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The outcropping — a triangular chain of reef and rock with a fish-rich lagoon in the middle — is a hotly disputed territory that is also claimed by the Philippines and Taiwan.

Nature reserve builds on China's control

China has effectively controlled Scarborough Shoal since a faceoff with the Philippines in 2012, though Philippine ships still try to approach it to stake the country's claim.

Confrontations have spiked in recent years. In August, while trying to intercept a Philippine ship near the shoal.

Before announcing the reserve, China earlier had declared the waters around the shoal as its territory and then defining what are known as the territory’s baselines.

“It falls into a pattern of China trying to establish administrative justifications for things it’s already done with military force,” Greg Poling, an expert on the South China Sea at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said of the reserve.

Giant clam harvesting has damaged the coral

Scholars of environmental and marine science say that Chinese harvesting of giant clams, which was banned last year, has caused extensive damage to Scarborough Shoal. The shells have become popular and valuable in the last few decades as a replacement for elephant ivory, which has been increasingly banned.

Chinese ships dragged their propellers through the reefs to dig up the clams until 2016. Then they switched to firing high-pressure water at the reefs. The damage is less visible but equally harmful, said Ray Powell, founder and director of SeaLight, a group at Stanford University that tracks maritime “gray-zone” activity.

China is "attempting to strengthen its claim while diverting scrutiny from the environmental devastation its own fleets inflicted — like an arsonist who torches a property and then appoints himself fire marshal amid the ashes,” Powell said.

China eyes shift from defending to governing the shoal

The nature reserve has more to do with territorial claims than reef protection, said Bec Strating, a professor of international relations at La Trobe University in Australia. She described the move as “the weaponization of environmental concerns.”

China’s state broadcaster CCTV said the establishment of the reserve was not just an act of ecological protection, but also a signal that China is shifting from responding to provocations to long-term maritime governance in the South China Sea.

Marine scientists, including those from China, have been trying to preserve nature, but policymakers are turning conservation into politics, said James Borton, a non-resident senior fellow at Johns Hopkins' SAIS Foreign Policy Institute.

“If you declare just a small section of the reef crest, maybe that’s an area where they can replant some coral and grow a little garden,” Poling said, “But Scarborough shoal is a graveyard ... Everything is dead.”

Experts don’t see China building another island

China has come under criticism for , but experts don't expect the same at Scarborough Shoal.

“It would be very odd for them to say we’re going to turn it into a nature preserve and then put a 3,000-meter (9,800-foot) concrete runway and four facilities there, right?” Powell said.

In 1995, China put up small octagonal huts on stilts at Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands, another part of the South China Sea. The move alarmed the Philippines and others that claim the reef.

China said they were emergency shelters for fishers in bad weather, but in the ensuing years, it added a runway and other facilities that the U.S. has said turned the reef into .

Building islands in the Spratlys makes more strategic sense, because they are farther from China's shores than Scarborough Shoal, Poling said.

“China certainly doesn’t need an airstrip or another deep-water harbor there.”

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Moritsugu reported from Beijing. Associated Press writer Jim Gomez in Manila, Philippines, contributed to this report.