Malaysia FM: China's 'nine-dash line' claim 'ridiculous'

Foreign Minister Saifuddin says Malaysia's decision to take South China Sea claim to UN is its 'sovereign right'. 
by Ted Regencia
Malaysian Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah said he expects ASEAN to further debate in the coming months the need for a 'Code of Conduct' with China over the South China Sea issue

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - Malaysia has hardened its diplomatic position on the disputed South China Sea, questioning China's "nine-dash line" claim over the entire sea lane that has already been previously declared with "no legal basis" by an arbitration tribunal in The Hague.
Malaysian Minister of Foreign Affairs Saifuddin Abdullah said late on Friday that Kuala Lumpur has the "sovereign right to claim whatever that is there that is within our waters".
"For China to claim that the whole of South China Sea belongs to China, I think that is ridiculous," Saifuddin said in response to an Al Jazeera question about Malaysia's decision last week to take its case to the United Nations.
"It is a claim that we have made, and we will defend our claim. But of course, having said that, anyone can challenge and dispute, which is not something unusual."
On December 12, Malaysia formally filed a submission seeking clarity on the limits of its continental shelf beyond the 322 kilometre (200 nautical miles) exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the disputed body of water claimed by several countries in the Southeast Asian region.
The move has angered China, which claims "historic rights" over all of South China Sea.
It has also blamed the United States for raising tensions in the area.
In response, the US Navy's Pacific Fleet commander, Admiral John Aquilino accused China of "bullying" its Southeast Asian neighbours.
Malaysia and China are both signatories to the UN Convention for the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which codifies the rights and responsibilities of independent states' use of the oceans.
Under UNCLOS, coastal states like Malaysia are entitled to an EEZ.
Beyond that waters are considered the high seas, common to all nations.
UNCLOS also defines rules in the case of overlapping EEZs.
It was on this basis that the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague rejected in 2016 China's claims to almost the entire sea, through which an estimated $3 trillion of trade pass each year.
China, however, rejects the ruling in The Hague, and since then has expanded its presence in the region, building artificial islands with runways and installing an advanced missile system.

ASEAN Code of Conduct
Beijing has insisted on the application of its "nine-dash line" demarcation, which claims that the littoral countries are only entitled to the seas and other resources nine miles from their shore.
Aside from the Philippines and Malaysia, China's claim is also being questioned by Vietnam.
Brunei and Taiwan also claim parts of the South China Sea.
Asked whether Malaysia's latest diplomatic move would strengthen the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' (ASEAN) push for a unified "Code of Conduct" in the South China Sea, Foreign Minister Saifuddin replied, "It would be debated for sure."
It was unclear what prompted Malaysia to file a formal submission this month.
In August, Saifuddin had said that he was "very hopeful" that ASEAN and China can reach an agreement within the three-year deadline or earlier, to help ease the tensions, Bloomberg News reported him as saying.
In September, Saifuddin also met his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi to set up a "bilateral consultation mechanism for maritime issues".
The agreement was dubbed "a new platform for dialogue and cooperation".
China has tried to keep discussions over the sea on a bilateral basis rather than negotiating with ASEAN as a group.
In October, Saifuddin told members of Parliament that Malaysia should be "upgraded" in order to "better manage our waters should there be a conflict between major powers in the South China Sea."
For the last 10 years, China has been Malaysia's largest trading partner.
In 2018, its trade was estimated to be at about $76.6bn, representing 16.7 percent of Malaysia's total trade, according to Malaysia's trade ministry.

Chinese Paranoia

Indonesia rejects China's claims over South China Sea
Reuters

Indonesia's Deputy Minister for Maritime Affairs Arif Havas Oegroseno points at the location of North Natuna Sea on a new map of Indonesia during talks with reporters in Jakarta, Indonesia, July 14, 2017. 

JAKARTA -- Indonesia said on Wednesday it rejected China’s claims over a disputed part of the South China Sea as “having no legal basis”, after two days earlier protesting to Beijing over the presence of a Chinese coastguard vessel in its territorial waters.
The boat trespassed into Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone off the coast of the northern islands of Natuna, leading Indonesians officials to issue a strong protest and summon the Chinese ambassador in Jakarta.
Speaking in Beijing on Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang had said China had sovereignty over the Spratly Islands and their waters and that both China and Indonesia have “normal” fishing activities there.
In a sharp rebuke, Indonesia’s foreign ministry called in a statement on Wednesday for China to explain the “legal basis and clear borders” regarding its claims on the exclusive economic zone, as based on the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
“China’s claims to the exclusive economic zone on the grounds that its fishermen have long been active there... have no legal basis and have never been recognized by the UNCLOS 1982,” the foreign ministry said.
Jakarta also noted that the argument had been refuted during China’s legal defeat against the Philippines in 2016 over disputed South China claims at Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.
Indonesia has no claims over the Spratly Islands, which lie to the northeast of the Natuna Islands.
The foreign ministry reiterated its stance that the country is a non-claimant state in the South China Sea and that it has no overlapping jurisdiction with China.
However, Jakarta has repeatedly clashed with China over fishing rights around the Natuna Islands, detaining Chinese fishermen and expanding its military presence in the area.
China claims most of the South China Sea, an important trade route which is believed to contain large quantities of oil and natural gas.
Several Southeast Asian states dispute China’s territorial claims and are competing with China to exploit the South China Sea’s abundant hydrocarbon and fishing resources.
Beijing has raised the ante by deploying military assets on artificial islands constructed on shoals and reefs in disputed parts of the sea.
China’s embassy in Indonesia was not immediately reachable for comment.

Sina Delenda Est

White House warns China on growing militarization in South China Sea
By Ben Westcott, Ryan Browne and Zachary Cohen

The White House warned Beijing on Thursday that there will be consequences for its growing militarization in the South China Sea, following reports of missiles being deployed to three of the country's outposts in the disputed region.
US intelligence assessed that there is a high probability the Chinese military had deployed anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles to three artificial islands during recent military drills on the contested sea.
But a US defense official told CNN it was unclear if the missiles remained on the outposts following the April exercises.
The South China Sea is one of the most contested regions in the world, with overlapping territorial claims by China, the Philippines and Vietnam, among several others.
The move would mark the first reported Chinese missile deployment in the Spratly Islands, a series of small inlets and reefs that Beijing has slowly built into militarized, artificial islands to reinforce its claims.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Thursday that the United States has "raised concerns" with the Chinese. 

We're well aware of China's militarization of the South China Sea," she said.
"There will be near-term and long-term consequences, and we'll certainly keep you up to date," she added.
CNBC first reported the Chinese military had deployed the weapons systems to Subi Reef, Fiery Cross Reef and Mischief Reef, east of the Philippines, on Thursday, quoting a source with knowledge of US intelligence reports.
According to CNBC, the YJ-12B anti-ship missiles would be able to strike ships up to 295 nautical miles away from the artificial islands.
Beijing previously announced in 2016 it had already deployed similar weapons to Woody Island in the Paracel Islands, on the northwestern edge of the South China Sea.

This aerial photograph of Fiery Cross reef obtained by the Philippine Inquirer and taken on November 28, 2017.

'Point of no return': expert
China's militarization has alarmed countries both in the region and around the world, prompting freedom of navigation operations by the US Navy to assert its right to travel in international waters.
"The United States has long raised concerns about the militarization of outposts on disputed features in the South China Sea," said a State Department official who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
"China's leadership has publicly pledged not to pursue militarization in the disputed Spratlys. We are concerned that China is not acting in accordance with this pledge."
Speaking during a visit to Australia on Wednesday, French President Emmanuel Macron said it was important not to have any one "hegemony" in the region.
"What's important is to preserve a rules-based development in the region, especially the Indo-Pacific region and to preserve the necessary balances," he said.
Australia's Foreign Minister Julie Bishop told CNN-affiliate Sky News Australia on Friday said if the media reports were correct, she would be "concerned."
"This would be contrary to China's stated aspiration that it would not militarize these features," she said.
But China's steady military buildup on the islands is reaching a "point of no return," Collin Koh, research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies' Maritime Security Program, told CNN

China's unmovable aircraft carriers
Beijing claims an enormous swath of territory through the center of the sea, delineated by the Chinese government's controversial "nine-dash line" which runs all the way from Hainan Province down to Malaysia and back past Taiwan.
In a ruling in July 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague ruled China's territorial claims had no legal basis.
Nevertheless, Beijing has attempted to reinforce its hold on the area by creating and militarizing artificial islands in the Spratlys and the Paracels.
Koh said China's string of militarized islands -- equipped with airfields and radar facilities -- have become like a series of immovable aircraft carriers.
He said that the missiles will allow China's armed forces to form "a multilayer military umbrella over the South China Sea," with interlocking sensors and weapons systems.
Satellite imagery had previously emerged of China building installations to hold these missiles, said Bonnie Glaser, the director of the China Power Project at Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
"This is exactly what we have expected the Chinese to do," she said. 

"Next thing we'll see is fighter aircraft to deploy, probably on rotation, then they'll begin exercises near the islands. I just think that (Beijing) believes everybody, including the claimants, understands this is inevitable."
Pentagon chief spokeswoman Dana White reaffirmed the United States' commitment to the international waters.
She said the Chinese must understand that "they cannot, and should not, be hostile, and understand that the Pacific is -- is a place in which much commerce goes through. And it's in their interest to ensure that there's a free navigation of international waters."

Rapid militarization
The missile deployments are just the latest example of Beijing tightening its hold on the South China Sea in recent years, as the world's attention focused farther north, on the Korean Peninsula.
In April, the Wall Street Journal reported US officials had confirmed China had installed military radar jamming equipment on the Spratly Islands.

The same month, Australian warships en route to Vietnam were challenged by the Chinese navy as they traversed the South China Sea, leading Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to assert Australia's right to travel international waters.
Hanging over everything was a massive display of Chinese military might in the sea on April 12, culminating in a parade led by Beijing's only aircraft carrier and personally reviewed by Xi Jinping.
The United States under the Trump administration has increased the number of freedom of navigation operations near China's artificial islands, but Glaser said it was difficult for the United States to stand up to Beijing with little support in the region.
"(China) believes they can get away with it and they have probably calculated correctly," she said.
"The big question has always been: How do we impose enough costs so we stop the Chinese where they are, and not go any further? And so far we haven't been successful in that."
Adm. Philip Davidson, nominated to take charge of the US Pacific Command, told his confirmation hearing last month that China is already the master of the South China Sea.
"China is now capable of controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios short of war with the United States," Davidson said in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
"The PLA [People's Liberation Army] will be able to use these bases to challenge US presence in the region, and any forces deployed to the islands would easily overwhelm the military forces of any other South China Sea-claimants," Davidson wrote.
The admiral also pointed to the fact that China's current activity contradicts what Chinese dictator Xi Jinping said during a White House meeting with then-US President Barack Obama in 2015.
On the topic of the South China Sea, Xi said at the time that "China does not intend to pursue militarization."
But, speaking at his testimony last month, Davidson noted that China's "forward operating bases" now appear complete. 

