China recently began dredging the seabed around Antelope Reef, pumping sand and rock onto the remote shoal to create developable land, according to a new report. The Paracel Islands feature is among many that Beijing has developed to support military bases and other structures intended to project power across the South China Sea, an international trade route.
The projects disregard environmental concerns and other nations’ claims that the maritime features are within their exclusive economic zones (EEZ) or international waters. China’s augmentation of Antelope Reef, in the Paracels’ western Crescent Group, has focused on a reclamation area spanning more than 15 square kilometers, Open Source Centre (OSC), a United Kingdom-based research group, reported in February 2026.
Once an uninhabited, largely submerged shoal that supported a thriving ecosystem of corals and marine life, Antelope Reef now bustles with human activity and heavy equipment. Beijing has not revealed the purpose of the scheme, which began in October 2025.
For at least the first three months, only one dredging vessel sent a single automatic identification system (AIS) transmission, though satellite images showed many dredgers at the site. Functioning AIS devices are required on most large vessels by the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization.
The reef now has prefabricated shelters for work crews and a causeway to access and retain pumped-in material, the images show. While 22 cutter-suction dredgers continued scouring the reef’s lagoon and submerged surroundings, at least one concrete plant appeared on the reef, along with roll-on/roll-off berths for cranes, dump trucks and other heavy equipment, the OSC reported.
“Taken together, these developments suggest reclamation activity is intended to extend across the reef’s full length and will likely evolve into a multipurpose outpost to enhance China’s military presence in the region,” the research group said.
The United States and its Allies and Partners have condemned Beijing’s destruction of fragile South China Sea ecosystems, including in the Paracels. The Antelope Reef project repeats Beijing’s island-building exploits elsewhere in the sea and violates an international tribunal’s 2016 ruling that the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea protects and preserves such marine environments.
Woody Island in the Paracels’ eastern Amphitrite Group is China’s administrative hub among the archipelago’s sandbars, reefs and islands. Northeast of Antelope Reef and about 280 kilometers southeast of China’s Hainan island province, Woody Island has a major airstrip and extensive military and civil infrastructure.
Since seizing the Crescent Group from Vietnam in 1974, Beijing has militarized 20 land formations in the Paracels, according to the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative. The regime also has military outposts in the sea’s Spratly Islands and controls undeveloped Scarborough Shoal, which it declared an “island nature reserve” in September 2025 despite the shoal being within the Philippines’ internationally recognized EEZ.
Beijing’s purported environmental stewardship is a ruse to assert control over the strategic shoal, experts say. They note that China declared the area a nature preserve while destroying maritime ecosystems throughout the region.