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Friday, March 29, 2024

Islands of Mass Destruction

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By Dune Lawrence and Wenxin Fan

ON A map of the world, the South China Sea appears as a scrap of blue amid the tangle of islands and peninsulas that make up Southeast Asia between the Indian and Pacific oceans. Its 1.4 million-square-mile expanse, so modest next to its aquatic neighbors, is nonetheless economically vital to the countries that border it and to the rest of us: More than $5 trillion in goods are shipped through it every year, and its waters produce roughly 12 percent of the world’s fish catch.

Zoom in, and irregular specks skitter between the Philippines and Vietnam. These are the Spratly Islands, a series of reefs and shoals that hardly deserved the name “islands” until recently. In the past three years, China, more than 500 miles from the closest of the Spratly reefs, has transformed seven of them into artificial land masses; as it reshaped coral and water into runways, hangars sized for military jets, lighthouses, running tracks, and basketball courts, its claim to sovereignty over the watery domain has hardened into an unsubtle threat of armed force.

Mobile signal towers on the newly cemented islands now beam the message, in Chinese and English, “Welcome to China” to cellphones on any ships passing within reach. But its latest moves, in the long-running dispute with its neighbors over the sea, the fish in it, and the oil beneath it, are anything but welcoming: China appears to have deployed weapons systems on all seven islands, and last week seized a US Navy underwater drone.

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In the runup to all this, as most international observers watched the islands bloom in time-lapse on satellite photos, John McManus arrived with a film crew in February 2016, to document a less visible crisis under the water. To McManus, a professor of marine biology and ecology at the University of Miami, the Spratlys aren’t just tiny chips out of a blue background on Google Maps; from dives there in the early 1990s, he remembers seeing schools of hammerhead sharks so dense they eclipsed the light. This time, he swam through miles of deserted dead coral—of the few fish he saw, the largest barely reached 4 inches.

“I’ve never seen a reef where you could swim for a kilometer without seeing a single fish,” he says.

When we met in early November, McManus had just moved offices at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, on Virginia Key next to the Miami “Seaquarium.” McManus rummaged through a box to find an extension cord before opening a laptop to pull up slides.

The first signs of what was to come appeared in late 2012. Satellite photos of reefs in the Spratlys showed mysterious arcs, like puffs of cartoon smoke, obscuring the darker areas of coral and rock. A colleague forwarded them to McManus, wondering if the shapes might be signs of muro-ami fishing, where fishermen pound large rocks into a reef, tearing up the coral to scare their prey out of hiding and up into a net above. Another theory, floated first in an article on the Asia Pacific Defense Forum, a military affairs website, explained the arcs as scars left by fishermen harvesting giant clams.

Giant clams are an important species in the rich reef systems of the Indo-Pacific waters; they anchor seaweed and sponges, shelter young fish, and help accumulate the calcium deposits that grow reefs over time. Underwater, the elegantly undulating shells part to reveal a mantle of flesh in rainbow hues: blue, turquoise, yellow, and orange—mottled and spotted with yet more colors. The largest can reach almost 5 feet across and weigh more than 600 pounds. Long hunted for their meat, they’re also prized in the aquarium market, though they’re protected by international law.

McManus found both theories implausible, particularly the giant clam one; the only method he’d ever heard of for fishing the hefty bivalves involved wrestling them by hand into the boat.

As McManus pondered this mystery, tensions in the South China Sea were flaring, with the Chinese fishermen of Tanmen as the tinder. Tanmen is a pinhead of a place on the coast of Hainan Island, China’s equivalent of Hawaii. Temperatures rarely drop below 60F, and blue skies contrast with the smoggy haze over much of the mainland. 

Although China listed giant clams as a protected species, Tanmen fishermen found a loophole, going after the large shells of long dead clams, buried within reefs. By 2012, the shells from giant clams, dead or alive, had become the most valuable harvest for the vessels sailing from Tanmen into the South China Sea. Boats regularly came home with 200-ton hauls, which could sell for 2,000 yuan ($290) a ton—big money in a place where the annual income for a fisherman was 6,000 yuan.

In April 2012 a Philippine navy ship encountered 12 Chinese boats fishing around Scarborough Shoal, a 58-square-mile ring of barely submerged reefs encompassing a lagoon with just one narrow entrance. Shells from the shoal fetched a premium for their purplish color, some as much as 30,000 yuan apiece. Both countries—and Taiwan—claim Scarborough, which sits more than 140 miles off the coast of Luzon, the largest island in the Philippines, and roughly three and a half times that distance from Tanmen. Filipino soldiers boarded the boats and found them loaded with hundreds of clamshells. 

Within hours, Chinese government ships arrived to face off with the Filipinos, who eventually withdrew. China has remained in control of Scarborough ever since. The Chinese fishermen returned to Tanmen to be feted by state media as patriots and photographed grinning in front of heaps of creamy-gray shells.

The Philippines and China are both signatories to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea; the Philippines initiated proceedings against China for violations of the law in the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague in January 2013.

That spring, Tanmen received the ultimate honor: a visit from China’s newly minted president, Xi Jinping. He shook hands with men wearing traditional basket hats, urging them to build bigger boats to catch more fish in support of China’s sovereignty over the South China Sea and pledging financial support. He made good on his word: Government funds went to adding new 500-ton boats to the local fishing fleet and subsidized voyages.

Xi made no mention of giant clams, but the local shell industry became the biggest, and most obvious, beneficiary of the government’s largesse: The number of clam-processing factories ballooned to more than 100. There were Buddhas reclining among clouds; the many-armed Guanyin, goddess of mercy; intricate landscapes of mountains and trees; there were even, ironically, clamshells shaped to look like ivory tusks. 

China refused to participate in the process in The Hague, leaving the tribunal to piece together possible motivations for its apparent support of the clam harvesting. In public statements and a report in 2015, China claimed the island-building wasn’t damaging to the environment and took place in areas of coral that were already dead. The tribunal came to a more sinister conclusion, based on the evidence, that China was fully aware of and even tolerated and protected the practice, creating the conditions necessary to claim that the construction of Chinese bases itself wasn’t harming the reefs.

The local government of Tanmen held public meetings about the damage from clam fishing as early as July 2013, and more than a year before the ruling it imposed a ban on harvest and sale; the ban put some factories out of business as supply shrank. Locals like Li Xuanru, a shop owner who’s still operating, undercut the tribunal’s theory. “Xi would be furious had we told him the bigger boats were out for giant clams,” he says.

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