"The only thing lacking are the deployed forces," said Davidson.

Wanted: A Strategy to Limit China's Grand Plans for the South China Sea

The United States needs to play an active role in helping broker resistance to the Chinese political push.
By Dean Cheng

The United States has significantly accelerated the pace of it freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs) in the South China Sea. 

Last year it conducted four such operations in the span of five months. 

This contrasts with the four FONOPs conducted during Barack Obama’s entire second term.
On January 17, the USS Hopper, a U.S. Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, conducted the first FONOPs of 2018. 

This one occurred near Scarborough Shoal, much farther north than the previous operations. 

Like those earlier FONOPs, it rapidly drew a rebuke from the People’s Republic of China.
China’s Defense Ministry spokesman declared that the repeated “illegal” entry (feifa jinru 非法进入) of American warships to Chinese island groupings and maritime regions in the South China Sea endangered both sides. 

He condemned the operations as a threat to Chinese sovereignty and security and said they disrupted regional security and stability.
Scarborough Shoal has been a source of ongoing friction. 

Claimed by both China and the Philippines, it was the scene of a confrontation between Manila and Beijing in 2012. 

The United States brokered what was supposed to be a mutual withdrawal, but which saw the Chinese remain establishing effective control over the area. 

Thus far, however, Beijing has refrained from engaging in the kind of island reclamation or building at Scarborough that it has conducted in the Spratly Islands and the Paracel Islands.
But that restraint may be coming to a close. 

China’s state-run news agencies now openly acknowledge that the nation has, indeed, engaged in significant land reclamation and artificial island building in the South China Sea region. 

Chinese media have also unveiled a number of new dredges. 

This includes the Tian Kun Ho, one of the most powerful excavation vessels in Asia. 

The 140-meter-long vessel can reportedly dredge six thousand cubic meters per hour, and reach thirty-five meters below the ocean surface. 

Beijing appears to be warning that it can engage in rapid island development at any time—and Scarborough Shoal is potentially one of those sites.
The People’s Republic of China has long promulgated a map of the South China Sea that includes a “nine dash line” encompassing most of the region. 

Based upon a map initially published by the Republic of China, Beijing has been ambiguous over what exactly the nine-dash line represents. 

Is it a claim over the land features within it, including the Paracel Islands, Spratly Islands and Scarborough Shoal? 

Or is it an assertion that the entire region, including the waters, belongs to Beijing, essentially making the South China Sea its territorial waters? 

Its behavior, including repeatedly interfering with American warships and military aircraft transiting the region, would seem to suggest the latter. 

Beijing, however, has protested this view, arguing that it has never interfered with civilian ships on the sea lanes that traverse the area.
In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) ruled on a complaint against China filed by the Philippines, as part of the binding arbitration applicable to signatories of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), to which both the Philippines and China are parties. 

The PCA ruled on a number of elements, in almost all cases finding in favor of Manila. 

This included a ruling that China’s claims to "historic" rights, or other sovereign rights or jurisdiction, within the area encompassed by the nine-dash line was contrary to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and without lawful effect.
But Beijing bluntly rejected the findings, often in very intemperate terms. 

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang described the PCA as a “law-abusing tribunal” engaging in a “farce.” 

China’s ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai, accused the tribunal of “professional incompetence” and “questionable integrity.” 

Indeed, since the ruling, Beijing has expanded its military presence, despite promises to Obama not to “militarize” the South China Sea.
Meanwhile, Chinese actions have also increasingly worried Indonesia. 

Indonesian territory extends to Natuna Island and an associated array of natural gas fields in the southwestern portion of the South China Sea. 

Chinese fishing boats have steadily encroached on its waters—much like they had on Scarborough Shoal. 

More alarming, one Chinese fishing boat detained by Indonesian authorities for illegal fishing has been seized back by the China Coast Guard. 

China’s growing naval capabilities have therefore also raised concerns. 

Most worrisome, Indonesian requests to clarify whether Natuna Island (and the surrounding waters) are encompassed within the nine-dash line have not received official clarification from Beijing. Instead, the PRC has said that, while it recognizes Indonesian sovereignty over Natuna island, it still retains “overlapping claims to maritime rights and interests.”
These issues led Indonesia to expand military facilities near Natuna in 2016. 

This has included expanding the island’s runway and increasing the number of troops deployed there. In 2017, Djakarta announced that it would rename the area near Natuna, within its own Exclusive Economic Zone, the North Natuna Sea. 

The Chinese promptly rejected this move, warning that it would not be “conducive” to good relations.
The name change has been endorsed by the United States, however. 

Secretary of Defense James Mattis used the term while visiting Indonesia, saying, “We can help maintain maritime domain awareness in the South China Sea, the North Natuna Sea. . . . This is something that we look forward to doing.”

An Integrated Course of Action for the Future
There is no reason to think the Chinese will back away from their increasingly assertive stance toward the South China Sea. 

Far from opening to compromise, Beijing has steadily tightened its grip over the area, while its actions toward Indonesia suggest that its ambitions may extend even further. 

Beijing is clearly engaged in a long-term effort. 

It is essential, then, for the United States to have short-, medium-, and long-term responses.

Short-Term: Slowing Down Chinese Actions
One of the great challenges has been China’s island construction. 

Literally moving earth and sea, Beijing has built entirely new islands, complete with airfields and military installations, and thereby changing the facts on the ground. 

The growing strength of all parts of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—including the PLA Navy, PLA Air Force, and the PLA Rocket Forces—makes challenging China an ever more dangerous proposition.
But China’s ability to build these islands rests upon certain companies, such as the state-owned China Communications Construction Company, and their attendant ability to build and maintain dredging capabilities. 

Insofar as their dredging equipment relies on imported parts, restricting the sale and supply of those parts can affect the pace of operations. 

The Tian Kun Hao’s predecessor, the Tianjing, clearly relies on imported equipment.
It is also possible to restrict the operations of companies engaged in Beijing’s dredging operations. 

Not all are state-owned enterprises. 

Some are commercial entities, based in China and Hong Kong. 

Denying them the ability to bid on commercial contracts in the United States (and, ideally, Japan, Australia and Europe), would compel them to assess whether South China Sea operations are worth the price. 

State-owned enterprises, too, can be vulnerable to sanctions. 

Even though they are less vulnerable to sanctions, China would nonetheless like to expand their global footprint. 

By publicizing their role in South China Sea activities, and imposing sanctions on their operations, it may be possible to limit their international presence, or at least affect perceptions of them.
Medium-Term: Improving Local Coordination and Capacity
Perhaps the greatest political challenge to limiting Chinese action is the lack of coordinated responses among the other claimants. 

In the Spratly Islands, it is not a matter of ASEAN states versus China, but rather an array of mutually challenging claims. 

Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei and the Philippines all claim at least parts of the Spratly Islands. 

For there to be any hope for balancing the Chinese political push, the local states must first reach a common negotiating stance among themselves. 

The United States needs to play an active role in helping broker such a stance among Kuala Lumpur, Manila and Hanoi.
Similarly, any kind of common Southeast Asian response to China must eventually include Indonesia, the most populous of the ASEAN members. 

ASEAN is unlikely to assume a direct military-security role, but enhancing the members’ mutual information-sharing, maritime domain awareness, and general situational awareness would facilitate intra-ASEAN confidence. 

The inability to determine the fate of Malaysian Airlines MH17 underscores the general utility such improved information sharing could have, regardless of Chinese claims in the region.
Improving local coordination will also require rehabilitating relations with Thailand. 

Within ASEAN, Thailand is the fourth most populous nation, boasting the second largest GDP (in nominal terms) and one of the largest militaries. 

It is also a U.S. ally and has been a key partner in many U.S. military interventions in the post–Cold War era. 

It is also centrally located as part of the “Indo-Pacific” region.
But Thailand’s 2014 coup and the regime’s subsequent suppression of public dissent are inconsistent with American sensibilities, severely complicating Washington’s relations with Bangkok. 

The United States should certainly not approve of such moves, and should strive to shift Thailand back on a path to civilian rule and orderly civil-military relations. 

But just as the United States nonetheless maintained coordination and interaction with the Egyptian military in the wake of its toppling of Mohammed Morsi, strategic calculations should be integrated into our handling of Thailand.

Long-Term: Building New Approaches
At the end of the day, these moves underscore that the United States cannot, by itself, manage, much less resolve, the South China Sea issue. 

But as President Trump indicated at the recent World Economic Forum, “America first” is not the same as America alone. 

Similarly, while there are many things that America can do to help balance China, more can be achieved in conjunction with other states.
The nascent “quad” of the United States, Japan, Australia and India offers a potential new path for addressing some of the South China Sea issues. 

When officials from the four states met during President Trump’s November circuit of Asia, it gave new life to the concept, which has hibernated for nearly a decade.
The “quad” is not—and should not be—an effort at creating a regional-alliance structure. 

The four states have very divergent views on security, as well as national constraints on their ability to interoperate. 

But facilitating political and diplomatic coordination among these states, and perhaps advancing certain economic and political policies jointly, can provide a significant underpinning for individual- and bilateral-security moves.
For example, making clear that all four states believe in freedom of the seas and reject the idiosyncratic Chinese interpretation is a political, not a military, move, which could then be buttressed by individual national naval activities. 

Simply having all four nations maintain a steadfast position on the importance of keeping the region’s sea lanes open is likely to have salutary effects.
At the same time, should China choose to adjust its approach and refrain from further destabilizing the region with its artificial island construction efforts, an informal “quad” is far better placed to respond positively than a formal alliance which presupposes incipient hostilities.

Prospects: Still a Question Mark
The Trump administration continues to be a work-in-progress. 

For that matter, so is Xi Jinping’s administration.  

We have yet to fully understand the impact of the personnel changes announced in the 19th Party Congress, including the elevation of Yang Jiechi to the Chinese Communist Party Politburo and Wang Huning to the Politburo Standing Committee. 

