South China Sea and China (2011-2017)

[Dayuhan]

In case anyone's actually interested, the Chinese fishing vessels have withdrawn. There's still a Philippine Coast Guard ship around, which probably won't be there for long. What some people may not realize is that these incursions by fishing vessels happen regularly. In most cases there's no response, as the ships are often not detected (patrols are irregular) or there's no ship close enough to respond. In any event it's winding down without anything remotely close to, say, the 1988 Johnson Reef incident, which might be looked at by anyone thinking China's current behaviour is a new thing.

Absolutely not, this is simply strategic messaging to the countries that border the SCS... Instead of the strategic corporal, we're looking at strategic Capt's playing chess with their warships. Its a dangerous game.

Dangerous, yes, but both sides seem aware of that and are actually being quite conservative. The ships sent by the Chinese to support the fishermen were civilian vessels without overt armament; they didn't send Navy vessels or produce any direct threat, which they certainly could have done. Based on publicly available evidence it's really not possible to say whether the incident was purposely generated to produce a message or whether a routine pillage at Scarborough Shoal turned into an incident due to detection and response.

As far as the intentional strategy, you can find China's strategic aims with a little research, it is unclassified and available for the world to read, and claiming the SCS is a key part of their overall strategy. One way to enforce those claims are to send fishing boats out to challenge territorial claims of other nations in the region. There is a better than 50% chance these confrontations are intentional, and there have been several of them. Yes this is a change, and it isn't just about fishing.

How is it a change? It's been happening for a long, long time. As I said above, the intrusions of fishing boats have been a constant for years (not just Chinese; the Philippines has had issues with Taiwanese and Japanese fishermen as well). Poaching fish is old practice in the SCS.

My speculation based on reading their documents is this is part of a larger strategy to undermine the U.S. as a global power (especially regionally, but it has global implications), to gain greater economic and political influence regionally (supported by a strong military). If our national security and our economy are related, as many senior leaders state, then this is clearly in our interests.

I'm not sure I agree that this is a strategy to undermine US influence. If anything it seems calculated to increase US influence, as neighboring States look to the US, and become more willing to make concessions to the US, to balance Chinese influence. Certainly Chinese economic and political influence in the region is not enhanced, as ASEAN countries come under popular pressure to do less business with China and to seek other balancing alliances. I'd say that they're less concerned with undermining the US than with stamping their own pressure, even if that means increased US influence.

Extant forces does not mean an extant threat. We are not an extant peacetime threat to Chinese maritime commerce.

Threat is a question of perception. Many Americans perceive China as a threat to America... hell, many Americans perceive Iran as a threat. These perceptions may not have much rational basis, but they are still held. We might say that China's military force is out of proportion to our perception of any threat to China, but they build their forces according to their perception of threat, not ours. Much of the world believes that American military force is far out of proportion to any realistically assessed threat to America... are they entirely wrong?

So we are very careful about when we interfere with sea traffic. We basically keep the lanes open. As a maritime nation that benefits us because FREE trade benefits nations, especially maritime ones. So whether you say we "protect" or "control" the upshot is the same, the ships move without interference. We don't "control" the seas to our benefit beyond that. We don't say this nations ships can go here or but not there for our exclusive commercial benefit.

We don't keep the lanes open. Nobody's threatening to close them, and we could pull our entire Navy back to our shores without putting commerce at risk, except perhaps near Somalia. What we maintain is the capacity to interfere if we choose to do so. That's kind of like a nuclear bomb: you don't have to use it to maintain the threat, because everybody knows it's there.

So in my view, if the Chinese are building a fleet to preserve peacetime sea communications, they are seeing and countering a threat that is not there. If that is why they are doing it, they are wrong in their judgment and wasting a lot of resources.

Much of the world, many Americans among them, believes that the US wastes a lot of resources seeing and countering threats that are not there. We don't make decisions based on other people's assessment of threats, we make them on our assessment of threats. The Chinese do the same. Throughout history nations that depend on maritime commerce for survival have built navies. Should that be different now?

Aside from the perception of threat, we have to consider the generalized Chinese desire to force their way into the top table, to be taken seriously, to be a player with military weight equal to their economic weight. If you've followed Chinese commentary over the years, you'd have noted a phase of public exasperation over what was considered an absurd situation: that has-been nations like Britain and France had more potent navies, greater expeditionary capacity, and more perceived influence on global affairs than China. China's in a "coming out" phase, blending great arrogance with great insecurity... the US went through a phase like that in its own history. It may not be entirely rational and it's not the only influence out there, but it's not a factor that can fully be discounted either.

If that is how the Red Chinese regime sees it, they don't see it the way the British, Indians, Brazilians, Japanese see it, all nations dependent upon sea trade. They aren't building navies to challenge the USN.

India has in fact built a quite substantial Navy, and the British still maintain a Navy that might be considered out of proportion to their economic needs. The difference is that you don't perceive these nations as a challenge. Again, remember that China's dependence on maritime commerce is greater than that of any other nation on earth. A hostile power that could cut off Chinese access to Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, which could be done far from China's shores, could bring their economy grinding to a halt in no time. Powers exist that can do this, and those powers are not entirely friendly. In their position, would we not perceive a threat? If China could, at any time of their choosing, cut us off from our primary commodity imports and merchandise exports (to the extent that we have any), would we not see that as an issue?

Now that leads to me conclude that they would not go to all that trouble to chase off the USN unless they wanted things to be run differently than they are now.

Did they chase off the USN? When did that happen, I must have missed it. The 7th fleet flagship was parked in Manila a few weeks ago, so it must have been recent...

Have we ever wondered why if the US is so 'hated', even their past adversaries find US 'comfortable'?

Is the US "hated"? Maybe in some parts of the world, but not in SE Asia, despite a rather mixed historical legacy. People are suspicous of American motives and don't want to be in a subordinate position to the US, but given the history that's not irrational. They also see the US as potentially useful and they're not averse to having a relationship with the US... they just want it to be a peer-to-peer relationship, not one where the US is in charge. Again, this is not unreasonable. I'd say SE and E Asia aspire to have a relationship with the US similar to the relationship between the US and Europe, not one that brings them back to the colonial/neocolonial rut of bygone days.