It's not like there's a local island population that could object to the occupation, so control effectively belongs to whoever establishes a permanent presence first. It's obviously not an ideal state of affairs, but it also doesn't indicate a propensity of the current Chinese government to invade populated territory any more than for the other countries.
> when the other claims are just as illegitimate
This is untrue, re: «On 12 July 2016, an arbitral tribunal constituted under Annex VII to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea ruled that China has no legal basis to claim "historic rights" within its nine-dash line in a case brought by the Philippines»
> All of these countries have overlapping
This is massively disingenuous, because only China is putting military bases next to other countries and then chasing off their fishermen. Locate Mischief Reef on a map, and then tell me China isn’t annexing Phillipine territory with a straight face.
> China has no legal basis to claim "historic rights" within its nine-dash line in a case brought by the Philippines
The tribunal did not find that the Philippines had such a legal basis either. Mischief Reef is not in the Philippines' territorial waters, which only extend 12 nautical miles. It is within their exclusive economic zone, which means that China would not be allowed to e.g. drill for oil. But the surface is international waters and no nation has the right to obstruct another's vessels there.
> only China is putting military bases next to other countries
Vietnam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namyit_Island
Yes it is, and China has put a military base there and is chasing out Filipino citizens.
Now there’s a straw man
Each of these have thousands of stores in China.
> China does not respond to the normal stimulus / protest that democratic, human-rights based nations do.
I guess there was the brutality of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, but Tiananmen is the exception in the history of Chinese protests, just like the Kent State Massacre was in the US.
If it is only an exception in Chinese history, why is it not being mentioned anywhere, let alone discussed? You still don't see the difference?
Most Chinese don't want to talk about it because it's considered a source of national shame. (Westerners often interpret that as them being afraid to talk, but that's not actually true.) They also believe the events are used for foreign propaganda which is not entirely untrue.
In Germany people have a completely different perspective on the Holocaust. It was horrible and a source of great national shame, but still, never forget. Blocking Wikipedia on Holocaust remembrance day would not happen in Germany.
Is the Hundred Flowers Campaign also an exception? And the millions of people who were killed during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution? Or the millions of people who have been brainwashed for religious reasons in Xinjiang? Or the thousands of journalists, authors and publishers who have been jailed, sometimes "disappeared", for texts critical of the CCP just during the last two decades?
You answered your own baffle, it's right there.
You know why the US didn't suffer painful sanctions for its Iraq invasion and debacle (which ~3/4+ of the world was overwhelmingly against)? Because the US-allied world runs the world, mostly, and the US was the world's only superpower both economically and militarily (throw in the global reserve currency for good measure).
China carries an increasingly big stick and a very aggressive attitude that it's their way or else (and they mean it). It's exactly the same reason Muslim countries won't do anything to them or say almost anything to them about Xinjiang; they're afraid of China and they know China does not respond to the normal stimulus / protest that democratic, human-rights-based nations do.
So Russia has the authoritarian, no-human-rights disregard aspect that China has, although to a slightly lesser extent (Putin's dictatorship is nowhere near as powerful or enduring as the CPC party dictatorship). The problem for Russia is that they're economically weak and backwards. They can be easily pushed around and contained economically. Russia is also a regional military power, China is about to be a global military power (certainly within ~20 years). What is Russia going to do, commit suicide by shutting off their energy exports? Are they going to shut down all their vast factories (which don't exist) and hammer the global economy? Are they going to lock down access to their technology & science? Are they going to further restrict their vast consumer market (which doesn't exist)? The best Russia can do is poke Europe with energy, tamper occasionally with the Middle East, and mess with Ukraine. Meanwhile China just went and annexed a country the size of France in Asia - stealing vast territory from numerous other countries through military force - in the South China Sea; nobody did anything to stop it or sanction China for it. Nobody will do anything about it, either. China is in a position now where they are able to play by different rules than everybody else, and there is nothing that anybody can or will do about it. That is going to get worse yet, their military power is nowhere close to peaking, so their projection and aggression will only increase for decades yet.