The next several years may see a mutual focus on domestic economic development, and, if so, then there will be a significant likelihood of cooperation.
But the past decade suggests that there is growing friction in the South China Sea, and recent events give us little reason to believe that trend is changing. 

What will follow in the wake of the USS Hopper FONOPs remains to be seen, but it might be best to batten the hatches.

China's island-building machine

Beijing unveils giant vessel that can reclaim land with incredible speed and is set to be sent to South China Sea

• Powerful Tiankun could potentially build nine artificial islands in a year's time
• It's more efficient than Tianjing, China's current flagship on South China Sea
• The vessel was launched today and is expected to enter service next June
• Beijing is hoping to accelerate its 'military defence project' on disputed waters

By TRACY YOU

China today unveiled a powerful island-building machine to help reclaim more land in the disputed South China Sea.
The enormous ship, called Tiankun, can dredge 6,000 cubic meters (211,000 cubic feet) of mud every hour -- roughly the size of 2.5 Olympic Swimming Pools.
It's more efficient than Tianjing, China's current flagship for construction on the South China Sea.
Tianjing reportedly built seven artificial islands within a year's time in the contested region that's also claimed by Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, among other countries.

China's largest cutter-suction dredger Tiankun takes water on November 3, 2017 in Qidong

The enormous ship is expected to be used for building military bases on the South China Sea
China completes building of Asia's largest cutter suction dredge

Tiankun has been built so that Beijing could accelerate its 'military defence project' on the South China Sea, according to a report on Sohu.com.
China's state media People's Daily Online reported that the self-propelled cutter-suction dredging ship was launched today at the port of Nantong, east China's Jiangsu Province.
It's said to be the most powerful dredging vessel China has ever built.

Tiankun can smash underwater rocks as well as move sand, mud and water to construct islands

It's 460 feet long and 91 feet wide and is the most powerful dredging vessel China has built

Tiankun is the sister vessel of Tianjing (pictured), which China has used to build military bases

Tianjing (pictured) reportedly built seven artificial islands within a year on South China Sea

Beijing has militarised its man-made South China Sea islands
Beijing's man-made islands in the South China Sea are now bristling with military hardware as the country seeks to build more bases overseas.
The base on the hotly-contested Spratly Islands has been outfitted with 24 fighter-sized hangars, runways, water and fuel storage, a large port, communications equipment, fixed-weapon positions and a barracks.
Three squadrons of warplanes will eventually be stationed at the bases, analysts with the Department of Defense believe, allowing Chinese warplanes to operate over the entire region. 

Measuring 140 meters (460 feet) long and 27.8 meters (91 feet) wide, Tiankun can smash underwater rocks as well as move sand, mud and water to construct man-made islands.
The ship can dig as deep as 35 metres (115 feet) into the sea. 

It can squirt liquid and debris to as far as 15 kilometres (9.3 miles) -- the farthest for any dredging ships in the world, claimed People's Daily.
Tiankun is the sister vessel of Tianjing, which China has used to build military bases on a group of disputed islands known as Spratly Islands.
Chinese media claimed that Tianjing built seven man-made island in the South China Sea in 2015, and nearly 3,000 acres of island within 18 months' time.
Tiankun is 1.3 times more efficient than Tianjing, meaning it could potentially build nine islands in one year.
It can dig deeper and move water, mud and sand farther than Tianjing. 

It's also said to have four different types of dredging cutters so it could break into different rock and mud.
The heavy-duty machinery is expected to enter service next June.

Chinese dredging vessels are purportedly seen in the waters around Mischief Reef in the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea in this still image from video taken by a P-8A Poseidon surveillance aircraft provided by the United States Navy May 21, 2015

China has equipped its artificial islands in the South China Sea with 24 hangars, runways, communications equipment, fixed-weapon positions and a barracks (pictured in 2016)

China has deployed anti-aircraft missiles to Woody Island (stock) and the Pentagon have declined to release details about the increased reclamation in the Paracels or to provide concrete estimates in the Spratly Islands

China is developing and weaponsing man-made islands in the South China Sea (stock) so it will have greater control over the maritime region without resorting to armed conflict
It's expected to join China's fleet of vessels on the South China Sea to further militarise the islands.
The military expansion also ties into a broader Chinese initiative, called One Belt One Road.
The vast infrastructure project, launched by Xi Jinping, is set to build a 'new Silk Road' of ports, railways and roads to expand trade across an arc of countries through Asia, Africa and Europe.

Controversy of the South China Sea

An aerial view of Southwest Cay, also known as Pugad Island, controlled by Vietnam and part of the Spratly Islands in the disputed South China Sea.

The sovereignty of the South China Sea region has been heavily disputed over decades, focussing on whether China can claim ownership of the Spratley and Paracel outcrops which may contain important reserves of natural resources.
China says it owns an area defined by a 'nine-dash line' which stretches over hundreds of miles of water, and claims their right dates back centuries.
Some of the South China Sea region is also claimed by south-east Asian nations including Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Last year, a case was brought by the Philippines to the United Nations challenging China's nine-dash line claim on the South China Sea.
In July 2016, a UN-backed tribunal in The Hague -- the Permanent Court of Arbitration -- ruled that China has no historic rights to the area.
Manila welcomed the decision, as China, having boycotted the proceedings, said it 'neither accepts nor recognises' the ruling.

Paper Tiger

How America Is Losing the Battle for the South China Sea
Washington should step up its efforts to make Beijing pay a more serious price for such a flagrant disrespect for international law.
By Bill Bray

What a difference a year makes. 

In late summer 2016, there was some hope the July 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration’s ruling in favor of the Philippine interpretation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea regarding the Spratly Islands and Scarborough Shoal would curtail Beijing’s subsequent activity in the South China Sea (despite China’s refusal to even participate in the arbitration case or recognize the court’s jurisdiction, let alone accept the ruling). 

In fact, some optimists, like Lynn Kuok from the National University of Singapore, have pointed to small developments—such as China this year permitting Filipino and Vietnamese fishing around Scarborough Shoal for the first time since 2012—as encouraging signs that the Hague’s ruling is having a positive effect. 

But most observers see it much differently, and developments this past summer seem to support a much more pessimistic forecast.
With the U.S. government and the world understandably focused on North Korea and escalating tensions in northeast Asia, China this summer has made substantial progress in further establishing de facto control over most of the South China Sea. 

Indeed, aside from Secretary Defense Mattis’ strongly-worded speech in June at the annual Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore, and an uptick in U.S. Navy freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea, the administration seems uninterested in reinforcing—let alone more forcefully emphasizing—international law and the longstanding U.S. position that all claimants must take concrete steps in accordance with said law to resolve the disputes peacefully. 

As Bonnie Glaser from the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted this past July at CSIS’s seventh annual South China Sea conference, the United States seemed surprised and ill-prepared for the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s 2016 ruling, and has yet to devise a comprehensive South China Sea policy or strategy. 

Freedom-of-navigation operations is simply a policy tool, not a policy in itself.
This isn’t lost on Beijing or the ten Association for Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN) states. 

As the diplomatic winds blow harder in China’s favor, Beijing’s next move could very well be a security power play, like declaring maritime base points and strait baselines from the islands and shoals it has occupied and militarized. 

Or perhaps it could establish an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) over the same area. Furthermore, U.S.-China relations are worsening over North Korea and trade, and, following the Nineteenth Party Congress in late October, Xi Jinping may see, from a position of greater domestic strength, both an opportunity and a need to make that very type of play.

What China Got During Its Summer Vacation
China scored two important victories this summer in the South China Sea confrontation, and this barely got any notice in mainstream Western media. 

First, after a hotly divided politburo debate in Hanoi in July, Vietnam yielded to a Chinese threat of force and suspended drilling in block 136/3, which is licensed to Vietnam’s state oil company, the Spanish firm Repsol S.A., and the Mubadala Development Company in the United Arab Emirates. China had first tried to pressure the Spanish government, as Repsol S.A. provided the drilling vessel and started the onsite project in June. 

When that didn’t work, Chinese Gen. Fan Changlong, deputy chair of China’s Central Military Commission, explicitly threatened force if Vietnam did not cease the project (block 136/3 is inside China’s South China Sea maritime rights claim, or the Nine-Dash Line) while on an annual border-exchange visit to Vietnam. 

Let’s be clear on just what exactly happened: Vietnam began a legal resource extraction operation inside its exclusive economic zone, and China, opposing it on dubious historical and legal grounds (grounds that the Hague’s PCA firmly rejected), threatened war if they didn’t cease the project. Beijing didn’t threaten to take Vietnam to court in the Hague, or raise the matter before the United Nations in another forum, or try to apply greater diplomatic and economic pressure. 

The Chinese government instead threatened military action. 

And Vietnam took the threat seriously and complied. 

And the United States and the rest of the world essentially registered no serious rebuke.
Second, China hit the trifecta at the ASEAN foreign ministerial in Manila on August 8. 

As expected, all ten ASEAN nations and China signed a framework for an eventual South China Sea code of conduct. 

For those not paying attention at home, this might sound like meaningful diplomatic progress. 

It was not. 

Instead, it was a completely vacuous exercise because it no more than restated principles all had agreed to fifteen years earlier, and China still refuses to enter into a binding code of conduct. 

Just to get to a framework for a nonbinding code took well over a year, so long one has to wonder whether the whole effort amounted to little more than a charade.
Vietnam at least lobbied hard for more forceful language in the post-ministerial joint statement, and after much wrangling it was agreed that language expressing concern about “reclamation” and “militarization” in the South China Sea be added. 

Then, in a breathtaking breach of protocol, the Philippines’ foreign secretary, Alan Peter Cayetano, told the press he agreed with China’s criticism of the joint statement, which included a bold-faced canard that China hasn’t engaged in reclamation since 2015. 

Cayetano trashed the ASEAN joint statement as if ASEAN were some nascent assembly of nations unnecessarily picking a fight with China, and not the fifty-year-old prestigious, diplomatic and economic grouping currently chaired by the Philippines. 

As one of China’s long-standing strategic goals is to divide ASEAN and deal with each SCS claimant bilaterally, this certainly saw champagne corks popping in the Chinese Foreign Ministry. 

Not quite the coup de grace, perhaps, but a powerful blow to ASEAN unity.
Finally, during and after the ASEAN ministerial in Manila, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson seemed to be focused on everything but the South China Sea, in marked contrast to not only Mattis’ June speech but also to Tillerson’s own statement on the South China Sea at the ASEAN summit in May. 

