In early December last year, a flotilla of two dozen Chinese fishing boats and escort warships sailed to the disputed Philippine-occupied Thitu Island (Jhongye Island, 中業島). By the end of the month, Beijing had almost 100 vessels in and around the archipelago, sparking an initially largely hidden confrontation that could yet spark outright war.
When China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy turns 70 in October, the celebrations are to center on its largest, highest-profile warships — particularly its pair of aircraft carriers, set to be the first of many.
High-tech saber rattling is clearly at the heart of Beijing’s strategy to dominate its immediate neighborhood, with jets and warships particularly aggressive around Taiwan in the past six months.
However, what the confrontation with the Philippines demonstrates is that such conventional naval posturing is complemented by something much less conventional: the hundreds if not thousands of small fishing and other vessels of China’s “maritime militia.”
Usually unarmed, albeit increasingly escorted by Chinese warships and coast guard cutters, they have become more assertive by the month.
With US-Chinese relations already complicated by a trade dispute, such confrontations are now clearly drawing in the US.
Earlier this month, the US Navy announced that it was sending the assault ship USS Wasp — essentially a small aircraft carrier operating 20 F-35B Joint Strike jets and a Marine Expeditionary Force — to exercise with the Philippine Navy.
On March 1, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that any Chinese attack on Philippine forces or civilian vessels would trigger a US military response under a 1951 mutual defense treaty.
The current confrontation with the Philippines suggests that Beijing’s face-off with its neighbors is reaching a new and potentially more volatile stage.
China has spent the intervening time building a network of sometimes vast reclaimed outposts on some of the most contentious islands, but is now becoming much more assertive right up to territory held by other nations, both with conventional military force and “civilian” vessels, such as its fishing fleet.
This has also demonstrated how complex the political dynamics of such a face-off can be.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte had been considered one of the closest regional leaders to China, with Beijing much less likely than the US to criticize his government’s often brutal crackdown on suspected drug dealers that has left thousands dead.
Chinese investment in the Philippines has increased sharply under his administration, including purchases of major strategic commercial port infrastructure.
Throughout this most recent crisis, Duterte has walked an awkward path between placating hawkish voices at home and further antagonizing his unraveling relationship with Beijing.
Meanwhile, nationalist Philippine voices — as well as much of the nation’s national security establishment — have been pushing him relentlessly toward a tougher line.
The current face-off began when the Philippines stepped up construction of its own island military outpost, albeit on a much smaller level than China’s giant island-building elsewhere in the region. With more than half the world’s fishing fleet, Beijing has more than enough vessels to swarm an area.
Satellite footage from the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, part of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, showed that the flotilla was almost always supported by one or more Chinese warships or coast guard vessels, usually keeping their distance several kilometers further from any of the disputed islands.
The message appears clear — if the Philippines choose to follow Indonesia or Vietnam in firing warning shots at Chinese fishing vessels or seizing them in disputed waters, they would be risking an immediate military clash.
How far either side is truly willing to go remains extremely unclear. While Duterte has said that war with China would be “suicidal,” he is also said that he would send the Philippine military to confront China if it did not “lay off” its islands.
Still, it remains likely Beijing is to maintain the “status quo,” frequently or continually maintaining large flotillas around Thitu and Scarborough Shoal (Huangyan Island, 黃岩島), where a similar face-off took place in 2012.
Even that, it is increasingly clear, would bring with it a significant rise in regional tension.
While the Pentagon has remained largely tight-lipped about the exact location and activities of the Wasp and its task force, Philippine media cited reports from local fishers putting it near Scarborough Shoal, also known for regular Chinese fishing fleet and possible “maritime militia” activity.
If that were true, it would be the most assertive that the US Navy has been in the region when it comes to pushing back at China’s maritime claims.
To make matters more complex, a small flotilla of Russian warships is now also exercising in the South China Sea, the latest sign of growing cooperation between Moscow and Beijing.
That included an apparently prearranged visit to the Philippines, another sign of just how conflicted Duterte and others in his government remain on their alliance to the US — and keen to hedge their bets.
In the almost a decade since the administration of then-US president Barack Obama announced its “pivot” to confront a rising China, Washington and Beijing have invested considerable energy in imagining and preparing for conventional all-out war with each other.
Such a conflict would prove devastating to the economies of both nations and the wider world — a key reason it has not happened so far.
Through pushing its neighbors in slightly less direct military ways, China clearly hopes to dominate the region without needing to fire a shot, but there might be decades more of these confrontations to come — and with other nations increasingly pushing back, they will become riskier by the year.
Peter Apps, a former Reuters reporter who is now a columnist for the agency, writes on international affairs, globalization, conflict and other issues. He is founder and executive director of the Project for Study of the 21st Century, a non-national, non-partisan, non-ideological think tank. The opinions expressed here are those of the author.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs