>         Your explanation makes sense. It just seems that, considering the
> information we have, simple walks on a Chinese beach might turn up new
> species. Do you know of any Chinese biologists or even collectors who
> might be in contact with the West? The Chinese coast appears to be one
> of the final, uncharted, malacological frontiers.

Romantic, but sadly unlikely to be true. The fauna of the Bo-hai Gulf is
quite well known - Grabau and King charted it, and the western Korean
peninsula has been done by the Koreans; the Yellow Sea has more or less the
same Mollusca as the East China Sea, which is well-documented; the southern
coast of central China will have a very similar fauna to Taiwan, which has
been thoroughly investigated, and the area around Hainan and the Vietnamese
border is likely to prove a mixture of Taiwanese and Philippine
assemblages, as found on the Pratas islands. The South China Sea off
Vietnam is yielding some suprises - Perotrochus metivieri was one - but is
now being surveyed by Japanese and Russian workers. Nevertheless, if you
want to go there and walk on the beach, no-one is stopping you - there are
regular flights to and within China these days, and it's not hard to get a
visa. You should of course survey the Zoological Record for a summary of
Chinese molluscan literature before you try and describe anything you find
- it may have been done already.
There are other goals in molluscan studies than just the discovery of new
species.