Tillerson instead praised China’s foreign minister after China joined in a unanimous UN Security Council vote to enact more sanctions on North Korea following that regime’s late July ballistic-missile test. 

This is understandable, of course, but even implicitly signaling to Beijing that the U.S. position on the South China Sea, Taiwan or any other issue is a potential bargaining chip for China’s cooperation on North Korea is a major win for China. 

China likely believes denuclearizing North Korea through economic and diplomatic pressure without causing state collapse is all but impossible, but if it can advance its interests elsewhere by giving the United States the impression that it is ready to finally take North Korea to task, all the better. 

The United States would be wise to steer clear of this quid pro quo trap. 

Instead, it should insist China meet unconditionally its international security responsibilities as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

China’s Next South China Sea Act
Following China’s recent South China Sea victories, the table is now set for an even bolder move to further cement Beijing’s de facto control of its expansive Nine-Dash Line claim. 

This could come in many forms, such as declaring an ADIZ or maritime base points from various occupied islands and shoals, as mentioned above, or by simply beginning routine military operations from its occupied reefs. 

The U.S. Navy has increased its South China Sea patrols (on pace for nine hundred days in 2017, up from seven hundred in 2016), and its freedom-of-navigation operations near Chinese-claimed and occupied territory. 

And, Vietnam sent its defense minister to Washington in August and subsequently agreed to host a U.S. aircraft carrier on a port visit. 

But neither will deter China from pressing forward more aggressively in the South China Sea this winter and into 2018.
China is getting much more comfortable challenging the U.S. Navy. 

Each year the Chinese Navy grows in size, capability, and proficiency. U.S. freedom-of-navigation operations are simply going to become a lot more risky in the future, to the point where the potential cost to continue them may outweigh the benefit. 

As for Vietnam, China knows Hanoi remains ambivalent about getting too close to the United States and will prefer to hedge its relationship, considering its proximity to China and its close defense relationship with Russia. 

Unlike with the Philippines, the United States has no formal security relationship with Vietnam. Pulling the Philippines even partly out of the U.S. orbit is far more valuable to China than a few more U.S. Navy port visits is to Vietnam.
Threatening war with China over the South China Sea is not credible. 

But that does not mean the United States should not step up its efforts to make China pay a more serious price for such a flagrant disrespect for international law. 

As Ely Ratner so thoughtfully pointed out recently in Foreign Affairs, the United States has yet to employ many tools in this regard, and its lack of a comprehensive policy underscores how confused and inconsistent its approach has been over the past decade or so. 

In many ways, the South China Sea is no less a supreme test of U.S. leadership than the Korea crisis. Trade disputes come and go, given the ephemeral and complex nature of global economics. 

Giving up on the South China Sea will cast a much longer shadow on the viability and credibility of international law.

Sina Delenda Est

How China Plans to Win a War in the South China Sea
By James Holmes

Last year China’s defense minister, General Chang Wanquan, implored the nation to ready itself for a “people’s war at sea.” 

The purpose of such a campaign? 

To “safeguard sovereignty” after an adverse ruling from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. 

The tribunal upheld the plain meaning of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), ruling that Beijing’s claims to “indisputable sovereignty” spanning some 80-90 percent of the South China Sea are bunk.
A strong coastal state, in other words, cannot simply wrest away the high seas or waters allocated to weaker neighbors and make them its own.
Or, at any rate, it can’t do so lawfully. 

It could conceivably do so through conquest, enforced afterward by a constant military presence. Defenders of freedom of the sea, consequently, must heed General Chang’s entreaty. 

Southeast Asians and their external allies must take such statements seriously—devoting ample forethought to the prospect of marine combat in the South China Sea.
That’s the first point about a people’s war at sea. 

A clash of arms is possible. 

Statesmen and commanders in places like Manila, Hanoi, and Washington must not discount Chang’s words as mere bluster.
Indeed, it’s doubtful China could comply with the UNCLOS tribunal’s ruling at this stage, even if the Chinese Communist Party leadership wished to. 

Think about the image compliance would project at home. 

For two decades now, Beijing has invested lavishly in a great navy, and backed that navy up with shore-based firepower in the form of combat aircraft, anti-ship missile batteries, and short-range warships such as fast patrol craft and diesel submarines.
Party leaders have regaled the populace with how they will use seagoing forces to right "historical wrongs" and win the nation nautical renown. 

They must now follow through.
It was foolish to tie China’s national dignity and sovereignty to patently absurd claims to islands and seas. But party leaders did so. 

And they did so repeatedly, publicly, and in the most unyielding terms imaginable. 

By their words they stoked nationalist sentiment while making themselves accountable to it. 

They set in motion a toxic cycle of rising popular expectations.
Breaking that cycle could verge on impossible. 

If Beijing relented from its maritime claims now, ordinary Chinese would—rightly—judge the leadership by the standard it set. 

Party leaders would stand condemned as weaklings who surrendered sacred territory, failed to avenge China’s century of humiliation despite China’s rise to great power, and let jurists and lesser neighbors backed by a certain superpower flout big, bad China’s will.
No leader relishes being seen as a weakling. 

It’s positively dangerous in China. 

As the greats of diplomacy teach, it’s tough for negotiators or political leaders to climb down from public commitments. 

Make a promise and you bind yourself to keep it. Fail to keep it and you discredit yourself—and court disaster in the bargain.

Like any sane leadership, Beijing prefers to get its way without fighting. 

Fighting, though, could be the least bad of the options party leaders have left themselves. 

Quite the predicament they’ve made for themselves.
Which leads to the second point. 

Judging from Chang’s words, small-stick diplomacy has run its course. 

Small-stick diplomacy was about deploying the China Coast Guard and fellow nonmilitary sea services to police waters Beijing claimed. 

It depicted China’s sovereignty in the South China Sea as a fact, and dared woefully outmatched rivals to reverse that fact.
Left unopposed, de facto Chinese sovereignty—a near-monopoly on the use of force within borders sketched on the map—would have become entrenched over time. 

Once it became the new normal, it might even have taken on an aura of legitimacy among seafaring states.
The UNCLOS tribunal struck China’s approach a grievous blow, collapsing the quasi-legal arguments underlying small-stick diplomacy. 

The tribunal’s decision makes it clear that Chinese maritime forces operating in, say, the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone are invaders or occupiers—not constables.
If Beijing can’t get its way through white-hulled coast-guard vessels, that leaves military force. Sovereign states deploy law-enforcement assets to police what is rightfully theirs. 

They deploy military forces to fight for things that are in dispute. 

Chang’s warlike talk implies that Beijing has abandoned the softly, softly approach and has tacitly admitted Southeast Asia constitutes a contested zone.
And the lingo he employs matters. 

People’s war is a Maoist phrase used to convey certain martial ideas. 

Mao Zedong’s Red Army waged people’s war to seize contested ground from Japanese invaders and Chinese Nationalists. 

It appears China now sees the South China Sea in similar terms—as an offshore battleground where rivals must be overcome by force.
But not by military force alone. 

Beijing won’t withdraw the coast guard, maritime enforcement services, or the fishing fleet—an unofficial militia—from embattled waters. 

They will stay on as part of a composite whole-of-government armada. 

But the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy and Air Force will figure more prominently in the force mix.
In the days of small-stick diplomacy, the naval big stick posed an implicit threat from over the horizon. 

Philippine or Vietnamese mariners knew the China Coast Guard had backup if they defied it. 

In all likelihood Chinese commanders will flourish the big stick more promiscuously in the future—rendering the threat overt and visible rather than latent and unobtrusive.
Here’s the third point. 

A people’s-war-at-sea strategy will confront a motley coalition in which outsiders—America, maybe joined by Japan or Australia—supply the bulk of the heavy-hitting combat power. 

The Philippines is lopsidedly outgunned. 

Vietnam has pluck and a formidable military, but it can hardly stand up to the northern colossus without help.
The coalition’s curious makeup would furnish Beijing opportunities for coalition-breaking. 

China might reckon that any conflict in the South China Sea would be a “war by contingent” for the United States, a war in which Washington fixes the size of a force dispatched to support regional allies and instructs the commanders of that force to do the best they can with the resources they have.
Such strategies are excellent for troublemaking but seldom decisive in themselves. 

Lord Wellington, for instance, led a contingent ashore in Iberia in 1807. 

The expedition gave Napoleon a “Spanish ulcer,” a nagging commitment on a new front. 

Yet Wellington never kidded himself that he would win a continent-spanning war with a modest expeditionary force augmented by partisans and the Royal Navy.
Such an approach, in other words, would betray half heartedness on Washington’s part. 

After all, America would have embarked on an open-ended enterprise in a distant theater off the opponent’s shores without any real thought of victory. 

Half Heartedness kills in such ventures.
People’s war is about outlasting stronger foes under circumstances like these. 

If the weaker contender is a China endowed with sizable reserves of hard power to tap, then that contender needs time. 

Its armed forces protract the campaign, both to gain time to muster more strength and to wear away at enemy combat strength.
In short, China could win even if it remains weaker than America in the aggregate. 

The PLA could narrow or reverse the balance of forces in the theater—overpowering the U.S. contingent at the place and time that truly matter. 

It could dishearten Washington. 

U.S. leaders might despair of sustaining the undertaking indefinitely. 

Or, China could outlast America—inflicting numerous tactical losses over a long time, and thus driving the price tag of preserving freedom of the seas higher than U.S. leaders are willing to pay. 

If America goes home, the venture collapses.
How, in operational and tactical terms, can PLA commanders bring this about? 

By hewing to their own warmaking traditions. 

China is politically and strategically predictable in the South China Sea yet operationally and tactically unpredictable. 

Politically and strategically predictable because party leaders painted themselves into a corner with domestic constituencies. 

Tactically unpredictable because that’s how Chinese forces have fought since the age of Mao.
Indeed, “active defense,” the concept whereby Mao codified his ideas about people’s war, remains the heart of Chinese military strategy. 

Just ask Beijing. 

To oversimplify, the conceit behind active defense is that a weaker China can lure a stronger pugilist into overextending and tiring himself before delivering a punishing counterpunch. 

Conjure up the great Muhammad Ali’s Rumble in the Jungle in your mind and you get the idea.
If the rope-a-dope approach works on a grand scale, Chinese forces can inflict tactical defeats that enfeeble the foe over time. 

