Given a country’s territorial waters are determined by its coastline, the emplacement of sand has become a new frontline of twenty-first-century diplomacy. The bigger those territorial waters are, the bigger the area a country can fish and drill and mine for offshore resources. Then there are the military consequences. Between 2006 and 2010 China reclaimed an average of 270 square miles a year on its coastline. Its dredging and land reclamation activities across islands in the South China Sea more recently are of such a scale that one U.S. admiral referred to them as representing a “Great Wall
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