China Increasingly Aggressive Toward Its Neighbors — and the U.S.
Claiming near seas as its own, pushing smaller nations out.
China’s coast guard blasts Philippine boat with water cannon
CHINA HAS SHOWN ESCALATING BELLIGERENCE in its surroundings seas, confident that it has no rivals in strength among what it calls the "small countries" such as Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines. It has built up reefs and outcroppings in the South China Sea into military bases from which it can force those nations off the fishing grounds that they rely on to feed their populations.
These invasions are in violation of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to which 168 countries are signatories that prescribes for each coastal nation an "economic zone" extending 200 nautical miles from its shores for its exclusive use. But China sweeps aside Western-inspired precepts of national sovereignty that conflict with its intended global dominance where it will set the rules. And so, on a boat sailing out of the Philippines at night near Mischief Reef, militarized by China in an area of the South China Sea that an international tribunal has said belongs to the Philippines, a New York Times reporter said that cell phones on board pinged with the message "Welcome to China", notwithstanding that they were 900 miles from the nearest China landfall. They were not in fact welcome and were assaulted with sound that shook their bodies, blinding searchlights, and threats of ramming.
YEARS OF HARASSMENT
In April of 2020, Vietnam accused a Chinese patrol ship of ramming and sinking a Vietnamese fishing boat near the Paracel islands in the South China Sea, leaving 22 survivors in the water for hours clinging to the wreckage. That June, another was rammed in the same zone by a Chinese ship. During the same period a Malaysian drillship was harassed near Borneo. American and Australian warships came to its relief.
Harassing and violence has been the norm ever since. Beijing has adopted a policy that treats the economic zones of other nations as its own, that feeding its own people at cost to those nations is the new rule. Chinese boats fish in Indonesian waters. To drive off Philippine boats and deprive them of their catch, swarms of Chinese fishing vessels band together as "maritime militias". This past October, a Chinese coast guard ship collided with a Philippine boat that was trying to… Continue reading