South China Sea: Chinese boat scavenging scrap metal from WWII wrecks shows Malaysia's vulnerability to maritime actions

For several years, Malaysian diver Hazz Zain has watched with dismay as the sunken wrecks of two British World War II battleships - the designated war graves of 842 men - were stripped of their precious steel by illegal salvage crews looting historic sites buried beneath the waves.

"They started in 2012," said Hazz, a professional diver who knows intimately the 68-metre-deep wreck site of the Prince of Wales, and Repulse, two vessels sent to defend Singapore but taken out by Japanese torpedoes in December 1941.

Showing This Week in Asia video footage of the extent of the damage to the Repulse, she pointed out the jagged pieces of metal ripped from the rear gun-turret area, which was intact at the time it was sunk.

Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.

"Look at the part damaged by illegal salvage works," she said. "That was in 2018, the ships still looked like ships at that time."

Hazz's interest in diving started during her youth in the 1990s. She was pulled in by the beauty of being under the sea, developing an interest in ships and aircraft from both world wars after discovering wrecks scattered in the waters around the country.

"This deep interest takes me to diving in waters around Malaysia as well as other places that have their own unique history," she said.

With more than three decades of experience as a diver, Hazz met Britain's then-Prince of Wales - now King Charles - in 2017 and briefed the future monarch on the deteriorating condition of the wrecks, which not only serve as tombs for hundreds of sailors, but also Britain's aspirations to dominate the seas.

One bulk carrier - the Chinese-registered Chuan Hong 68 - is to blame, experts say.

For years it has been seen scouring Malaysia's coastal shallows, where many World War II wrecks lie. Built before the first atomic detonation and free from nuclear radiation, these pieces of "pre-war steel" can sell from three to five times the price of modern steel.

The Chuan Hong 68 was detained on May 28 by the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) alongside its crew of 32, who included 21 Chinese nationals.

"It is the same barge," said Hazz, of a vessel she has witnessed circling around the site for years.

The barge had previously been caught salvaging the same wrecks in 2017, according to news reports, but appears to have returned to continue its illegal harvest.

It is registered to a Chinese company in Fuzhou, according to Malaysian authorities. But China has said that the vessel is chartered by a Malaysian company.

Whoever is behind its operations, the history of the barge is a tale of money and opportunism in the shadowy sea-salvage trade.

The ransacking of the wrecks has been carried out in waters so close to the Malaysian coast that the links to China have made many queasy over the potential creep of Chinese ships - and aspirations - into fiercely contested seas.

But as the Chuan Hong 68's crew got up to old tricks, they were tripped up by a very modern means: TikTok.

A video posted by a site worker apparently excited to see a gun turret being offloaded from a barge alerted Malaysian authorities to strange happenings along Tanjung Belungkor's secluded mangrove-covered coastline, not far from Singapore's Tekong island and the international border between Malaysia and the neighbouring city state.

On May 21 they found the scrapyard littered with parts - including unexploded ordnance - from the HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse.

Photos have since been circulated showing a Malaysian official at a scrapyard dwarfed by a hulking anchor and links of its chain, as well as what some experts claim to be a rusted gun barrel.

The ships were sunk by Japanese aerial torpedoes at the start of the war - two days after the start of the Battle of Hong Kong and the invasion of Malaya. The more than 800 deaths that resulted make it one of Britain's worst naval disasters.

Over the course of the war, more than 400 ships from all sides sank in the shallow waters of the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea around present-day Malaysia. Entombed within are the bodies of some 15,000 sailors who perished in the conflict, elevating the shipwrecks to war graves.

Lying 60 nautical miles from the coast of Kuantan in Peninsular Malaysia, the Prince of Wales settled upside down on the sea floor at a depth of 68 metres, while the Repulse lay on its side, 56 metres under the clear blue waters of the South China Sea.

Deployed to the South China Sea as part of "Force Z" to protect British holdings in the region - particularly Malaya and Singapore - the sinking of the vessels in Imperial Japanese Navy air raids marked the first time a then modern battleship had been sunk by air power while on the high seas.

It heralded the start of the age of air superiority and the virtual end of British naval supremacy.

Former UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill described in his post-war memoir that upon hearing of the sinkings, he "turned over and twisted in bed the full horror" and never "received a more direct shock".

"Across this vast expanse of waters, Japan was supreme, and we everywhere were weak and naked."

Bereft of protection from sea and air, "Fortress Singapore" fell just two months later.

However, the historical significance has not deterred some from seeing a potential fortune in the thick, heavy high-quality steel lying unattended at a manageable depth on the sea floor, leading to the destruction of many of the sites by unauthorised salvage operations.

