The government in Beijing has made no official statement to this effect, but connect the dots and here’s a picture: It has mothballed for now a quest to landfill new islands in Asia’s major disputed waterway, the South China Sea. Land reclamation had alarmed five other Asian governments that vie with China for sovereignty over the sea, which is packed with valuable fisheries as well as fossil fuel reserves, because the resulting new islets can support military installations.
China has put any new, controversial reclamation work on hold under a rising tide of foreign pressure, at least two veteran Asian geopolitics analysts believe. The last time you heard about it was in June, when an American think tank called China’s work on three of the sea’s Spratly Islands “near completion.” The construction began at least a year earlier.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphjennings/2017/11/27/china-freezes-expansion-of-its-control-over-asias-major-disputed-sea/#25871a2d771c