China seizes disputed reef near key Philippine military outpost

Japan Times

27-04-2025

China has 'enforced maritime management and exercised sovereign jurisdiction' over an uninhabited reef in the disputed South China Sea, planting the country's flag on the tiny sand bank just kilometers from a key Philippine military outpost.
Photographs released by Chinese state-run media on Saturday showed China Coast Guard officers unfurling the flag as part of an effort to effectively seize Sandy Cay reef, which Beijing calls Tiexian Jiao, earlier this month. The reef, located in the flash point Spratly Island chain, is also claimed by Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines.
Sandy Cay also sits just over 3 kilometers from Thitu Island, known as Pag-asa by Manila, which is home to Philippine military facilities — including a military-grade runway — and some 250 residents.
China's Global Times newspaper said the coast guard officers had landed on Sandy Cay 'to conduct on-reef inspection and video-recording of illegal activity,' while also cleaning up 'plastic bottles, wooden sticks and other debris scattered across the reef flat.'
Beijing in January claimed that the Chinese side had intercepted and 'repelled' Philippine naval vessels that had 'intruded' into the waters near the reef that it said were attempting 'an illegal landing and sand sample collection.'
The Philippines has said it has sent coast guard vessels into the area to monitor and study whether China is attempting to conduct small-scale island reclamation in the area. China claims the roughly 200-square-meter Sandy Cay is a natural feature and not man-made — entitling it to a 12-nautical-mile (22-km) territorial sea under international law that would overlap with Thitu Island.
Philippine scientists inspect Sandy Cay reef, near the Philippine-held Thitu Island, in disputed waters of the South China Sea on March 21, 2024. |
Philippine Coast Guard / VIA AFP-JIJI
Between 2013 and 2016, China undertook a large-scale land reclamation program in the South China Sea, building up a number of military outposts in a concerted bid to reinforce its claim to some 90% of the resource-rich waterway, through which trillions of dollars in trade flow every year.
Many of those claims, which come under what Beijing calls the "nine-dash line," overlap with the exclusive economic zones of Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and the Philippines.
But China is not known to have conducted reclamation projects in the waterway in recent years, and its focus on sovereignty over Sandy Cay reef adds to already high tensions in the strategic waterway, where fears over a clash have surged as Manila pushes back against Beijing's moves there.
Last June, updated China Coast Guard regulations went into effect that allow it to board foreign vessels and detain foreign nationals suspected of trespassing in waters it claims for up to 60 days. The updated regulations expanded on China's 2021 coast guard law, which allows it to use weapons against foreign ships deemed to have illegally entered Chinese-claimed waters.
A territorial sea claim around Sandy Cay would provide a boost for nearby Subi Reef — one of China's reclaimed-and-militarized features in the South China Sea that hosts missiles, a deep-water port, aircraft hangers and a 3,000-meter airfield. Subi Reef, which was underwater at high tide before reclamation activities, is classified as a low-tide elevation and is not entitled to a territorial sea under international law.
'One of the ironies is that China's interest in annexing Sandy Cay is about buttressing the legality of their claims to nearby Subi Reef, now host to a major artificial port & airfield. Lawfare, resulting in further expansionism,' Euan Graham, a regional security expert with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, wrote on X.
It's unclear if China plans to build up more of the unoccupied reefs and other features it controls, but observers say this is unlikely considering its military and coast guard presence in the South China Sea is already robust.