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What is happening?
On September 10, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) announced the creation of a nature reserve on Scarborough Shoal, located in the disputed waters of the South China Sea and within the Philippines’ Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). The reserve is set to cover roughly 35 square kilometers along the shoal’s northeastern side. According to the Chinese authorities, it will be divided into two areas with varying levels of protection – a so-called “core zone” and an adjacent “experimental zone.” By declaring such jurisdictions, the PRC seeks to legitimize its territorial expansion into overseas territories it illegally seized, despite having no entitlement to them under international law.
What is the broader picture?
Scarborough Shoal is located about 200 kilometers off the coast of the Philippine island of Luzon, in the contested waters of the South China Sea. This is where the territorial claims of several states collide – the Philippines, the PRC, the Republic of China (Taiwan), Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, and Indonesia. More than US$3 trillion worth of goods is shipped annually through the South China Sea. The region is also an extremely rich fishing ground, and beneath its seabed lie significant deposits of oil and natural gas. For these reasons, the South China Sea has become one of today’s defining geopolitical flashpoints.
The decisive actor in the region is the PRC, which has claimed nearly the entire maritime area since the 1950s through its so-called “nine-dash line,” thereby locking itself into territorial disputes with all other concerned neighboring states, including the Philippines. The PRC’s claims explicitly include Scarborough Shoal, which it forcibly seized in 2012, in contravention of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which states the shoal is part of the Philippine EEZ. Therefore only Manila may legitimately exercise jurisdiction there. This was consequently confirmed in 2016 by the ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, which invalidated PRC’s claims in the South China Sea – a ruling Beijing continues to reject.
Ignoring international legislation and norms, the PRC has long attempted to mask its territorial expansion through what can be called “state greenwashing.” Usually, term “greenwashing” refers to deceptive marketing and PR practices where a company or organization falsely presents itself or its products as environmentally friendly, while concealing the actual negative impact of its business activities. In this case, it is the Chinese state itself that – by establishing such types of jurisdictions over effectively occupied territories – seeks to create the false impression that these areas legitimately belong to it, while portraying itself as an “ecological society” concerned with environmental protection.
A bitter irony is that the PRC has systematically destroyed – and continues to destroy – the fragile ecosystems and biodiversity of the South China Sea’s coral reefs, particularly through large-scale dredging for artificial island-building and overfishing. Beijing has also inflicted lasting ecological damage on Scarborough Shoal itself, where satellite imagery still reveals vast fields of “scars” from the extensive harvesting of giant clams. These activities have devastated the very areas which the PRC has now declared a nature reserve.
While the reserve at Scarborough Shoal is new in form, the PRC’s strategy of state-led greenwashing is not a new phenomenon. Beijing has long linked sovereignty claims to legal frameworks of environmental protection. For decades, China has used conservation as a tool for forcibly relocating Tibetans, often through the creation and expansion of nature reserves. Its unilateral fishing moratorium in 1999 was presented as an ecological measure, yet it intruded into the disputed EEZs of neighboring states, prompting repeated formal protests from Manila and Hanoi. Similarly, “ecological” closures around the Paracel Islands in 2016 and the establishment of large marine reserves since 1983 have served less to protect the environment than to strengthen administrative control.
Why does it matter?
These tools of so-called “environmental governance” function as instruments of lawfare within China’s “three warfares” doctrine (legal warfare, psychological warfare, and public opinion warfare). They are designed to consolidate Beijing’s territorial control and mechanisms of power projection. At the same time, they serve as camouflage to create a false appearance of legitimate jurisdiction over territories and maritime areas to which the PRC has no entitlement under international law. For the wider world, it is therefore crucial to expose these efforts, describe them in detail, and firmly reject any such “administrative expansion” by Beijing as illegitimate and unlawful territorial expansion.