Active defense, then, is all about harnessing tactical offense for strategically defensive campaigns.
To prosecute it, Chinese commanders seek out isolated enemy detachments they can assault on “exterior lines,” encircling and crushing them. 

The cumulative effect of repeated tactical setbacks wears down the strong—and could prompt their leadership to question whether the endeavor is still worth its hardships, perils, and costs. 

If not, cost/benefit logic will prod U.S. leaders toward the exit—and China will prevail even without an outright victory over allied forces.
U.S. and allied mariners and airmen, accordingly, must study China’s martial traditions, gleaning insight into how offshore active defense might unfold in the South China Sea. 

If you’re Beijing and have built up a seagoing militia, an impressive coast guard, Asia’s biggest indigenous navy, and a sizable arsenal of land-based weaponry to influence events at sea, how do you alloy those components into a sharp combat implement—and consolidate control over a semi-enclosed sea?
Essaying some foresight into these matters now could pay off handsomely if China tries to put General Chang’s—and Mao’s—strategic concept into practice.
Speaking of whom, a final bit of advice from Mao Zedong. 

Chang deployed China’s traditional lexicon, centered on people’s war, to describe how Beijing may transact business in Southeast Asia. 

But bear in mind that a strategy of the weak was expedient for Mao, not his strategic preference. 

He was writing for a China that was flat on its back, wracked by civil war and foreign invasion.
It could do little else. 

But the goal of active defense—of people’s war—was to make the Red Army the stronger antagonist. Once Maoist forces reversed the force imbalance, they meant to unleash a counteroffensive and win on the conventional battleground.
This is not Mao’s China. 

It’s already a brawny economic and military power, and would be fighting on its own ground. 

Today’s PLA enjoys far more offensive options than did Mao’s Red Army. 

Rather than revert to pure people’s war on the Maoist pattern, PLA commanders could pursue a mix of small- and big-unit engagements against the U.S.-led coalition.
People’s war, then, could start to look awfully like conventional marine combat if Beijing believes the military balance and the trendlines favor China.
By all means, let’s review China’s way of war, discerning what we can about Chinese warmaking habits and reflexes. 

But these are not automatons replaying the Maoist script from the 1930s and 1940s. 

How they might transpose Maoist doctrine to the offshore arena—and how an unruly coalition can surmount such a challenge—is the question before friends of maritime freedom.

Chinese aggressions

Australia joins with US, Japan to rebuke China
By PRIMROSE RIORDAN
Julie Bishop has joined the Foreign Ministers of the US and Japan in singling out China and the Philippines over South China Sea maritime disputes.

Australia has joined the United States and Japan in issuing a rebuke to China over the South China Sea at a meeting directly after ASEAN took a softer stance on the issue.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has been in the Philippines over the past few days for the East Asia Summit and ASEAN-Australia ministerial meetings.
At the meeting ASEAN countries announced they had come to a consensus on a framework for the Code of Conduct for the South China Sea, which despite lobbying by Vietnam, did not include a reference to whether it would be legally binding.
Despite the Philippines initiating international legal proceeding against China over the South China Sea in the first place, the county’s incumbent administration has downplayed the dispute at times in order to have stronger economic relations with the superpower.
After the ASEAN meetings, Ms Bishop met with US Secretary of State and Japanese Foreign Minister Tarō Kōno for the Trilateral Strategic Dialogue.
The three ministers issued a long statement which singled out China and the Philippines and expressed “serious concern” over South China Sea maritime disputes.
“The Ministers called on China and the Philippines to abide by the Arbitral Tribunal’s 2016 Award in the Philippines-China arbitration, as it is final and legally binding on both parties,” the statement read.
The ministers backed in Vietnam and said the code of conduct should be legally binding, a principle Ms Bishop has previously pushed for.
“The Ministers further urged ASEAN member states and China to ensure that the COC be finalised in a timely manner, and that it be legally binding, meaningful, effective, and consistent with international law.”
Ms Bishop, Mr Tillerson and Mr Kono said they strongly opposed island building in the South China Sea.
“The Ministers voiced their strong opposition to coercive unilateral actions that could alter the status quo and increase tensions.”
“In this regard, the Ministers urged SCS claimants to refrain from land reclamation, construction of outposts, militarisation of disputed features, and undertaking unilateral actions that cause permanent physical change to the marine environment in areas pending delimitation.”
The statement addressed the North Korean missile tensions and terrorism.
The ministers said nations should “make further efforts” to change Pyongyang’s behaviour.
“The Ministers called on the international community to implement strictly UNSC resolutions and impose additional diplomatic and economic measures to address the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) threat posed by the North Korean regime and its destabilising behaviour, and to make further efforts to urge North Korea to abandon its current threatening and provocative path and immediately take steps to denuclearise.”
The Turnbull government has repeatedly urged China to place pressure on its rogue neighbour and ally to turn away from its nuclear weapons program.
The UN Security Council, which includes China, voted unanimously over the weekend for new sanctions on Pyongyang after a number of long-range missile launches this year.
The sanctions include a partial ban on exports, new asset freezes and travel bans, as well as measures which target North Korea’s primary foreign exchange bank.
Australia supported the move and said they would add additional individuals and seven entities to the county’s blacklist.
“In support of international efforts on North Korea, Australia will also apply targeted financial sanctions and travel bans on several additional individuals and seven entities under Australia’s autonomous sanctions regime,” Mr Turnbull and Ms Bishop said in a statement.
Ms Bishop also met with Rodrigo Duterte to discuss the three month old crisis in the country where Islamic State-inspired extremists captured the southern city of Marawi.
In June Australia announced it would send two AP-3C Orion aircraft from the Royal Australian Air Force to help the Armed Forces of the Philippines spy on the militants.
“I met Filipino President Duterte to discuss the ongoing situation in Marawi,” she said in a statement to The Australian.

Five Shades of Chinese Gray-Zone Strategy

Washington should be wary about a Beijing that has taken incremental steps toward small-stick diplomacy.
By James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara

Deterring aggression in the “gray zone” is hard.

The keeper of an existing order—an order such as freedom of the sea—finds itself conflicted. 

That’s because gray-zone aggressors deliberately refuse to breach the threshold between uneasy peace and armed conflict, justifying a martial response. 

Instead they demolish the status quo little by little and replace it with something new.
Piecemeal assaults compel the status quo’s defenders to consider unappealing options. 

They can act first and bear the blame for the outbreak of war, for taking excessive risk, for provoking the revisionist power or for destabilizing the peace. 

Or, unwilling to incur such costs, they resign themselves to inaction or half-measures.
Predisposed to put off difficult decisions, politicians can waffle, and surrender the initiative. 

