On December 21, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Mao Ning was asked about a reporting that China has been “building up several unoccupied land features in the South China Sea.”
While China has been known to build out islands, reefs and other geographic features in the disputed sea, the report stressed that the alleged Chinese activities would be “the first known instances of a nation doing so on territory it doesn’t already occupy.”
China and the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) signed in 2002 the non-binding that called on the signing parties to refrain from “inhabiting on the presently uninhabited islands, reefs, shoals, cays and other features” in the South China Sea.
The Philippines Foreign Ministry said that it was “” about the report and “such activities contravene the Declaration of Conduct on the South China Sea's undertaking on self-restraint.”
In response, Mao dismissed the Bloomberg News report as “completely untrue.”
[Note: The Spratlys Islands are called Nansha Islands by China]
China’s Embassy in Manila called the report “fake news,” The Manila Times.
Bloomberg News cited Western officials and presented satellite images that appeared to show the purported Chinese reclamation activities, and the Philippines Foreign Ministry said they have asked relevant agencies to “verify and validate” the report.
Citing Western officials who asked not to be identified to discuss sensitive information, Bloomberg News reported that “fishing fleets that operate as de facto maritime militias under the control of authorities in Beijing have carried out construction activities at four unoccupied features in the Spratly Islands over the past decade,” including Eldad Reef, Lankiam Cay, Whitsun Reef and Sandy Cay.
“Some sand bars and other formations in the area expanded more than 10 times in size in recent years,” the report noted.
A satellite photo from 2014 shows what the Western officials said was “a Chinese maritime vessel offloading an amphibious hydraulic excavator used in land reclamation projects at Eldad Reef in the northern Spratlys.”
The same satellite photo appeared in a by Philippine Daily Inquirer. It was reported that the Philippines’ military had taken photos “of China’s ongoing reclamation activity on Malvar Reef [note: named Eldad Reef in the Philippines] in February, with the pictures showing a backhoe attached to a Chinese vessel that, scientists said, was presumably used to gather filling materials and harvest giant clams.”
In another satellite photo of Eldad Reef taken on November 4, a small strip of brown-colored land can be seen in the middle of the bluewaters. Bloomberg News, citing the officials, said that new land formations have “appeared above water over the past year” and “images showed a large hole, debris piles and excavator tracks at a site that used to be only partially exposed at high tide.”
The officials told Bloomberg News said that “similar activities have also taken place at Lankiam Cay, known as Panata Island in the Philippines, where a feature had been reinforced with a new perimeter wall over the course of just a couple of months last year.”
Bloomberg News also obtained satellite images that appear to show the physical changes to “a layered land feature at Sandy Cay” between 2009 and 2021.
In a set of four satellite photos, the same land feature went from a small circular land feature on June 19, 2009, to being submerged in the sea on October 1, 2014. In a satellite photo taken on March 22, 2017, it became a slightly larger layered land feature. It expanded even further in a satellite photo taken on February 16, 2021.
Mike Yeo, Asia correspondent for the U.S. national security news website Defense News, used Google Earth to check the locations of interest in the report. on Twitter that the search result “does seem to show signs of small-scale reclamation at the locations mentioned by Bloomberg…”
He posted two Google Earth screenshots of Sandy Cay, which he located with decimal degrees 11.074551 and 114.257893, to show “signs of small-scale reclamation between 2018 and 2021.”
also showed a December 3 satellite photo of Whitsun Reef, where small areas of land features can be seen above water.
“Other images [the officials] presented showed physical changes at both Whitsun Reef and Sandy Cay, where previously submerged features now sit permanently above the high-tide line.”