It has been more than a decade since China began a striking strategy of territorial expansion: throwing tons of sand into the South China Sea. This is not unique to China and, in fact, Japan thus built an airport that soon it will be an underwater airportbut China is doing it massively and with one objective: to claim what is its own.
And seeing how they raise these artificial islands is… hypnotic.
Context. The end of 2013 marked a turning point in China: the country started to massively fill in seven of the reefs of the Nansha and Xisha archipelagos (Spratly and Paracels, respectively). In record time between December of that year and June 2015, China carried out the first phase of the operation: the filling phase.
From 2015 onwards, they have dedicated themselves to consolidate that territory through the construction of infrastructure such as landing strips, hangars, ports, radars and support structures. According to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, between December 2015 and October 2015, China had built artificially about 12 km² of land on the Nansha reefs. While the United States said it with concern, the Chinese media confirmed the information with pride.
Before
and then
How they do it. They did not use overly complex methods to do so. On the one hand, they cut the coral bottom and pumped sediments to shallow areas. The earth was deposited as fill to later build dikes and retaining walls around the reef. The next step was to deposit more fill and, finally, large steamrollers and shovels were compacting that earth to give consistency to the whole.
The last thing was to create paving, landing strips, roads and other infrastructure. The result is more than 12 km², and put in context they represent “17 times more land claimed in 20 months than all the other international claimants have achieved during the last 40 years.”
In action. Seeing the satellite photos that show the before and after, something easy to do using the history function of Google Earth, is interesting, but seeing a timelapse of how one of these new territories has been built is, as I said, something hypnotic. An example, the following video ‘tweet‘ (if you can’t see it, click on it):
Narrative. What motivation does China have for such a deployment of resources and money? It depends who you ask. On the one hand, the Chinese government has defended that the creation of these islands serves the support in rescue missions on the high seasalso to fishing, scientific research, navigation support points thanks to these radars and the collection of data for its meteorological service. Finally, it also serves for defense if necessary.
The neighbors are not convinced by the explanation and, in fact, think that it is a strategy that responds to a single interest: claiming territories that China considers its property. The Ministry of Defense of Japan assures that these infrastructures allow a permanent Chinese presence in waters that do not belong to it, with offensive capacity in practically the entire South China Sea.
Military. Recent reports, such as the one from CSIS in 2025, underlines that China’s recent near-perennial activity in the South China Sea has only been possible thanks to that decade-old construction work. Western analyzes they point that the runways for aircraft are prepared for combat aircraft and land transport, as well as the presence of ports for warships, underground facilities and even missile platforms.
The tension is evident because Beijing claims sovereignty over territories that its neighbors deny. Those neighbors are Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan or the Philippines. And Vietnam, in fact, is doing the same thing as China in 2013: throwing land into the sea. Their progress has also been considerable in a short time in an area that has become a real hotbed.
The ecological impact. But beyond the intentions of each other, something undeniable that cannot be hidden under any narrative is the environmental damage that these artificial islands cause to their surroundings. In some articles it has been indicated that this ‘island’ desire has caused the loss of some 12 to 18 km² of reef, damaging some of the best preserved reefs in the region directly, but also affecting distant systems due to the ‘clouds’ of sediment formed during the dumping of sediments.
Chinese scientific articles have also shown that these practices eliminate completely the ecosystem of the occupied area and negatively affects currents and sediment patterns, causing the aforementioned degradation of neighboring areas. However, the State Oceanic Administration of China defend that all projects were thoroughly evaluated and do not harm corals. The fault of it? Global trends such as sea acidification or climate change.
Images | Ma Wukong
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