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China’s Sand Dredgers Are Eating Into Taiwan, Vietnam, Philippines; US Coast Guard Should Step Up

China’s Sand Dredgers Are Eating Into Taiwan, Vietnam, Philippines; US Coast Guard Should Step Up
Chinese dredging vessels are purportedly seen in the waters around Fiery Cross Reef in the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, in this still image from video taken by a P-8A Poseidon surveillance aircraft provided by the United States Navy, on May 21, 2015. U.S. Navy/Handout via Reuters/File Photo
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Commentary

China’s sand dredgers have destroyed thousands of square miles of ocean floor in order to build sand islands on which they put military runways and docking facilities for submarines and aircraft carriers. The construction of a single such Chinese island, Mischief Reef (2.16 square miles) on Philippine maritime territory, affected more than 460 square miles with plumes of sediment that smothered life on the ocean floor.
This implies that the approximately 5 square miles that China created in the exclusive economic zones (EEZ) of the Philippines and Vietnam since 2013 impacted approximately 1,075 square miles of ocean floor.
Anders Corr
Anders Corr
Author
Anders Corr has a bachelor's/master's in political science from Yale University (2001) and a doctorate in government from Harvard University (2008). He is a principal at Corr Analytics Inc. and publisher of the Journal of Political Risk, and has conducted extensive research in North America, Europe, and Asia. His latest books are “The Concentration of Power: Institutionalization, Hierarchy, and Hegemony” (2021) and “Great Powers, Grand Strategies: the New Game in the South China Sea" (2018).
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