boeing 737 airliner, and a 5,000-tonne wharf.

According to the latest census, the island had a population of 2,333 as of November 2020.

Infrastructure construction on Woody Island has often sparked protest from rival claimants, particularly Vietnam.