Narrator: Seen from miles above, these rings in the ocean look like natural coral reefs. But zoom in on high-resolution satellite images, and you can make out military bases with 10,000-foot runways, ports, and gun emplacements. The South China Sea is bristling not just with artificial islands, but with egos. Here, China is facing off against the Philippines, Vietnam, and now the United States. And as the Chinese bases and fleets keep growing, and its opponents look to do the same, this is a watery battleground that looks ripe to ignite. Greg: The chance of a small military incident that then really puts the US and China into a Cold War is very real in the South China Sea. Narrator: So will island building lead to conflict? We spoke to the director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative and analyzed shipping data and the rapidly changing view from above to understand how close we might be.

The islands first started to appear just over 10 years ago. The Philippines, Vietnam, and, to a lesser extent, Malaysia have since been engaged in a race to claim, occupy, and fortify outposts in the South China Sea. But no one does it on a scale quite like China. It's not that people are outraged because China built islands; they're outraged because China built islands with the express purpose of kicking around its smaller neighbors. So now there are Chinese planes overhead, Chinese ships on the water 24 hours a day, everywhere in the South China Sea, made possible only by all of that island building. Narrator: The superpower has 20 outposts in the Paracel Islands and seven in the Spratlys. Of these, four are fully operational air and naval bases. Greg: They've got deepwater harbors and all the harbor works that would go with them. They've got point defenses and anti-ship missiles.

and anti-air missiles to defend themselves. These are fully functional, and I think people don't appreciate the scale we're talking about. I mean, Subi Reef, which is just 12 and a half miles from the nearest Philippine base, is roughly the size of the Pearl Harbor naval base of the US in Hawaii. Narrator: The Philippines occupies nine features in the Spratlys with just one airstrip. Vietnam has the most, around 50 outposts spread across 27 locations in the South China Sea, and Malaysia has five. Now with the region bristling with ships, firepower, and tension, clashes are inevitable. In fact, they're happening all the time. One particular hotspot is this patch of ocean around 100 miles from the coast of the Philippines. Back in the 1990s, China occupied what was then an underwater feature called Mischief Reef. Over time, China began to build permanent structures.

Greg: The Philippines panics, and they respond by going to the next closest reef, which happened to be Second Thomas Shoal, and intentionally grounding this useless old warship that they had no other better thing to do with onto the reef as an emergency outpost to keep an eye on Mischief Reef. Narrator: That was in 1999. But if you zoom in and look closely, you can see that the old ship is still there. Today, the Sierra Madre operates as a permanent military outpost for the Philippines. Marines rotate on and off while boats coming from the mainland resupply it with food and water. Meanwhile, Mischief Reef has been transformed. Mischief Reef is this giant ring around a lagoon. Most of Washington, DC, could fit inside of that lagoon. Narrator: It's from here that China can launch missions to intercept and intimidate Philippine vessels, including those trying to resupply the Sierra Madre.

And so, for the last two-plus years, the Philippines has had to run a blockade of China Coast Guard and Chinese militia vessels every time it wants to get through to these eight to 10 marines who live on this rusting hulk and are completely reliant on outside food and potable water. Narrator: This video filmed by the Philippines military aboard the warship on June 17, 2024, shows vessels from the Chinese coast guard trying to stop Philippine resupply boats. Footage shows Chinese crew wielding axes and knives. These maps show the movement of Chinese coast guard vessels between Mischief Reef and Second Thomas Shoal in recent years, and this is the route of Chinese coast guard vessel 5205 in August 2024. On the 31st of August, it was filmed ramming a Philippine ship close to the disputed Sabina Shoal east of Second Thomas Shoal. They've gone from just getting in the way

and blaring the horn to using high-pressure water cannons to both injure sailors and try to disable the engines. They've used lasers to blind crew. They've used acoustic devices to try to deafen them. And on many occasions now, they've begun to just ram Philippine vessels trying to get through. And the Philippines, to its credit, has not backed down. In accordance with international and Philippine national laws, we are proceeding according to our planned route. Narrator: The big question then is why is China doing this, and what does it stand to gain? It's partly about control. Control of one of the busiest shipping routes in the world, of the South China Sea's valuable fish stocks, and of the reserves of oil and gas beneath the seabed. All of that stuff is true. All of it's relevant. But none of it is why Xi Jinping cares about the South China Sea. The Chinese Communist Party has told itself a fairy tale

that these things belong to China in times immemorial, and therefore they must be recovered. And we should not assume a hyper-rational China any more than any other state is hyper-rational, any more than the fact that the US and Canada still fight over the Gulf of Maine or that the Philippines still claims North Borneo or that the UK didn't give up maritime claims to Rockall Island until just a few years ago. Like, states do irrational things, and China is no more rational than any other. Narrator: But no matter how irrationally China is acting in the South China Sea, it's ultimately about geography and logistics. The Spratlys are 700 miles from the Chinese ports on Hainan. Having bases this far south gives China not only a physical foothold but a launchpad for surveillance from the air and the sea. Look closely again at Mischief Reef. Greg: It took barely a year for Mischief Reef

to go from nothing to about 1,500 acres. And then they graded and paved everything, put a 3,000-meter airstrip on it, and all kinds of infrastructure to support naval deployments, etc., as well as sensing equipment, housing, officer's quarters, defensive equipment. Narrator: China uses the runway for surveillance aircraft like KJ-200 and KJ-500, giving Beijing a permanent eye in the sky over the South China Sea. China has eyes everywhere, and it sees everything that all the other claimants and the outside parties like the US do. Narrator: For years, the dispute has come down to who owns what, who is entitled to what. And this is where it gets messy, although in the eyes of international law, it should be fairly clear-cut. First, there's the territorial sea. That's the 12 nautical miles around any piece of land which a nation owns. Beyond that is the 200-nautical-mile EEZ,

