China’s campaign of land reclamation and military construction on features in disputed waters of the South China Sea “vastly outstrips what all other claimants have done over the past several decades”, a senior US official has said. As for recent friction with Indonesia over Chinese fishermen, it was “particularly disturbing” to see fishing issues come to the fore, and the scale of Chinese fishing “raises questions about what the intent is over the long term”, Ms Colin Willett, US Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, told South-east Asian journalists yesterday in a teleconference call from Washington.” In the case of Indonesia, we’re not even talking about the South China Sea. We’re well into Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone,” said Ms Willett. “I think this is all a piece of a broader pattern of behaviour where the scope and scale of Chinese activities actually outpace what we see in the rest of the region.”