Satellite images and on-board footage show how the race to build and fortify artificial islands in the South China Sea is nudging America and China closer to conflict.
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00:00Seen from miles above, these rings in the ocean look like natural coral reefs.
00:06But zoom in on high-resolution satellite images, and you can make out military bases
00:11with 10,000-foot runways, ports, and gun emplacements.
00:17The South China Sea is bristling not just with artificial islands, but with egos.
00:23Here, China is facing off against the Philippines, Vietnam, and now the United States.
00:33And as the Chinese bases and fleets keep growing, and its opponents look to do the same,
00:39this is a watery battleground that looks ripe to ignite.
00:45The chance of a small military incident that then really puts the US and China into a cold war
00:52is very real in the South China Sea.
00:54So will island building lead to conflict?
00:58We spoke to the director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative,
01:03and analysed shipping data and the rapidly changing view from above,
01:08to understand how close we might be.
01:16The islands first started to appear just over 10 years ago.
01:19The Philippines, Vietnam, and to a lesser extent, Malaysia,
01:22have since been engaged in a race to claim, occupy, and fortify outposts in the South China Sea.
01:29But no one does it on a scale quite like China.
01:33It's not that people are outraged because China built islands.
01:38They're outraged because China built islands with the express purpose
01:43of kicking around its smaller neighbours.
01:45of kicking around its smaller neighbours.
01:47So now there are Chinese planes overhead, Chinese ships on the water,
01:5124 hours a day, everywhere in the South China Sea,
01:55made possible only by all of that island building.
02:00The superpower has 20 outposts in the Paracel Islands and seven in the Spratlys.
02:06Of these, four are fully operational air and naval bases.
02:10They've got deepwater harbours and all the harbour works that would go with them.
02:14They've got point defences and anti-ship missiles and anti-air missiles to defend themselves.
02:20These are fully functional and, and I think people don't appreciate the scale we're talking about.
02:26I mean, Subariff, which is just 12 and a half miles from the nearest Philippine base,
02:31is roughly the size of the Pearl Harbour naval base of the US in Hawaii.
02:35The Philippines occupies nine features in the Spratlys, with just one airstrip.
02:40Vietnam has the most, around 50 outposts spread across 27 locations in the South China Sea,
02:46and Malaysia has five.
02:49Now, with the region bristling with ships, firepower and tension,
02:54clashes are inevitable.
02:56In fact, they are happening all the time.
03:00One particular hotspot is the island of Hanoi.
03:03One particular hotspot is this patch of ocean,
03:06around 100 miles from the coast of the Philippines.
03:09Back in the 1990s, China occupied what was then an underwater feature called Mischief Reef.
03:15Over time, China began to build permanent structures.
03:19The Philippines panics, and they respond by going to the next closest reef,
03:24which happened to be Second Thomas Shoal,
03:26and intentionally grounding this useless old warship that they had no other better thing to do with
03:30onto the reef as an emergency outpost to keep an eye on Mischief Reef.
03:36That was in 1999.
03:38But if you zoom in and look closely, you can see that the old ship is still there.
03:46Today, the Sierra Madre operates as a permanent military outpost for the Philippines.
03:51Marines rotate on and off, while boats coming from the mainland resupply it with food and water.
03:57Meanwhile, Mischief Reef has been transformed.
04:02Mischief Reef is this giant ring around a lagoon.
04:06Most of Washington DC could fit inside of that lagoon.
04:09It's from here that China can launch missions to intercept and intimidate Philippine vessels,
04:15including those trying to resupply the Sierra Madre.
04:18And so for the last two plus years, the Philippines has had to run a blockade
04:23of China Coast Guard and Chinese militia vessels every time it wants to get through
04:28to these eight to ten marines who live on this rusting hulk
04:32and are completely reliant on outside food and potable water.
04:37This video, filmed by the Philippines military aboard the warship on June 17th, 2024,
04:42shows vessels from the Chinese Coast Guard trying to stop Philippine resupply boats.
04:47Footage shows Chinese crew wielding axes and knives.
04:53These maps show the movement of Chinese Coast Guard vessels
04:56between Mischief Reef and 2nd Thomas Shoal in recent years.
05:00And this is the route of Chinese Coast Guard vessel 5205 in August 2024.
05:07On the 31st of August, it was filmed ramming a Philippine ship
05:10close to the disputed Sabina Shoal, east of 2nd Thomas Shoal.
05:14They've gone from just getting in the way and blaring the horn
05:18to using high-pressure water cannons to both injure sailors and try to disable the engines.
