China has opened a new shopping centre on Woody Island in the disputed Paracel Islands, bolstering its civilian presence on the strategically vital South China Sea outpost.
The Sansha City Commercial Centre opened to business on Thursday, according to the local government. The over 6,000 square metre (64,600 sq ft) complex is the latest addition to China’s civilian infrastructure on what it calls Yongxing Island, following its first hardware store last year and a hotpot restaurant in 2023.
Woody Island lies within the Paracel Islands – an archipelago known as the Xisha Islands in Chinese that is at the centre of overlapping territorial claims in the South China Sea.
Woody Island is the largest of around 30 islands in the Paracels chain and serves as the administrative hub of Sansha, a city established in Hainan province in 2012 to assert Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea.
Sansha governs the Paracels, as well as the disputed Spratly Islands and Macclesfield Bank, called Nansha Islands and Zhongsha Islands, respectively, in China.
The city had a permanent population of about 2,200 at the end of 2024, according to data from the Hainan statistics bureau.
