AKIPRESS.COM - Lighthouses have for centuries guided the world’s seafarers, preventing ships from striking rocks and reefs and helping fishermen find their way home. In the disputed South China Sea, they may be taking on a darker role.

China’s program to build beacons on reclaimed reefs it occupies in the waters -- through which about 30 percent of global trade passes -- is spooking other claimant countries concerned it will use them as political tools. Having lighthouses perched on top of the reefs, ostensibly to help navigation in the waters, could boost China’s argument for sovereignty, Bloomberg reports.

The country is expediting construction, having built two lighthouses in the Paracel islands and two in the Spratly archipelago as of October. They are part of an array of civilian facilities that China says will serve the public good by providing bases for search and rescue operations and meteorological information.

There’s potentially another motivation: So that China can promote the idea that the reefs it occupies have enough infrastructure -- and height -- to be regarded as islands, albeit artificial ones. It has indicated this entitles it to a 12-nautical mile territorial zone in the surrounding waters, something recently challenged by a U.S. warship that came within that range of one reef.

“Building facilities on any features for which the sovereignty is disputed, and you are building a case toward administrative control, which can make quite a difference in international legal proceedings,” said Alexander Sullivan, an associate fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington. “Doing things like building lighthouses as opposed to runways or barracks allows them to make the argument they are providing public goods.”

China claims more than 80 percent of the South China Sea based on a nine-dash line drawn on a 1940s map lodged informally with the United Nations in 2009. The map covers around 2 million square kilometers of maritime space equal to about 22 percent of China’s land area, according to a U.S. State Department estimate. It also overlaps claims from Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Brunei and Malaysia.