Or they can escalate, and see their nation branded a bully.
An unpalatable choice.
Gray-zone strategies are designed precisely to impose such quandaries on custodians of an existing order.
The stepwise approach is reminiscent of the late Thomas Schelling’s parable of the rebellious child who whittles down his parents’ willpower at the seashore.
“Tell a child not to go in the water,” maintains Schelling, “and he’ll sit on the bank and submerge his bare feet; he is not yet ‘in’ the water. Acquiesce, and he’ll stand up; no more of him is in the water than before. Think it over, and he’ll start wading, not going any deeper; take a moment to decide whether this is different and he’ll go a little deeper, arguing that since he goes back and forth it all averages out. Pretty soon we are calling to him not to swim out of sight, wondering whatever happened to all our discipline.”
Over the past couple of decades, likewise, Beijing has devised a variety of stratagems to flummox those who defy its claims to sovereignty over islands, sea and sky. 
China started out with light-gray, largely inoffensive gray-zone tactics twenty-five years ago, but they darkened into coercion over time as its ambitions and power mounted.
First, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership codified its claim to offshore territory in domestic law in 1992, proclaiming that China held jurisdiction over disputed land features in the East and South China seas along with the surrounding waters.
Western governments and press outlets deemed this development barely newsworthy, in large measure because Beijing made little effort to enforce the law.
Though light in tincture, however, this Law on the Territorial Sea and Contiguous Zone comprised an extravagant statement of purpose toward China’s near seas.
This largely forgotten edict prepared the way for additional assertions of legal authority while justifying more muscular gray-zone strategies.
In 2009, for instance, the CCP leadership delivered a map of the South China Sea to the United Nations bearing a “nine-dash line” that delineated its claim to “indisputable” or “irrefutable” sovereignty over some 80–90 percent of that waterway.
It later flouted a 2016 ruling from the Permanent Court of Arbitration that gutted its legal case for sovereignty. 
Beijing has little fealty to commitments it has freely undertaken—commitments such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea—when operating in the gray zone.
China also projected its claims skyward.
In 2013 the leadership declared an air-defense identification zone over the East China Sea, encompassing Japanese- and Korean-administered islands. 
It asserted the power to regulate air traffic moving up and down the Asian seaboard, parallel to the coast, rather than traffic bound for China.
Controlling airspace—not defending China against inbound aircraft—represented its true aim. 
Yet here, too, Beijing has only halfheartedly sought to enforce its air-defense zone—most recently by challenging a U.S. Air Force bomber bound for South Korea.
Its skyward strategy remains light gray in execution, if not in principle.
Second, China’s “smile diplomacy” ranked as the lightest of light-gray ventures.
Commencing in the early 2000s, Beijing fashioned a diplomatic narrative drawing on the charisma of China’s ancient mariner, Zheng He.
The Ming Dynasty admiral commanded a series of “treasure voyages” six centuries ago, reinvigorating China’s tribute system in Southeast and South Asia without indulging in territorial conquest.
Modern-day officialdom took pains to reassure fellow Asians that China would follow Zheng He’s pattern.
It would make itself a potent yet beneficent sea power.
It could be trusted not to abuse lesser neighbors.
In short, smile diplomacy constituted an effort to brand China as a uniquely trustworthy great power—and mute resistance to its maritime rise.
Until the late 2000s, when China turned more assertive, regional audiences were by and large receptive to this soothing message.
Third, gray-zone tactics tended in a darker, more coercive direction after Beijing unveiled the nine-dash line in 2009. 
Zheng He found himself summarily jettisoned in favor of what we dubbed “small-stick diplomacy.”
Rather than flourish the big stick of naval power, that is, CCP leaders unlimbered the small stick of maritime law enforcement coupled with militiamen embedded within the fishing fleet.
Small-stick diplomacy represented a masterful gray-zone strategy. 
The small stick was big enough to cow Asian neighbors whose navies barely rated as coast guards, but it was too small to goad the United States into sending its navy to defend allies and friends.
Routine harassment of Asian coastal states projected the image that China’s coast guard and maritime enforcement services were simply policing waters that had belonged to China since "remote antiquity". It was an effort to quash lawbreakers trespassing on Chinese territory.
Small-stick diplomacy, in short, comprised a gray-zone strategy vis-à-vis the U.S. Navy but exhibited a dark, coercive hue toward Asian claimants.
And that dualism suited Beijing just fine.
Fourth, China attempted a variant of small-stick diplomacy in the East China Sea but found the setting far less permissive. 
Since 2010 or thereabouts, China’s coast guard has conducted regular patrols in the waters around the Senkaku Islands.
Its purpose: to challenge Japan’s administrative control of the islands and adjoining seas.
For its part, Tokyo has staged a standing coast-guard presence in the archipelago’s territorial sea, buttressing its own control. 
The result is a curious form of joint Sino-Japanese administration of waters around the islets.
Both sides police what they regard as their own.
While the Obama administration and Trump administration have reaffirmed that the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty applies to the Senkaku Islands, obliging Washington, DC to help defend them against attack, China’s East China Sea strategy displays the same kind of dualism as in the South China Sea. It’s coercive toward Japan yet stops short of triggering U.S. countermeasures. 
This tactic was enough to alter the status quo in China’s favor but not enough to trigger escalatory action-reaction cycles with Japan. 
And it keeps in play Tokyo’s insecurities about America’s commitment to Japan’s defense, granting China leverage over the alliance. 
In all likelihood this state of affairs will persist so long as Beijing refrains from trying to wrest the islets from Japan—so long, that is, as China keeps its strategy gray.
And fifth, CCP chieftains have discovered that building artificial islands—or fortifying existing ones—constitutes an effective gray-zone strategy. 
Its island-building enterprise has taken several forms over the years.
In 1994, for example, China occupied Mischief Reef, deep within the Philippine exclusive economic zone.
It commenced constructing structures at the reef soon afterward, converted it into a military outpost in 1998, and expanded it sufficiently to host an airstrip and defensive armaments by 2016.
If gradualism suited its purposes at Mischief Reef, China has exercised even more forbearance at Scarborough Shoal, another feature within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone.
Its occupation of Scarborough Shoal in 2012 marked the final transition from smile diplomacy to small-stick diplomacy.
China’s seagoing law-enforcement services shooed away Philippine mariners from this traditional fishing ground, imposing control over access to the shoal.
Engineers, however, have yet to begin reclaiming seafloor around it to erect another armed redoubt.
Why such restraint?
Geography may have dissuaded Beijing from acting.
Unlike the other contested features, Scarborough Shoal perches near the principal Philippine island of Luzon.
China’s leadership may fear drawing in the U.S. military, which is obligated to defend the Philippines under a longstanding mutual-defense pact, if it constructs a fortified outpost so close to an American ally. 
Politics is at work as well.
Elected in 2016, furthermore, Rodrigo Duterte has signaled his willingness to loosen the alliance with America while cozying up to China. 
That being the case, refraining from provocative acts probably appears prudent to CCP leaders. 
Why alienate a new ally?
And lastly, China went big, and fast, elsewhere in the Spratly and Paracel archipelagoes.
Starting in 2013, civil engineers manufactured island bases from rocks and atolls scattered across the South China Sea.
Xi Jinping pledged not to “militarize” the artificial islands, freezing any serious response from the Obama administration, only to proceed with construction of airfields and other infrastructure. 
The result: a fait accompli.
It’s one thing to deter an aggressor from seizing ground, quite another to evict an aggressor from ground it has already seized. 
Island-building tactics of all three varieties have left China in possession of territory—and it’s hard to see how such gains can be reversed short of open warfare. 
Beijing has, in essence, forced the region and the United States to live with a new and largely irreversible strategic reality.
This typology of gray-zone tactics suggests that China is bringing to bear all elements of national power on the maritime disputes in the East and South China Seas.
Beijing has employed legal, diplomatic, maritime and material elements of statecraft to chip away at the U.S.-led liberal international order. 
Even its construction prowess, honed over decades of massive infrastructure-building, has been on dazzling display in the heart of the South China Sea—contributing to strategic success.
For custodians of the current order, consequently, it is not enough to think exclusively about the marine dimensions of strategy.
To balk China’s gray-zone stratagems, Washington and its allies must take a page from Beijing and adopt a holistic, grand-strategic posture that applies patient, vigilant countervailing pressure on many fronts simultaneously. 
In short, the defenders of the status quo must think in shades of gray and must accustom themselves to acting in the twilight between peace and war.
To do any less would concede to China the initiative—and the future shape of the regional order.
Thomas Schelling would nod knowingly at the challenges before Washington and its partners.
Unlike his milquetoast parents, let’s muster some strategic discipline.

Sina Delenda Est

Take Defense Treaty Action For Philippine Sovereignty In South China Sea
By Anders Corr

On Monday, Reuters reported China Coast Guard and industrial fishing ship operations at Scarborough Shoal, the Philippines, which are arguably a violation of Philippine territorial sovereignty. 

The report said China is now allowing Philippine fishermen at the shoal, but restricting full access to the lagoon. 

The ratio of Chinese to Philippine fishing boats on Monday was about 10:1. 

China Coast Guard are typically armed, and have been shown to be armed at the shoal. 

Chinese ships at the shoal on Monday included at least two approximately 75-meter industrial fishing trawlers. 

In addition, according to Reuters, the Chinese Foreign Ministry confirmed that the China Coast Guard was at the shoal to “administer fishing and preserve the peace.” 

This is arguably a direct violation of Philippine sovereignty at what the Hague’s Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) found to be an “island” last year. 

The U.S.-Philippine Mutual Defense Treaty of 1951 applies to “islands”, so should be triggered by China’s continued armed occupation of Scarborough.

A Filipino fisherman is seen past the US Navy amphibious transport dock ship USS Green Bay.

China’s occupation is an affront to the Philippines’ sovereignty, territorial integrity , and the Constitution of 1987, according to which “The State shall pursue an independent foreign policy. In its relations with other states the paramount consideration shall be national sovereignty, territorial integrity, national interest, and the right to self-determination,” and that “The State shall protect the nation’s marine wealth in its archipelagic waters, territorial sea, and exclusive economic zone , and reserve its use and enjoyment exclusively to Filipino citizens.”
If allowed to continue, Chinese occupation of the shoal degrades the Philippine environment, sovereignty, and the likelihood that it will eventually regain control of the shoal. 

The longer China has control of the shoal, the more likely it is to build planned military facilities there, and the less likely it will return the shoal to the Philippines. 

It is critical for the natural habitat at Scarborough, and for the Philippines’ sovereignty and territorial integrity, that the Philippines, U.S., and allies immediately increase pressure on China, through economic sanctions and activation of the defense treaty if necessary, to vacate the shoal and return it to Philippine administration.
China is in the process of large scale environmental destruction at Scarborough Shoal and other parts of the South China Sea (SCS), including through widespread destruction of endangered coral and harvesting of endangered species such as giant clams and sea turtles. 

China has been turning barely-submerged shoals in the South China Sea into militarized artificial islands, replete with military runways and docks large enough for aircraft carriers and nuclear missile submarines. 

Analysts think China may eventually create underwater submarine bastions or harbors in the South China Sea, including at Mischief Reef and Scarborough. 

A Chinese military source and maritime experts said last year that China plans to turn Scarborough into a military base.
This picture taken on April 23, 2016 shows a member of the Indonesian navy standing before the Chinese trawler ‘Hua Li-8′.

I visited Scarborough Shoal in June 2016, Philippines Independence Day, on a “Freedom Voyage” organized by the Kalayaan Atin Ito activist group. 

Two 2,580-ton China Coast Guard cutters with light cannon, and another medium-sized China Coast Guard boat, made numerous dangerous passes, charges, chases, and blocking maneuvers of our 30-meter wooden fishing boat. 

In one case, the medium-sized China Coast Guard boat charged us to about 4 meters, then began rocking in a way that made our boat pitch violently up and down. 

Once we made it past the larger Coast Guard boats to the shoal, Filipino activist swimmers carrying Philippine and U.N. flags swam towards the shoal, and could have been killed on multiple occasions as two China Coast Guard speed boats circled them aggressively and backed their spraying propellers towards the swimmers within about 3 feet of slicing into their flesh.
Over the course of about an hour, five very brave swimmers were undeterred, and as swimmer and leader of the expedition Joy Ban-eg diverted two China Coast Guard speed boats, from which she was forced to push off on multiple occasions, swimmer Mariel Ipan made it past the Chinese to raise a small Philippine flag on the shoal that day. 

I was there and I saw it happen. 

The next day, Ms. Ipan wrote on Facebook, “My near death experience at Scarborough Shoal; Could’ve been the Sweetest Death.”
Kalayaan Atin Ito’s 2016 protest of China’s occupation of Scarborough was not official, but it had a maximum of heart and patriotism. 

It was one way in which the Philippine people continued to demonstrate non-acquiescence to China’s claim and aggressions, and to show the Philippine government that they demand continued assertive measures to maintain Philippine sovereignty, an independent foreign policy, and the territorial integrity of the Philippines. 

Official non-acquiescence is critical to the maintenance of the Philippines’ claims to sovereignty over Scarborough, and the rest of the Philippines’ territory and exclusive economic zone (EEZ) within China’s nine-dash line.

A Chinese protester throws eggs at photos of US President Barack Obama and torn copies of the ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague against Beijing’s extensive claims in the South China Sea, outside Hong Kong’s United States Consulate on July 14, 2016. About 50 pro-China activists marched to Hong Kong’s United States Consulate holding placards that read ‘Ruling is a piece of paper’, ‘US sowing discord and stirring up trouble’, as they shouted slogans such as ‘No Compromise on South China Sea’ and ‘Shameless US’. The protesters also threw eggs on pieces of paper placed on the ground — featuring the picture of US President Barack Obama — outside the consulate. 

According to the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) Award in the Philippines v. China case, “In practice, to establish the exclusive historic right to living and non-living resources within the ‘nine-dash line’, which China now appears to claim, it would be necessary to show that China had historically sought to prohibit or restrict the exploitation of such resources by the nationals of other States and that those States had acquiesced in such restrictions.” 

International lawyers will argue that China’s actions over the last 20 years, now that the dispute has started, will not adversely affect the Philippine sovereignty claim. 