The TikTok video, along with sightings of the crane barge by local fishermen, prompted experts to sound the alarm about possible illegal salvage operations at the site of the shipwrecks in the South China Sea.

The 8,352-gross ton Chuan Hong 68 crane barge, which measures 122 metres by 32 metres, is registered to Fujian Ya Rui Marine, a company in Lianjiang county, Fuzhou, China, which described the nature of its business on its website as "wrecking sunken ships at home and abroad".

The barge has been operating at the site since December, spending more than two weeks there before offloading scraps at the jetty in Tanjung Belungkor and returning for further unsanctioned salvage operations.

The barge and its 32 crew members - 21 Chinese nationals, 10 Bangladeshis and one Malaysian - were detained during a routine inspection by the MMEA for failing to present anchor permits.

The Maritime Observatory, a UK-based agency dedicated to preserving the world's underwater cultural heritage, said its satellite reconnaissance showed the Chuan Hong 68 operated undetected for more than five months and offloaded at least six boatloads of scrap from HMS Prince of Wales, spending more than 54 days at the site.

Giles Richardson, its senior archaeologist, claimed to have evidence that the barge had disabled its automatic identification system transponder when at sea to avoid being tracked, and is suspected of using a permit to remove a modern wreck as cover to access the Prince of Wales site.

"If true, it suggests that official checks on the ship's movements and verification of the scrap cargo carried into Tanjung Belungkor were completely inadequate," Richardson told This Week in Asia.

He said concerns about the sighting of Chuan Hong 68 were warranted as it was also responsible for removing three Japanese World War II wrecks in Sabah in 2017.

While little is known about Chuan Hong 68, the Chinese government in 2017 claimed that a Malaysian company, Accenture Strategy Sdn, chartered the crane barge, after the Indonesian Navy detained the vessel for illegally scavenging the wreck of a Swedish supertanker around Indonesia's Anambas islands, in the far south reaches of the South China Sea.

According to the company's registry, it has since renamed itself Amenture Strategy Sdn. Bhd., and reports its business activity as land reclamation, buying and selling of scrap metals and "to dredge waste of scraps from seabed".

Its business address is in Skudai, Johor, an hour away from where the illegally salvaged material from the British warships was offloaded.

It is unclear if the Chuan Hong 68 is still being chartered by the Malaysian company. Calls to the company went unanswered.

The National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth, England, has expressed concern at the "apparent vandalism for personal profit of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, which are both designated as protected places under the UK's Protection of Military Remains Act 1986.

"They are designated war graves," said its director general Dominic Tweddle. "We are upset at the loss of naval heritage and the impact this has on the understanding of our Royal Navy history."

The issue has brought a geopolitical edge too.

Swathes of the South China Sea are heavily contested, with China claiming most of it under the so-called nine-dash line.

But the site of the Prince of Wales and Repulse lies more than 240 nautical miles (445km) west of China's westernmost claim and well within Malaysia's uncontested exclusive economic zone, making the activities of the Chuan Hong 68 even more egregious.

While the barge continued to scour the South China Sea for Japanese and British shipwrecks, an archaeological sweep of the contested waters carried out by China over the span of about three months last year uncovered five ancient merchant ships laden with historical artefacts.

On the same day news broke of the illegal salvage operations on the Prince of Wales, China's National Cultural Heritage Administration announced it had begun surveying and mapping two sunken centuries-old Ming-era merchant ships discovered in the contested waterway.

Located in an unspecified area in the northeastern part of the South China Sea, the body said it would now assess how to preserve and protect the two shipwrecks, which it said were of "world-class archaeological importance".

Three other wrecks were found in August, in the vast expanse of water between China's southern coast and the Paracel or Xisha Islands, which are also claimed by Vietnam as the Hoang Sa Islands.

China is expected to use the discovery of sunken ships of Chinese origin to strengthen its claims to a series of disputed islands in the sea, where it has been an active maritime power for centuries.

Malaysia's threadbare naval resources, meanwhile, have been stretched thin by tensions in the South China Sea, militant incursions in the Sulu Sea and piracy along the busy Strait of Malacca.

The navy in particular is reeling from a scandal over the lengthy delay in the construction of six littoral combat ships which began in 2011, with first deliveries expected in 2019. None of the ships are 50 per cent complete, however, and the government is scrapping the last vessel, leaving five to be built.

With the Chuan Hong 68 impounded, calls are mounting for Malaysia to urgently protect the sites of the sunken vessels.

"For us in the UK, these are important war graves," said Richardson, the archaeologist.

"For Malaysians, they are world-famous diving sites that should bring in tourists and money.

"When they're destroyed, no one benefits."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

Copyright (c) 2023. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.