BEIJING, China — Sand, cement, and Chinese military facilities now sit on top of some of the South China Sea’s once-thriving reefs; China has built over half a dozen new artificial islands in a bid to bolster its territorial claims in the hotly disputed region. Such reclamation devastates the local marine habitat. But according to China, these activities do not cause significant ecological damage. Beijing increasingly insists that the island-sized piles of sand and concrete now burying the highly biodiverse coral reefs are, in fact, environmentally friendly.

“It’s a green project,” claimed Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Deputy Director-General Wang Xining in a May 10 meeting at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing. All land reclamation and construction activity in the region “is carefully designed, carefully built, [to] try to minimize ecological effect,” Wang told a group of journalists visiting Beijing on a May reporting trip organized through the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Beijing Calls South China Sea Island Reclamation a ‘Green Project’