05:24They've used lasers to blind crew.
05:26They've used acoustic devices to try to deafen them.
05:29And on many occasions now, they've begun to just ram Philippine vessels trying to get through.
05:36And the Philippines, to its credit, has not backed down.
05:38In accordance with international and Philippine national laws,
05:41in accordance with international and Philippine national laws,
05:45we are proceeding according to our planned route.
05:48The big question then is why is China doing this?
05:51And what does it stand to gain?
05:54It's partly about control.
05:56Control of one of the busiest shipping routes in the world,
06:00of the South China Sea's valuable fish stocks,
06:03and of the reserves of oil and gas beneath the seabed.
06:07All of that stuff is true.
06:09All of it's relevant.
06:10But none of it is why Xi Jinping cares about the South China Sea.
06:14The Chinese Communist Party has told itself a fairy tale
06:18that these things belong to China in times immemorial,
06:21and therefore they must be recovered.
06:23And we should not assume a hyper-rational China,
06:27any more than any other state is hyper-rational,
06:29any more than the fact that the US and Canada still fight over the Gulf of Maine,
06:32or that the Philippines still claims North Borneo,
06:34or that the UK didn't give up maritime claims to Rockall Island until just a few years ago.
06:40States do irrational things.
06:42And China is no more rational than any other.
06:45But no matter how irrationally China is acting in the South China Sea,
06:49it's ultimately about geography and logistics.
06:53The Spratlys are 700 miles from the Chinese ports on Hainan.
06:57Having bases this far south gives China not only a physical foothold,
07:01but a launch pad for surveillance from the air and the sea.
07:05Look closely again at Mischief Reef.
07:07It took barely a year for Mischief Reef to go from nothing to about 1,500 acres.
07:15And then they graded and paved everything, put a 3,000 meter airstrip on it,
07:21and all kinds of infrastructure to support naval deployments, etc.,
07:26as well as sensing equipment, housing, officer's quarters, defensive equipment.
07:31China uses the runway for surveillance aircraft like KJ-200 and KJ-500,
07:37giving Beijing a permanent eye in the sky over the South China Sea.
07:41China has eyes everywhere.
07:44And it sees everything that all the other claimants and the outside parties like the US do.
07:49For years, the dispute has come down to who owns what, who is entitled to what.
07:55And this is where it gets messy.
07:57Although in the eyes of international law, it should be fairly clear-cut.
08:01First, there's the territorial sea.
08:03That's the 12 nautical miles around any piece of land which a nation owns.
08:09Beyond that is the 200 nautical mile EEZ, or Exclusive Economic Zone.
08:14This is the area of ocean that stretches beyond the territorial sea,
08:18and where the nation is free to exploit the natural resources and even build artificial islands.
08:23This map shows the competing EEZs for China, the Philippines, Vietnam, and the other nations.
08:30And in the middle of it all sits the Paracels and the Spratlys,
08:34and you can see why they're so hotly contested.
08:38What you can't do is build an artificial island in someone else's EEZ,
08:42and then claim your own rights around it.
08:46This is what China has done with Mischief Reef.
08:49But in 2016, an international tribunal ruled that China's claim over many features in the
08:54South China Sea, including land reclamation projects, were unlawful.
09:02And that should have been case closed.
09:05And legally, the dispute is now over a few dozen tiny dots of territorial sea
09:13in the middle of the ocean.
09:14A few dozen tiny dots of territorial sea in the middle of the ocean,
09:19and everything else should be pretty clear.
09:22Except that China claims a whole nother set of entitlements.
09:29China famously draws this old dotted line map that originated in the 1930s,
09:34and it says basically anything we can't find a way to claim
09:39under UNCLOS inside that line, we claim with historic rights.
09:44The tribunal also dismissed China's so-called nine dash line claim.
09:48But China rejects the court's decision and continues to patrol water and claim reefs,
09:53rocks and islands that lie within another nation's EEZ.
10:00Vietnam, for one, has not shied away from the fight.
10:05In response to Chinese island building,
10:07the Vietnamese began building small outposts on reefs and sandbars.
10:12This map shows Vietnam's EEZ.
10:14The nation, in fact, claims all of the Paracel Islands and all of the Spratlys.
10:21The outposts often start as small concrete structures,
10:24like this one at Discovery Great Reef.
10:27Then from 2014 on, we start to see walkways, helipads
10:31and small docks with deeper harbours cut into the reefs.
10:35Those are the dark areas you see here.
