South China Sea: If you can’t beat them, build islands

For more than a decade, artificial island building in the South China Sea was viewed as a uniquely Chinese strategy (Opens in new window) for consolidating its regional maritime claims. And while Beijing’s decades-long land reclamation campaign has fundamentally altered the physical and strategic geography of the region, a quieter and more dangerous transformation is now underway.

Countries like Vietnam (Opens in new window), Malaysia (Opens in new window), and Taiwan (Opens in new window) have each accelerated their own land reclamation projects in occupied features across the South China Sea. Although these efforts are smaller than China’s, they suggest that opposition to the physical alteration of disputed geographies is giving way to a new regional status quo of competitive island building.

For example, over the past several years Vietnam has begun conducting land reclamation projects in the Spratly Archipelago. These projects amount to about 216 new hectares (Opens in new window) of land, the construction of 15 harbours, and specialised military infrastructure including ammunition depots and a 2.5-kilometre runway (Opens in new window) at Barque Canada Reef. Vietnam’s dredging and land reclamation operations are the second largest (Opens in new window) in the region after China. In 2024, the Malaysian government complained (Opens in new window) to the Vietnamese foreign ministry about Hanoi’s Spratly expansions, suggesting that it is not only China who is undermining the status quo.

Despite Malaysia’s protests, it too has been pursuing its own land reclamation in the disputed Swallow Reef. Malaysia has now built a 1,368-metre airstrip (Opens in new window). Malaysia claims at least 12 features (Opens in new window) in the Spratlys, but it has a physical presence on only five: Swallow, Ardasier, Erica, Mariveles, and Investigator reefs. Malaysia’s dual position (Opens in new window), criticising Vietnamese expansion while continuing improvements on its own occupied features, demonstrates how regional states increasingly distinguish between their rival’s reclamation and legitimising their own.

Taiwan has also pursued its own island building in the Spratly Islands, conducting a 3-hectare land reclamation project on Itu Aba (Opens in new window). This project was designed to support a major wharf, a 1,200-metre airstrip, lighthouse, and hospital.

International norms rarely disappear overnight. China’s repeated South China Sea violations were met with limited international consequences which have gradually redefined acceptable state behaviour for the region. China’s land reclamation used to be an exception to the international rules-based order, an exception which drew widespread condemnation. Today, however, the absence of meaningful legal or diplomatic consequences has lowered the political cost of similar actions by other claimants, especially when such actions occur below the scale or visibility of China’s. As a result, what used to be destabilising behaviour is becoming accepted as a practical necessity for maintaining territorial claims.

Take, for example, the 2016 arbitral tribunal on the law of the sea ruling in favour of the Philippines over China in the Second Thomas Shoal. This ruling carried legal weight but lacked meaningful enforcement (Opens in new window) mechanisms. While the decision de-legitimised China’s nine-dash line internationally, it did little to alter the facts on the ground. For many other South China Sea claimants, this experience over time reinforced the perception (Opens in new window) that international law alone cannot secure disputed territory.

Explanations about why countries are ramping up land reclamation now vary depending on one’s expectations for the future dispute resolution process. Over the past few decades, countries across Asia have been negotiating (Opens in new window) a Code of Conduct for the South China Sea which aims to design a set of rules and procedures for engagement between competing states and potential sovereignty dispute resolution. For those who believe the Code of Conduct is nearing completion, current island building efforts reflect a “race to the finish line” wherein countries are trying to maximise their claims before an agreement prevents any future expansion. The risk of such competitive island building is that the sudden change to the region’s geography in the short term may undermine the long-term dispute resolution process.

An alternative explanation suggests that in the absence of a formalised Code of Conduct, countries are seeking to gain leverage (Opens in new window) in the region that allows them to defend and negotiate their claims. Competitive island building in this case resembles a classic security dilemma (Opens in new window). Land reclamation and infrastructure that one claimant views as defensive is interpreted by others as enhancing military power. Those states respond with similar improvements of their own. The resulting cycle produces cumulative militarisation that increases the threat of war even if none of the participants initially sought confrontation.

None of this suggests a moral or strategic equivalence between China’s island-building campaign and the far more limited activities of Vietnam, Malaysia, or Taiwan. China’s land reclamation – estimated (Opens in new window) at more than around 2,210 hectares – remains without parallel in both scale and its connection to Beijing’s expansive claims.

Nevertheless, China has demonstrated that countries can change facts on the ground with relatively limited international consequences. The danger is less that every claimant behaves like China, especially not in scale, but more that island building is becoming normalised as an instrument of regional competition. Artificial island building allows states to reshape regional geography in a way that reinforces their specific national interests. Should other countries decide restraint imposes higher costs than reclamation, the result would be a more dangerous and escalatory future in the South China Sea.