China is sharply increasing its violent attacks against Philippine vessels and sailors in disputed waters off the Philippine coast, with the latest Chinese assault this week maiming a Philippine sailor and wrecking a Philippine small craft.
Beijing seems to be testing just how genuine are repeated U.S. assurances that it will defend its treaty ally in the Pacific—and whether its own unilateral vision of might-makes-right at sea will prevail over decades of a rules-based order.
On Monday, China Coast Guard ships intercepted Philippine vessels attempting to resupply their own sailors grounded on a shoal inside the Philippines’s own exclusive economic zone (EEZ), barely 100 miles off the western coast of the archipelago. The Chinese attack, including by ax- and knife-wielding Chinese crewmen, left one Filipino missing a thumb and with a Philippine rigid-hull inflatable boat in tatters. The Philippine Armed Forces chief of staff likened the Chinese assault to a pirate attack.
The latest Chinese escalation came just two days after the entering into force of a new coast guard regulation that allows Beijing’s military ships carte blanche to seize any foreign vessels anywhere it deems necessary, even if those foreign ships are inside their own waters or on the high seas. The measure, which pays no heed to international law, is part of the yearslong militarization of the China Coast Guard and meant to bolster Beijing’s ability to impose by force its long-planned annexation of a huge swath of open sea.
This week’s intensification follows a similar, but less violent, increase of Chinese belligerence last month, with repeated efforts to interfere with Philippine operations in its own territories and waters. (China’s incursions are increasingly brazen, with vessels sailing within miles of Palawan, just off the west coast of the Philippines.) For more than a decade, China has been claiming nearly the entirety of the strategic South China Sea for itself—by building artificial islands, ignoring international law, and chasing away other countries’ vessels with water cannons.
With the violent confrontation this week, the showdown over otherwise unremarkable features such as Second Thomas Shoal and Sabina Shoal is threatening more than just the Philippines.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated Wednesday in a call with his Philippine counterpart that the U.S. defense commitment with Manila is “ironclad,” just days after State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller reaffirmed long-standing U.S. policy that any attack on Philippine vessels in the South China Sea will trigger the mutual defense clause of the 1951 treaty between the two countries.
But the United States has not followed up with concrete action.
“The maritime tensions dominate the discourse in the country, and people still feel that it could get even worse,” said Georgi Engelbrecht, who covers the Philippines for the International Crisis Group. “For now, statements are everything that exists. Will they deter China, or will Beijing up the ante again?”
China has carefully ratcheted up its aggression, from using bullhorns and water cannons to ramming ships to now boarding them and assaulting sailors. But it has been a slow and calibrated boil that seems to fall just short of an outright trigger of the U.S. defense conditions, said Collin Koh of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
The Chinese “seem to believe that their current set of techniques of coercion against the Filipinos would fall below the threshold of triggering the mutual defense treaty, but they are flirting with danger,” he said. “It’s down to the stroke of luck, and mainly Filipinos exercising the utmost restraint, that the latest incident did not escalate. If that emboldens the Chinese to push the envelope further, dire consequences may be in the works whether they intend for it to happen or not.”
The immediate question remains why China is intensifying a campaign against the Philippines that so far has produced only redoubled resistance in Manila, international condemnation, and no tangible results. Theories abound, whether about the potential energy riches of the South China Sea, the geostrategic importance of tiny atolls in the Western Pacific, or Beijing’s yearning for the friendlier foreign policies of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.
Ultimately, though, China seems to be strong-arming its neighbor because it can.
The new coast guard law, passed three years ago but which went into effect over the weekend, gives Chinese ships the right to seize and detain foreign ships if they are deemed by Beijing to be in “Chinese jurisdiction.” As Australia’s Lowy Institute put it: “In essence, this will allow the China Coast Guard to detain vessels on what the rest of the world views as high seas and in the EEZs of foreign countries where, under the [United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea], they enjoy high seas freedoms of navigation and overflight.”
The Philippines, with a tiny and obsolete coast guard and navy, has little recourse against the world’s biggest wielder of both, except for its defense treaty with Washington. But despite repeated insistence from U.S. defense officials and diplomats that attacks on Philippine vessels anywhere in the South China Sea will trigger the treaty, there is clearly little appetite in Washington for war with China over rocks and shoals.
And it could be the sheer achromatic nature of U.S. red lines, from Syria in 2012 to Rafah in 2024, that gives Beijing hope that this, too, is a red line drawn in sands.
China “is testing the resilience of both the Philippines and the Americans—they are testing the red lines,” Engelbrecht said. “This is the objective of China: testing the alliance, calling the bluff of the Americans.”
For Manila, the whole issue is closer to home and less complicated. Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. enjoys broad public support for his policy of resistance against Chinese foreign-policy bullying, especially in what Philippine officials increasingly refer to as the “West Philippine Sea.” The China appeasement policy of Duterte has little truck with voters these days, even if his daughter has just broken off from Marcos to prepare her own run for the presidency.
The seriousness with which the Philippines is taking the increased Chinese assaults can be seen in who is now riding point on the risky operations to resupply Philippine features at sea and who is increasingly publicizing Chinese aggression: The Philippine Armed Forces have replaced the coast guard as Manila’s main instrument in the showdown with China, both at sea and in the propaganda war.
And Manila has international law unequivocally on its side, repeatedly invoking the unanimous and legally binding 2016 ruling at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague that put paid to China’s expansive maritime claims in the region. That is one big reason that Philippine officials stress that the conflict is not just about Philippine rights in one isolated reef or another but about the whole rules-based international order.
That’s why both Manila and Washington are looking at middle-way options to bolster the Philippines’s ability to push back against China without going all the way to invoking the mutual defense treaty. A U.S. Coast Guard cutter recently exercised with ships from Japan and the Philippines near the waters of contention. Two U.S. carrier strike groups also conducted maneuvers in the South China Sea and the Philippine Sea. U.S. Navy P-8 reconnaissance planes make regular overflights of the South China Sea, including the Taiwan Strait.
But U.S. operations in the neighborhood haven’t been enough to deter China, which is why there is growing talk between the allies of a possible U.S. escort for Philippine resupply missions, both to assuage growing public ire in the Philippines and skepticism about the reliability of U.S. defense commitments.
The “Marcos Jr. administration’s credibility at home is at stake, and so is Washington’s in pledging security commitments to its allies and partners,” Koh said.
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