For two years, scores and sometimes hundreds of Chinese fishing ships have been harassing, swarming and spying on Filipino construction crews upgrading infrastructure on the island of Thitu, known as Pagasa in the Philippines. This is the second largest naturally occurring island in the Spratly archipelago, and is home to about 100 Filipinos and a small military detachment.
The Thitu confrontation is part of a much larger, long-running dispute between Beijing and Manila over ownership of islands and islets in the Spratly group and other South China Sea features such as the Scarborough Shoal and Mischief Reef.