It doesn't really matter how transparent it is, since, International Law has rather little ability to enforce its decisions.
As much as we try to develop rules and norms to constrain and moderate behavior by countries in the international community, at the end of the day, "the strong [still] do as they can and the weak [still] suffer what they must".
And yes, you're right that the actions and intentions are pretty transparent, with just some uncertainty surrounding the extent (ie, what reasoning will the PRC ultimately use to justify its claims, as it's also been quite ambiguous about them).
How could any court agree to the claims, why, yes, you demonstrated prior control, you indeed had a permanent population there"?
To anyone seeing this this is an obvious objective to nullify claims by ph, vn, my, jp, etc.
Can international courts be persuaded by these obvious artificial methods of establishing jurisdiction?