But China is progressively destroying the shoal, and to be on the safe side of the sovereignty issue, and increase political as well as legal pressure, I think it critical to physically demonstrate regular official as well as popular non-acquiescence to China’s claim. 

It is a political as well as legal issue, so the duty to defend the sovereign territorial rights of the Philippine nation requires frequent public demonstration. 

The shoal is a high-tide feature according to the PCA’s 2016 interpretation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). 

Scarborough is therefore vulnerable to being claimed as territory by China, along with a 12 nautical mile (nm) territorial sea and rights to build or fish there as China would were it sovereign territory. 

“Whichever state has title to Scarborough shoal is entitled to a 12 nm territorial sea,” according to James Kraska, Professor of Law at the Stockton Center for the Study of International Law at the U.S. Naval War College.
For hundreds of years, Philippine sovereignty and traditional fishing methods at Scarborough Shoal protected it from overfishing. 

The first historical depiction of Scarborough Shoal was on a 1734 map of the Philippines drawn in Manila during the Spanish colonial era. 

In 1953, the Philippines Bureau of Fisheries published a book that discussed Scarborough Shoal as historically one of the “principal fishing areas” of Filipino fishermen. 

In 1965, the Philippine Navy erected an iron tower on the site. 

The Philippines presented affidavits of fishermen to the PCA that showed indirect evidence of Philippine fishing at Scarborough as early as 1972, and direct evidence of fishing since 1982.

Filipino fishermen on a small fishing boat on July 10, 2016 in Mariveles, Bataan, Philippines. Filipino fishermen regularly set sail into the South China Sea while claiming rights to the disputed waters between China and the Philippines. Tony Fernandez, a fisherman who has frequented the South China Sea for nearly 30 years says, ‘we’ve been fishing in these waters within our territories for decades, we know what is ours and not.’

China’s claims to Scarborough are much later, and do not include detailed evidence of fishing. 

They stem from an official 1948 map titled “Map Showing the Location of the Various Islands in the South Sea” of an 11-dash line that surrounds the entire South China Sea, including a depiction of Scarborough. 

In 1997, China erected a flag on the shoal, which was taken down by Filipino fishermen who erected their own flag. 

In 1998 and 1999, the Philippines arrested dozens of Chinese fishermen on multiple occasions after gathering endangered corals and sea turtles. 

They were in possession of blast fishing equipment, like dynamite and detonation cords. 

Between 2000 and 2001, the Philippine Navy attempted to scare off Chinese fishermen from Scarborough, including with live fire, but did not arrest them. 

After the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC) was signed in 2002, disputes at Scarborough decreased.
Since 2009, China turbo-charged its sovereignty claims to the entire South China Sea, including Scarborough Shoal, by sending a map of a new 9-dash line (minus two dashes in the Gulf of Tonkin removed in 1953) in an official communication to the United Nations and more aggressively “policing” the area with its coast guard and armed fishing boats called a “maritime militia”.
In 2012, the Philippines Coast Guard once again responded to reports of Chinese destructive fishing methods at Scarborough, including fishing of endangered coral, sea turtles, and live sharks. 

But this time something changed. 

China placed two maritime surveillance ships between the Philippine Coast Guard and Chinese fishermen, then strung 28 utility boats together to block Philippine fishermen and Coast Guard from entering the shoal.
Chinese fishermen unload the last of their catch for the season as fishing boats arrive back in Qionghai, south China’s Hainan province on May 16, 2012.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell brokered a deal whereby the Philippine Coast Guard and fishermen left the shoal to end the standoff. 

China said they would leave but reneged. 

China stayed in the vicinity of the shoal, and continued blocking Filipinos from fishing there, including with water cannon. 

The Philippine Navy and Coast Guard did not return. 

This affirmed a Chinese strategy of incrementalist salami-slicing tactics by which China could gain territory without ever fighting. 

Chinese analysts called it the “Scarborough Model.”
Due to a Chinese promise of $24 billion in funding and investment commitments to the Philippines, and President Rodrigo Duterte’s thawing of relations, China allowed some Filipino fishermen to return this year. 

But according to this week’s Reuters reports, very small numbers of Philippine fishermen have been allowed to return, and they can only take small boats into the interior lagoon of the shoal. 

The Chinese Foreign Ministry confirmed Tuesday that China Coast Guard at Scarborough Shoal are there administering fishing activities of Filipino fishermen.
China’s administration of Scarborough Shoal is in direct violation of Philippine sovereignty of the feature. 

“The Philippines has sovereignty over Scarborough Shoal,” said Kraska in an email. 

“Territorial title to the feature inured to the Philippines through extensive Spanish possession. Philippine title to Scarborough Shoal was recognized by the United States, which used the feature as a bombing range for US forces based in the Philippines.” 

Environmental destruction by Chinese industrial fishing at Scarborough Shoal is the product of a lack of enforced Philippine sovereignty. 

“This is a common problem in the law of the sea and international law more generally – it is a collective action problem in that all states would benefit from a solution that restrains China, but no state wants to bear the cost of trying to achieve that goal,” said Kraska.
Philippine protesters wearing cut-out turtle shells hold placards during an anti-China protest in front of the Chinese consulate in the financial district of Manila on May 16, 2014. Several hundred Filipino and Vietnamese protesters united in a march in the Philippine capital, demanding that China stop oil drilling in disputed South China Sea waters. 

Lack of enforcement of Philippine sovereignty at Scarborough is now a tragedy for an astonishing range of issues. 

In addition to obvious negative effects on the environment, Philippine fishing families, and the sovereign territorial integrity of the Philippines and its EEZ, it is a tragedy for three policy areas that make this personal.
First, lack of stronger U.S. action at Scarborough has weakened the U.S.-Philippine alliance by making the U.S. commitment to the Philippines appear less credible. 

Second, the ability of China to increasingly occupy the South China Sea without being held accountable, including at Scarborough Shoal since 2012, has strengthened and emboldened it generally. 

Given that China is the world’s most powerful authoritarian regime, its increasing lack of international legal accountability is a threat to democracy in not only Asia, but beyond. 

If China continues to increase its authoritarian reach, that could eventually affect not only the Philippines, but the children and grandchildren of Americans. 

Some would say it already has. 

Third, the fact that the Philippines has no independent legal recourse to address the sovereignty issues of China’s occupation of Scarborough Shoal demonstrates the general weakness of international law, and its lack of enforcement. 

A stronger international legal regime would allow the Philippines to take China to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on a sovereignty dispute, even without China’s consent. 

That is not currently possible, which is a weakness of international law on sovereignty issues that nation states should rectify. 

That weakness means that sovereignty issues, if one party is not amenable to peaceful arbitration, must be resolved through force or the threat of force, such as economic sanctions or naval blockades. That increases international instability, and is an increasingly dangerous anarchic international situation as military technologies, including nuclear weapons, proliferate and become more powerful.
Scarborough Shoal is therefore much more important internationally than its strict legal designation of a “rock” would imply. 

What happens, or is prevented from happening, at Scarborough will augur more of the same. 

The critical issue at Scarborough is disputed sovereignty, which the PCA Award last year did not and could not address. 

According to the Award, “The [UNCLOS] Convention [] does not address the sovereignty of States over land territory. Accordingly, this Tribunal has not been asked to, and does not purport to, make any ruling as to which State enjoys sovereignty over any land territory in the South China Sea, in particular with respect to the disputes concerning sovereignty over the Spratly Islands or Scarborough Shoal. None of the Tribunal’s decisions in this Award are dependent on a finding of sovereignty, nor should anything in this Award be understood to imply a view with respect to questions of land sovereignty.”

The International Court of Justice.

Conversely, the ICJ is capable of arbitrating sovereignty disputes, and so could resolve the sovereignty issue at Scarborough Shoal. 

“I firmly believe that in this day and age responsible states should take their sovereignty disputes to the International Court of Justice,” said Peter Dutton, Professor of Strategic Studies and Director of the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College.
But the ICJ can only arbitrate sovereignty disputes where both parties agree to submit the case. 

“All options (like the ICJ) would require Chinese agreement,” said Greg Poling of the Center for Strategic and International and Studies. 

“There is no such thing as compulsory dispute resolution for a sovereignty dispute.”
Because China is using its increasing military and economic advantages to gain territory in the South China Sea, East China Sea, and Himalayas, it is unlikely to set a precedent against itself by voluntarily agreeing to cede territory or go to the ICJ where those military and economic advantages have little to no effect. 

“I don’t see much chance of anything bringing China around to ceding sovereignty or going to arbitration (which on Scarborough it would likely lose), at least not in any reasonable time frame,” said Poling in an email.
Some analysts, perhaps representing the mainstream of opinion in the U.S. given its inaction on Philippine sovereignty within its EEZ, think the U.S. should not take sides in sovereignty disputes between China and the Philippines. 

“If either China or [t]he Philippines refuses to do so [arbitrate the Scarborough sovereignty disputes at the ICJ], the role of the international community is to support stability until such time as the parties can agree on how to resolve their dispute,” Dutton said by email. 

“In my view it is not the role of the United States to champion the Philippine claim. Our role is to help maintain overall regional stability, not to provoke conflict by choosing a side.” 

But there is no “stability” at Scarborough Shoal, and the theory of balancing in international relations tells us that not taking the side of the weaker party invites conflict. 

Over 20 years, China has gradually removed most Filipino fishermen, destroyed the environmental habitat, and a Chinese military source and military experts have talked of plans to start building a military facility.
Based on U.S. national interests alone, the U.S. and other allies should jointly pressure China into returning Scarborough to the status quo as it was in the mid-1990s. 

Where some dispute exists on the nature of that status quo, we should use all means at our disposal, including economic sanctions and a robust naval presence at Scarborough, to pressure China into accepting arbitration by the ICJ. 

Not doing so increases uncertainty about U.S. intentions in Asia, and thereby increases instability and the likelihood of war. 

By not taking a stronger stand on Scarborough, Second Thomas Shoal, and Mischief Reef, for example, the U.S. actually fails to stop instability by allowing China to think that it can get away with occupying the entire South China Sea as its sovereign territory.
China’s continued incremental acquisitions of the South China Sea, to the extent allowed at places like Scarborough Shoal, will harm the national security of the U.S. by making China stronger and bolder. 

Scarborough Shoal is just 250 km from Subic Bay, one of the most important naval bases in Asia, and one the U.S. historically utilized. 

We could utilize it to a greater extent if we improved relations with the Philippines. 

China’s building of a military base at Scarborough Shoal would make the value of Subic Bay as a naval base much less defensible. 

