FRED KAPLAN
When the Philippine Coast Guard removed a Chinese barrier in a contested stretch of the South China Sea last week, some observers feared it might light a fuse to war. It didn’t—and it’s worth examining why it didn’t, because we may soon see similar challenges to China’s dominance in the region.
Initial reports of the removal—which happened on the orders of the Philippines’ President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.—cited worries that Chinese President Xi Jinping might react with some escalatory counteraction. But, so far anyway, he has not.
Marcos’ action was legally and morally proper. The Chinese barrier clearly violated international law and blocked the movement of Philippine fishing boats. Still, Manila has rarely—and, in the past decade, has never—challenged Beijing’s territorial claims so boldly. It’s an open question whether Xi will now double down on his claims or settle into a more “rules-based” coexistence.
After the Philippine Coast Guard cut the rope that held the barrier in place, a commentator and former military officer in Beijing, Song Zhongping, denounced the move as “a serious threat to China’s national sovereignty and security,” adding, “China must take decisive measures to put an end to the Philippines’ provocation.”
However, a spokesman for China’s foreign minister was less bellicose, saying merely, “We advise the Philippines not to cause provocation and cause trouble.” The barrier was carted away.
China’s disputes—not only with the Philippines but with most other countries in the area—have been going on since the end of World War II, when Beijing’s rulers drew an “11-dash line” delineating almost the entire South China Sea as its territory. (When the Communist Party took over China in 1949 and the former rulers retreated to Taiwan, this was revised to a nine-dash line.) The claims, from all parties, intensified in 1969, when a geological survey first discovered “substantial energy deposits” in the sea.
Still, few took any of this as a source of danger—for one thing, China had few resources to back up its position—until 1996, when three Chinese naval vessels engaged a Philippines gunboat in a 90-minute battle over Capones Island in the Mischief Reef, part of the Spratly Islands chain, about 100 small islands claimed by Manila.
President Bill Clinton helped mediate a stand-down, then signed the U.S.–China Military Maritime Consultative Agreement, which established a forum to discuss these sorts of disputes, while also reviving a U.S. military treaty with the Philippines. Tensions calmed further in 2002, when China and 10 Asia-Pacific countries signed the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea.
Still, China kept pressing its claims, blocking other countries’ fishing boats and impeding maritime passageways generally. At the same time, though, Chinese economic growth was beginning to boom; U.S. firms were finding investment too lucrative to let some complaints about unfair trade practices or improper incursions across obscure maritime borders get in the way.
When Barack Obama became president in 2009, he announced a desire to pivot from the ancient squabbles of the Middle East to the more vital challenges and opportunities of Pacific Asia. Part of this meant trying to lure China into the international economy, hoping the benefits of its inclusion would help make it a good global citizen; part of it also meant containing China from persistently violating the rules. Or as Obama later put it in his memoir, he “settled on a strategy to thread the needle between too tough and not tough enough.”
As part of this needle-threading, at a 2010 conference in Hanoi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reiterated U.S. neutrality on sovereign matters in the South China Sea but also affirmed America’s interest in the “open access to Asia’s maritime commons”—a statement that Beijing took as a rebuke to its territorial claims.
In 2013, the Philippines formally submitted its complaint about the Spratly Islands to an arbitration court in the Hague, citing the definition of proper maritime borders in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Though the U.N. had passed the law in 1994, this was the first claim to be adjudicated under its authority. (The U.S. never ratified the treaty and, as a result, has stayed out of these disputes, though it has backed its allies’ positions and criticized China’s.)
In July 2016, the Hague ruled in favor of the Philippines, saying the nine-dash line was illegal. China ignored the ruling. In fact, in the months leading up to the decision, China started building artificial islands throughout the contested areas of the South China Sea. It then built military bases on those islands, then transported bomber aircraft and missiles to the bases. The idea, as a former senior China analyst in the CIA told me, was to “create facts on the ground” which no mere ruling from the Hague could displace.
Manila’s severing of China’s floating barrier last week—the significance of the action—should be viewed in the context of this broader militarization.
Under the rules of the Law of the Sea, a nation’s territory extends 12 nautical miles beyond its coast, but its Exclusive Economic Zone, or EEZ—the area where it has legal jurisdiction over maritime resources—extends to 200 nautical miles. (A nautical mile is about 1,852 meters.)
The area where China placed its floating barrier is 124 nautical miles from the Philippines, well within Manila’s EEZ. It is 350 nautical miles from the closest internationally recognized strip of Chinese territory—well outside Beijing’s EEZ.
When President Marcos, who is popularly known as “Bongbong,” ran for president of the Philippines in 2022, he promised to crack down on China’s aggression. (His father, who died in 1989, was the country’s kleptocrat-dictator from 1965 until he was deposed in 1986.) Bongbong’s predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, reveled in anti-American politics, rebelling against Washington’s onetime colonial rule, and cozied up to China, tolerating all manner of Beijing’s incursions until just before leaving office, when, after 200 Chinese ships sailed into the Philippines’ EEZ, he vowed to run a “suicide mission” into China’s harbors—a clearly empty threat.
Marcos Jr. probably could not have done something so bold as cut loose a Chinese barrier without first renewing the strong ties to Washington. (It is not known whether President Joe Biden encouraged or even knew about the action ahead of time, but Biden has stepped up U.S. military cooperation with the Philippines.) President Donald Trump tried to reverse China’s unfair trade practices in a way that previous presidents hadn’t, but he did nothing about its territorial assertions (or about its more serious economic malpractice—intellectual property theft).
Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, told me in an email last week, “U.S. support is giving Manila the confidence to confront China in ways they haven’t been willing to in the past.”
This U.S. support may be giving Xi second thoughts about asserting China’s claims as brazenly as he has in the past. Biden and Xi are likely to hold a private face-to-face meeting at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit next month in San Francisco. Both leaders are seeking ways to deal with their myriad interests—some conflicting, some converging—in ways that avoid either war or capitulation. What happens between now and then in the South China Sea may affect the tone and substance of that meeting. What happens at the meeting will certainly affect the tone and substance of future maneuverings in the South China Sea.
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