Beijing finally slices off Sandy Cay
The Financial Times reported last week that China’s coast guard has declared China’s sovereignty over Sandy Cay, posting pictures of personnel holding a Chinese flag on a strip of sand. The landing apparently took place in mid-April.
If history is a guide, then Beijing is likely to get away with this latest fine-slicing annexation, a tactic well suited to the geography and geopolitics of the South China Sea. However, a prompt counter-assertion of sovereignty by armed forces and law enforcement personnel from the Philippines suggests that Manila will not yield sovereignty to China without resistance.
Seasoned South China Sea watchers will recognise the name Sandy Cay, a modest uninhabited sliver of land in the Spratly Islands, located a few nautical miles away from China’s largescale facilities at Subi Reef and the Philippines’ installation at Thitu Island.
This particular morsel of the South China Sea salami has been a long time in the carving. I wrote about it first in 2015 and again in 2017. For almost a decade, the Philippines and China have engaged in a low-intensity but persistent tussle over Sandy Cay.
While Sandy Cay has negligible physical value as territory, China’s lawfare experts were clearly paying attention, realising that whoever possessed the feature could potentially lay jurisdictional claim to Subi Reef, a naturally submerged feature at high tide, over which China has built a large-scale base on reclaimed land, including an airstrip and port. This apparent legalistic interest in Sandy Cay is ironic, considering that Beijing has run roughshod over international law and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in so many respects.
The annexation was almost certainly long planned. Again, it comes as no surprise to seasoned South China Sea watchers to see China act at a time of international distraction. The long sweep of China’s territorial expansion in the South China Sea is replete with such moments when Beijing was able to take advantage of the international situation to press its claims, at the expense of rival Southeast Asian claimants.
Apart from heightened tensions with the Philippines, Beijing is unlikely to face punishment for its latest, bloodless annexation. Relations with Manila are already at a low point, given the breadth and severity of China’s maritime coercion and interference in the Philippines. Meanwhile, China is strengthening its relations with the rest of Southeast Asia.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is unlikely to make much of a fuss, despite the occupation of new features running contrary to the 2002 Declaration on a Code of Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea and ongoing code of conduct negotiations. Beijing likely judges that ASEAN members will turn a blind eye, provided China does nothing further to develop Sandy Cay. Despite the Trump administration’s professed focus on competition with China and expressions of alliance solidarity with the Philippines—such as exercises between US marines and the Philippines armed forces in northern Luzon—the United States appears similarly unlikely to take a stand over the status of such a small, unoccupied feature. The inter-agency Philippines operation to reassert sovereignty at Sandy Cay and two other small features, conducted on 27 April, does not appear to have been directly supported by the US military.
One of Beijing’s diplomatic aims will be precisely to highlight, to the Philippines and others, the US’s alleged failure to act in support of its ally. But the failure to push back and impose costs against China’s successful revision of the status quo in the South China Sea is not just a US policy issue; it is a collective and cumulative failure of much of the international community interested in upholding international law, sovereign equality among states and access to the maritime commons. Australia, for one, should promptly make clear that China’s actions are provocative and destabilising, and its sovereignty claims to Sandy Cay are baseless.
Whether China encroaches in slow motion or acts in high gear to further its territorial claims in the South China Sea, the key point is that it only rolls forward—never back. Isolated shows of force, such as Scarborough Shoal in 2015, may temporarily hold its ambitions in check. But Beijing has learned that it can afford to pick its preferred time and place in the South China Sea.
Would a large-scale US show of force in response to China’s initial reclamation activities in the Spratly Islands have made a difference in 2013? The answer to that may well be affirmative, but that is water long under the bridge. In 2025, it seems most unlikely that the international response to China’s coast guard landing on Sandy Cay and proclaiming sovereignty will be significantly different to China’s actions in Scarborough Shoal in 2012, or the more serious clashes at Johnstone Reef in 1988 and the Paracels in 1974.
What sets this incident apart is the prompt counter-assertion of sovereignty by the Philippines, underlining Manila’s resolve to resist further Chinese encroachment and demonstrating its strengthened maritime policy coordination under the Marcos administration. Such resolve deserves tangible support from Manila’s allies and partners.
But the Philippines and other Southeast Asian claimants face a problem: the sparsely populated scraps of coral and sand that make up most of the contested features in the South China Sea are ideally suited to a salami-slicing strategy. Beijing has repeatedly shown that steady encroachment can successfully transform the status quo over time, without precipitating an armed response or incurring significant punishment.
China pursues a similar array of pressure tactics against Taiwan, which also has remote territory in the South China Sea at Pratas Reef and Itu Aba. Yet the annexation of Taiwan remains on a vastly different order of scale. However appetised China’s leaders may be by the thinly cut hors d’oeuvres on offer in the South China Sea, consuming the sausage whole is likely to induce indigestion, or worse.