This decreases the opportunities and relative power of the U.S., and increases those of China.
The U.S. has already taken sides. 

In 1951 we signed the Mutual Defense Treaty, which requires the U.S. to defend the Philippines. According to Article IV of the treaty, “Each Party recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific Area on either of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common dangers in accordance with its constitutional processes.”
China Coast Guard is armed at Scarborough Shoal. 

According to the affidavit of Jowe Legaspi, who fished at Scarborough since 1994, “In May or June 2014, they [the Chinese] harassed Filipino fishermen through water cannon, sound blare, and there were times that they have a gun when they came near us.” 

I personally saw light cannon mounted on the two China Coast Guard cutters that harassed the Kalayaan Atin Ito activists at Scarborough last June.
This picture taken on May 13, 2014 from a Vietnamese coast guard ship shows two Chinese coast guard vessels sailling near the area of China’s oil drilling rig in disputed waters in the South China Sea. Vietnam experienced its worst anti-China unrest in decades following Beijing’s deployment of an oil rig to disputed waters, with at least one Chinese worker killed and more than 100 injured. 

These armed Chinese acts, combined with Chinese occupation of the sovereign territory of the Philippines, arguably combine to constitute an “armed attack”. 

The treaty further says, “For the purpose of Article IV, an armed attack on either of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack on the metropolitan territory of either of the Parties, or on the island territories under its jurisdiction in the Pacific or on its armed forces, public vessels or aircraft in the Pacific.” 

Last year, the PCA found Scarborough Shoal to be a “rock”, which is a legal subcategory of an “island” according to UNCLOS. 

So the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty appears to apply to Scarborough.
Any attempt to further split legal hairs on the wording of the treaty and its relevance to Scarborough would not reflect well on American defense commitments. 

The appearance of avoiding or reneging on a U.S. treaty commitment to protect Philippine territory in the South China Sea, including Scarborough Shoal, could make the U.S. look weak as an ally, not only to Filipinos, but to the world. 

Ukraine already blames the U.S., rightly or wrongly, for not sufficiently fulfilling security guarantees in the Budapest Agreement of 1994, when Russia invaded Crimea. 

Adding a failure to protect the Philippines from China could further tarnish our reputation. 

The longer that China is allowed to administer Scarborough Shoal with the China Coast Guard, the more China, and international lawyers, will start to see it as China’s de facto sovereign territory. 

And, possession is 9/10 of the law.
Some international lawyers already think China has the right to act as a sovereign at Scarborough. 

“I think China is acting as sovereign — as it has a right to do — when it fishes in and around Scarborough Shoal,” said Dutton. 

“I agree it is not engaging in artisanal fishing when it uses industrial sized vessels. But a sovereign has an unfettered right to choose how to fish in its own territorial sea and internal waters. The [PCA] arbitral opinion merely acknowledged that China and the Philippines (and others) have artisanal fishing rights at Scarborough without limiting other rights that might pertain to the sovereign. So I do not conclude China is acting unlawfully.” 

Dutton’s assumption that China has a right to act as a sovereign at Scarborough Shoal is a stretch, and likely rejected by other international law scholars. 

The Philippines has also alleged that China’s destruction of coral at Scarborough Shoal violates several international conventions to which China is a signatory, including the RAMSAR Convention (1971), the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (1975), and the Convention on Biological Diversity (1993).
While some lawyers may be able to justify China’s industrial fishing at Scarborough based on a hypothetical sovereignty, combined with one interpretation of international law, China’s destruction of the environment in what most people think is the EEZ of another country is a dangerous precedent, and flies in the face of common sense values.
Those common sense values that indicate the Philippines should have sovereignty over Scarborough Shoal start with Scarborough being much closer to the Philippines than to China. 

Just look at a map. 

Any reasonable person would say that China should not be “administering” Filipino fishermen at their own shoal. 

Second, Scarborough is within the Philippine EEZ. 

Scarborough at high tide is a small collection of rocks, the largest of which is not much bigger than a car. 

This should not give China the right to claim it as territory, along with a 12 nm radius of territorial sea. 

Third, when the Philippines administered Scarborough up to 2012, the shoal was for the most part sustainably fished by Filipino fishermen. 

Now it is being destroyed by China, which has acted aggressively against Filipino fishermen. 

China is likely seeking to build a military base at the shoal that will increase regional instability. 

Fourth, the Philippine maps of Scarborough predate by centuries the Chinese maps that purportedly claim the shoal, and Philippine fishing at Scarborough predates China’s territorial claim. 

Fifth, China likely refuses to arbitrate the sovereignty dispute at the ICJ, which would place China and its actions squarely outside the international rule of law.
Activists dressed as clowns and holding water pistols spray a map illustrating China’s claim to the South China Sea during a protest in front of the Chinese consular office in the financial district of Manila on March 3, 2014. Activists protested against Chinese ships firing a water cannon at Philippine fishermen. 

Scarborough Shoal is 864 km from the Chinese coast, and only 223 km from the Philippines. 

It is within the Philippines’ EEZ, which according to the basic UNCLOS rule, extends 200 nm (370km) from its coastline. 

The Philippines has for a long time used the shoal as a primary location for fishing. 

Only in very recent history has China increased its claims and activities at the shoal. 

China refused to participate in the PCA arbitration, but in its absence the arbitral panel made an effort to collect evidence that supported China’s case. 

In the award, the PCA referenced China’s embassy in Manila, which chose June 12, 2012, Philippine Independence Day, to publish historical evidence for its claim to Scarborough.
“Scarborough Shoal and its surrounding waters have been China’s traditional fishing grounds since ancient times. Chinese fishermen have engaged in fishery activities for generations. In addition, they have used Scarborough Shoal as a safe have[n] in their voyage in the South China Sea. Genglubu, an ancient Chinese navigation log recording trips in the South China Sea, and other ancient documents and literature contain complete records of Chinese fishermen’s activities around Scarborough Shoal. Since the Yuan Dynasty, the Chinese people have never stopped developing and exploiting Scarborough Shoal and its surrounding waters and the Chinese government has exercised effective management and jurisdiction over their activities all these years. These historical facts are supported by official documents, local chronicles and official maps in the past centuries.”
These Chinese claims of evidence have no specific references or quotes, which puts into question the extent to which they actually show Chinese fishermen’s utilization of Scarborough Shoal. 

In contrast, the Philippines presented a detailed case of its traditional fishing at Scarborough Shoal, which I presented above.
The family-owned Philippine fishing boats that have historically plied the waters of Scarborough Shoal are typically much smaller, for example about 30 meters, when compared to the 75-meter Chinese industrial fishing trawlers documented by Reuters at Scarborough on Monday. 

Some of the Philippine boats at Scarborough are “barely more than rafts,” according to the article. These artisanal fishermen come from family fishing communities in nearby Philippine towns such as Masinloc, Palauig, and Iba. 

Their artisanal spear, line and small-net fishing will not be protected if China is allowed to administer the shoal, and facilitate industrial fishing that progressively denudes the shoal’s fish, coral, giant clams, and sea turtles, many of which are endangered.

The ecosystem at Scarborough is already critically damaged, but continued Chinese industrial fishing at the location will sever a critical link in migratory fish movements around the South China Sea. “Chinese overfishing and, even more damaging, it’s previous reef destruction to poach giant clams, has done horrendous damage to the marine ecosystem at Scarborough,” said Poling. 

“Filipino fishermen report significantly reduced catches, and there’s no telling how bad things will get. It’s entirely possible that so much damage has been done to reef ecosystems in Scarborough and the Spratlys that we’ll soon see a collapse of migratory fish stocks throughout the South China Sea.”
Giant clams flourish on the sea bed off Bolinao in Lingayen Gulf, northwest of Manila on October 18, 2008. Highly prized for its meat and decorative shell the giant clam, scientific name: Tridacna gigas had virtually disappeared from the Philippines fished out by local and foreign fishermen. Marine biologists from the Marine Science Institute of the University of the Philippines launch in 1985 an ambitious programme to breed and restock the waters in this south east Asian archipelago of 7,000 islands. Giant clams form an integral part of a coral reef’s ecosystem. A large clam can weigh up to 230 kilos.

Based on the common sense values above, the Philippines and its allies are arguably not only justified, but legally obligated, to actively defend Philippine sovereignty, territory and the environment at Scarborough. 

To do so, the Philippines should continuously object to China’s occupation. 

“The best Manila can do is continuously object and refuse to recognize Chinese sovereignty, in order to maintain a clear legal record of its objections,” said Poling. 

“The Philippines has effectively used law to chasten China, and should continue to do so,” said Kraska. 

“It might, for example, encourage Vietnam to file a similar suit. Also, the Philippines should try to obtain multilateral lateral agreement on the SCS with the other claimants to further isolate China and attract greater international support.”
These are important legal measures to take. 

But China has shown its disregard for international law by refusing to participate in, or accept the findings of, the Philippines v. China case at the PCA. 

Therefore stronger measures are required. 

Economic sanctions against China and joint U.S.-Philippine Coast Guard and Navy patrols at Scarborough should be utilized to enforce China’s agreement to arbitrate the sovereignty issue at the ICJ, and in the interim block Chinese activities at the shoal, including industrial fishing, pretensions of providing governance through coast guard operations, and military base construction. 

The same tactics should be employed to protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Philippines in the rest of its EEZ, for example at Mischief Reef and Second Thomas Shoal. 

To decrease the likelihood of joint U.S.-Philippine enforcement erupting into conflict with China, take a leaf from the Chinese strategy book: implement enforcement gradually.
If the Philippine and U.S. governments do not take more assertive measures to oppose China’s occupation of Scarborough Shoal, and reaffirm and enforce Philippine sovereignty, they are not sufficiently doing their jobs and are possibly breaking the law. 

In this case the Philippine and American people, and their respective congressional representatives, would be well-advised to encourage stronger executive action through legal activism and new legislation that mandates the enforcement of Philippine sovereignty over its territory.

A protester holds a sign saying ‘Benham Rise is Philippine territory!’ in front of the Chinese Consulate to protest Duterte’s perceived closeness to China and China’s continuing ‘militarization’ of the disputed islands in the South China Sea, on March 24, 2017 in the financial district of Makati, Philippines. The protesters accused President Rodrigo Duterte of siding with China instead of the Filipino people and are protesting against alleged plans to build military structures on Scarborough Shoal as well as months of alleged incursions of Chinese research vessels in the Benham Rise, east of the country.