or exclusive economic zone. This is the area of ocean that stretches beyond the territorial sea and where the nation is free to exploit the natural resources and even build artificial islands. This map shows the competing EEZs for China, the Philippines, Vietnam, and the other nations. And in the middle of it all sits the Paracels and the Spratlys, and you can see why they're so hotly contested. What you can't do is build an artificial island in someone else's EEZ and then claim your own rights around it. This is what China has done with Mischief Reef. But in 2016, an international tribunal ruled that China's claim over many features in the South China Sea, including land reclamation projects, were unlawful. Narrator: And that should have been case closed. Legally, the dispute is now over a few dozen tiny dots of territorial sea in the middle of the ocean. And everything else should be pretty clear,

except that China claims a whole 'nother set of entitlements. China famously draws this old dotted-line map that originated in the 1930s, and it says basically, anything we can't find a way to claim under UNCLOS inside that line, we claim with historic rights. Narrator: The tribunal also dismissed China's so-called nine-dash-line claim, but China rejects the court's decision and continues to patrol water and claim reefs, rocks, and islands that lie within another nation's EEZ. Vietnam, for one, has not shied away from the fight. In response to Chinese island building, the Vietnamese began building small outposts on reefs and sandbars. This map shows Vietnam's EEZ. The nation, in fact, claims all of the Paracel Islands and all of the Spratlys. The outposts often start as small concrete structures like this one at Discovery Great Reef. Then from 2014 on, we start to see walkways, helipads,

and small docks with deeper harbors cut into the reefs. Those are the darker areas you see here. So all of that stuff was clearly meant to improve the resiliency of Vietnam's bases in the face of this massive Chinese buildup and this new level of coercion we saw under Xi Jinping. And then you've moved into a new phase of island building for Vietnam, which started probably about the end of 2021 but has accelerated over the last 18 months. And that's been the expansion of islands overall, where they've begun to mimic many of the tactics we saw from China, including using the same kind of dredgers. This is Barque Canada Reef. Vietnam occupied it in 1987 and for years only had a small outpost. This is what it looks like now. Barque Canada Reef went from being basically zero acres of land to now the fourth-largest feature, fourth-largest island in the Spratlys.

behind only China's big three. If Vietnam wants to protect what it has and protect its rights in its own waters, it needs to be able to patrol those waters in similar numbers to China. And it can't do that if Chinese boats only have to go 10 miles and the Vietnamese boats have to go 300 miles. That's just not math that'll ever work out. Narrator: For China, it's all about the math, and there's no doubt who's winning the numbers game. Over the course of the last 40 years, China went from having virtually no navy, no coast guard, and almost no fishing industry, to having the world's second-largest navy, largest by number of ships, second by tonnage to the US, by far the world's largest coast guard, the world's largest shipping industry, the world's largest fishing industry, the world's largest marine science industry, right? On and on and on.

And a unique component of this has become China's maritime militia. Narrator: The militia are fishing boats, either fully operated or contracted by the Chinese government. Their job is to disrupt and block boats from other competing nations in the South China Sea, or simply sit idle, maintaining a highly visible Chinese presence. To see this new thing emerge in the South China Sea, where Filipino and Vietnamese patrol would go out, and they'd find hundreds of Chinese boats sitting in anchor, tied up to each other, often uncrewed, or crewed by a skeleton crew, just sitting around playing cards and watching their phones and not doing anything. Narrator: These are the movements of Chinese vessels identified by Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative as militia vessels on the same month from 2021 to 2024. With all the heightened tension above the water, an ecological disaster has been unfolding beneath the waves. To build these islands, engineers started by using

clamshell dredgers scooping sand and coral into barges and then dumping it in a pile to create islands. Nowadays, the likes of China and Vietnam are using methods that are even more destructive: suction dredging. The drill bit grinds up everything indiscriminately: rock, coral, marine life, sand. And then it shoots this, you know, organic slurry out the other end. That's what China built its islands using, and that's why it didn't just kill the reef that was covered in sand; it killed all the reef nearby, too. It dug up all the coral to make that sand, and then it put huge plumes of sediment into the water that drifted around and smothered anything that had managed to escape the initial digging. Narrator: As the islands and the rival navies expand, so does the chance that skirmishes turn to battles. The US has a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines.

and has promised to come to the aid of its old ally in the event of an attack on its military or its coast guard. Recent meetings between Joe Biden and his Philippine counterpart, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., serve as a warning shot to China, specifically with regard to the South China Sea. It's a numbers game. You hit people with enough water cannons, you ram their boats, eventually, you are going to kill somebody. Narrator: But what Greg Poling and the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative have noticed is not that the tides have turned, but that there seems to be a greater willingness to stand up to China. The Philippines has begun to re-patrol around Scarborough Shoal for the first time since China took it from them in 2012. And it's been not only resupplying but building up, you know, shoring up the Sierra Madre despite the Chinese blockades. China has at least so far been unwilling

to use overt military force, and I think the Southeast Asians have realized that China can't have it both ways. You know, if they just drive straight, if they ignore all the harassment, if they're firm and committed to this, they've been able to develop new resources, resupply their people, patrol where they want. And all China's behavior has done really is internationalize the disputes and create exactly the kind of anti-China coalition that Beijing has always feared more than anything else. Voice on radio: Your actions are threatening China's sovereignty, security, and related rights and interests. To avoid miscalculation, leave and keep far off immediately. Over. We are proceeding according to our planned route. Request to stay clear from our passage in accordance with the collision regulation, over.

What’s Actually Happening In The South China Sea? | View From Above | Business Insider

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