One of China’s primary environmental aggressions toward Taiwan comes in the form of pillaging a precious—but easily plunderable—natural resource. The resource is sand, which is unexpectedly the world’s second most used resource. As one of the primary materials used to make concrete, asphalt, and glass, sand is crucial to China’s breakneck urban development and island building projects. [1]
Sand’s seeming physical abundance should not be mistaken for lack of economic scarcity. From 2018 to the present, China has consumed more sand than the U.S. has in the past hundred years—and its pace is quickening. Without the resource, its military and industrial expansions are curbed; its appetite for sand is tributary to voracious global ambitions. However, China currently has a sourcing problem. It has already overexploited many of its own sand reserves, at great environmental cost. The most alarming example is the transformation of its largest freshwater body, and the largest sand mine in the world, Poyang Lake.
Sand mining requires dredging of water beds and excavating of beaches, which both destroy fragile underwater habitats and irreparably alter the depth of the water body and shape of the shoreline. Sand mining boats, called dredge barges, use vacuum-like machinery to suck tons of sand from shores and beds, rousing clouds of sediment and killing any organisms that are suctioned in the process. Poyang Lake is an exemplar of the havoc these processes can wreak on aquatic environments.
Mining there began in 2001, and the lake’s extensive coastal erosion is stark in recent NASA satellite images. [2] Local farmers rely on Poyang’s coastline as a natural flood barrier as the lake is a primary flood outlet of the Yangtze River. That coastline has been decimated — its profile is completely resculpted, with expansive swathes of sandbank missing. These banks were also the habitats of many endemic species and migrant birds.
Beneath the surface, the damage is less visible, yet highly evident by way of abnormally low water levels and a biodiversity crisis. The surface of the lake has noticeably declined, causing problems for the farmers who require accessible water for irrigation. The scraping and sucking of the lakebed has left it ravaged and unsuitable for many of its prior habitants.
China recognizes that Poyang has been overharvested, and now legally restricts mining in its most degraded areas (although illegal mining still occurs in plain sight, according to Reuters). To fill this resource void, Beijing now takes aim at the shores of Taiwan.
Specifically, Beijing has been stealing sand from Taiwan’s Matsu Islands, which sit close to Chinese territory. Dredge barges can excavate tons of sand from Taiwan’s coasts in the time it takes Taipei to dispatch its Coast Guard Administration (CGA). The Taiwanese ships do not engage in formal military aggression, instead, they dispel the Chinese barges with their presence or with pressurized water cannons.
China’s motivation for sand theft is two-pronged. Matsu sand at once provides China with a precious material necessity and—perhaps even more valuable—an avenue of aggression without a formal military label. China extracting sand from what it claims are its own territories is not categorized as a military aggression, and, especially because only a handful of unarmed barges dredge at a time, the plundering does not warrant a military response from Taipei.
However, each raid by Chinese miners expends Taipei’s finite resources in terms of money, time, and fuel. The pillaging has been so consistent and harmful that Taiwan added a new frigate to its fleet in April to patrol for dredgers and stem its losses; China is succeeding in diverting Taipei’s attention and military power toward the endless and exhausting task of chasing away barges. It is a war of attrition which, despite being nonviolent, should be considered a military aggression against Taiwan.
Beijing’s sand campaign is part of its long ongoing “gray zone” engagement with Taiwan. [3] Because the conflict is unarmed, it is treated more as an act of harassment than warfare. However, its scope goes beyond bothersome and nonviolent harrying. Unsanctioned sand mining is at once economic depredation and environmental degradation. If unchecked, it will result in the same detrimental erosion, habitat destruction, and loss of crucial flood protection that afflict Poyang Lake. Research shows that much of this damage, especially habitat damage, is irreversible; sand mining has caused great loss of biodiversity and near extinctions in other parts of Asia and Africa.
If the international community hesitates in acknowledging China’s environmentally violent raids for what they are—warfare—the window will pass for preserving these invaluable swathes of habitat and crucial areas of flood protection in Taiwan, as it has passed at Poyang Lake. China’s actions must be recognized as vampiric: steadily stealing Taiwan’s natural vitality for the strengthening of its own urban and militaristic body.
[1] The sand used in construction and industry comes exclusively from water body mining sites. Though 33% of the earth is desert, desert sand’s grain shape is not suitable for material production. Thus, sand is mined from beaches, shorelines, riverbeds, and sea floors.
[2] The NASA satellite images can be found in the previously linked Reuters article, “Devoured.” It is linked again here.
[3] Atlantic Council describes the gray zone as “a set of activities that occur between peace (or cooperation) and war (or armed conflict). A multitude of activities fall into this murky in-between—from nefarious economic activities, influence operations, and cyberattacks to mercenary operations, and disinformation campaigns.”