10:37So all of that stuff was clearly meant to improve the resiliency of Vietnam's bases
10:45in the face of this massive Chinese buildup and this new level of coercion we saw under Xi Jinping.
10:51Then you've moved into a new phase of island building for Vietnam,
10:54which started probably about the end of 2021, but has accelerated over the last 18 months.
11:03And that's been the expansion of islands overall,
11:06where they've begun to mimic many of the tactics we saw from China,
11:10including using the same kind of dredgers.
11:13This is Bark Canada Reef.
11:15Vietnam occupied it in 1987 and for years only had a small outpost.
11:21This is what it looks like now.
11:24Bark Canada Reef went from being basically zero acres of land
11:28to now the fourth largest feature, fourth largest island in the Spratlys,
11:34behind only China's big three.
11:36If Vietnam wants to protect what it has and protect its rights in its own waters,
11:40it needs to be able to patrol those waters in similar numbers to China.
11:45And it can't do that if Chinese boats only have to go 10 miles
11:48and the Vietnamese boats have to go 300 miles.
11:50That's just not math that'll ever work out.
11:54For China, it's all about the math and there's no doubt who's winning the numbers game.
11:59Over the course of the last four years,
12:01China went from having a virtually no navy, no coast guard,
12:04and almost no fishing industry to having the world's second largest navy,
12:09largest by number of ships, second by tonnage to the US.
12:13By far the world's largest coast guard, the world's largest shipping industry,
12:17the world's largest fishing industry,
12:19the world's largest marine science industry, right?
12:21On and on and on.
12:23And a unique component of this has become China's maritime militia.
12:27The militia are fishing boats either fully operated or contracted by the Chinese government.
12:33Their job is to disrupt and block boats from other competing nations in the South China Sea
12:38or simply sit idle, maintaining a highly visible Chinese presence.
12:43To see this like new thing emerged in the South China Sea
12:47where Filipino and Vietnamese patrols would go out
12:49and they'd find hundreds of Chinese boats sitting in anchor tied up to each other,
12:54often uncrewed or crewed by a skeleton crew just sitting around
12:58playing cards and watching their phones and not doing anything.
13:03These are the movements of Chinese vessels identified by
13:05Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative as militia vessels
13:09on the same month from 2021 to 2024.
13:14With all the heightened tension above the water,
13:16an ecological disaster has been unfolding beneath the waves.
13:20To build these islands, engineers started by using clamshell dredgers,
13:24scooping sand and coral into barges and then dumping it in a pile to create islands.
13:30Nowadays, the likes of China and Vietnam are using methods that are even more destructive.
13:36Suction dredging.
13:38The drill bit grinds up everything indiscriminately,
13:41rock, coral, marine life, sand, and then it shoots this, you know,
13:46organic slurry out the other end.
13:49That's what China built its islands using.
13:52And that's why it didn't just kill the reef that was covered in sand,
13:56it killed all the reef nearby too.
13:58It dug up all the coral to make that sand.
14:00And then it put huge plumes of sediment into the water that drifted around
14:04and smothered anything that had managed to escape the initial digging.
14:09As the islands and the rival navies expand,
14:11so does the chance that skirmishes turn to battles.
14:16The US has a mutual defence treaty with the Philippines
14:19and has promised to come to the aid of its old ally
14:21in the event of an attack on its military or its coast guard.
14:26Recent meetings between Joe Biden and his Philippine counterpart Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
14:31serve as a warning shot to China,
14:34specifically with regard to the South China Sea.
14:37It's a numbers game.
14:38You hit people with enough water cannons, you ram their boats,
14:42eventually you are going to kill somebody.
14:45But what Greg Poling and the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative have noticed
14:49is not that the tides have turned,
14:51but that there seems to be a greater willingness to stand up to China.
14:54The Philippines has begun to re-patrol around Scarborough Shoal
14:58for the first time since China took it from them in 2012.
15:01And it's been not only resupplying but building up,
15:05you know, shoring up the Sierra Madre despite the Chinese blockades.
15:09China has, at least so far, been unwilling to use overt military force.
15:14And I think the Southeast Asians have realized that China can't have it both ways.
15:19You know, if they just drive straight, if they ignore all the harassment,
15:23if they're firm and committed to this,
15:25they've been able to develop new resources, resupply their people,
15:29patrol where they want.
15:31And all China's behavior has done, really,
15:34is internationalize the disputes
15:37and create exactly the kind of anti-China coalition
15:40that Beijing has always feared, more than anything else.