An activist professor has called for strong measures from the government to defend the country’s maritime sovereignty, after China installed three more buoys near disputed waters. 

Professor Seo Kyoung-duk from Sungshin Women’s University made the appeal in a social media post on Monday, saying China is attempting to turn the Yellow Sea into its own internal waters.

Criticizing China for installing the additional buoys and calling it a strategy to strengthen its effective control over the waters, Seo said the Seoul government should go beyond just lodging protests and take proportional countermeasures.

In May 2023, South Korea’s Navy confirmed the presence of the three buoys in the Yellow Sea near the provisional maritime zone, where the two countries’ exclusive economic zones overlap.

The three buoys bring the total number of Chinese floating structures in the waters to 13.