Joe Biden’s first test against China is brewing as regime exploits the ‘grey zone’

The genius of China’s “grey zone” methods of warfare is once again on display. Three weeks ago the Philippines authorities discovered that a fleet of about 220 Chinese fishing vessels had entered the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone and anchored offshore at the Whitsun Reef in the West Philippine Sea. They are not the sort of low-slung fishing boats you might see unloading at an Australian harbour. The Chinese vessels are huge, steel-hulled, ranging in length from 30 metres to 100 metres, according to the Philippines’ National Security Adviser, Hermogenes Esperon. He calls them “an intimidation”.

And they haven’t been observed doing any fishing. They are lashed together in line formation. They run powerful lights at night but don’t move. The Philippines government has described it as “incursion”. On March 21 it demanded publicly that the Chinese government remove them. China’s ambassador to the Philippines, Huang Xilian, has said that the vessels were fishing boats that sought refuge at the reef due to rough sea conditions.

Mabini (Johnson) Reef part of the disputed islands China has built up in the South China Sea. Credit: New York Times

“How could they be ordinary fishing vessels seeking shelter, as Ambassador Huang says, when the weather is so good?” Esperon said to reporters on the weekend. “And they have been there in increasing numbers since November 2020. And they are not visibly there to fish.”

They are still there. Manila says the vessels are part of the China Maritime Militia; China denies this. Beijing says that they’re privately owned and operated fishing boats, end of story. They don’t have any weapons systems in evidence but, says Andrew Erickson of the US Naval War College, they don’t need to: “The ships themselves are the main weapon. Far larger and stronger than typical fishing vessels from the Philippines or other South China Sea neighbours, their comparatively robust hull designs – with additional rub strakes welded onto the hull’s steel plating aft of the bow, and – typically – powerful mast-mounted water cannons, make them powerful weapons in most contingencies, capable of aggressively shouldering, ramming, and spraying overmatched civilian or police opponents.”

The Lowy Institute’s China specialist, Richard McGregor, describes the supposed fishing fleet as “an amazing militia of the kind that Hezbollah controls, all these gunmen who aren’t part of an army”.

They’ve chosen the Whitsun Reef not by chance but because it is claimed by China as part of its audacious “nine-dash line” to seize ownership of some 80 per cent of the South China Sea, including territories claimed by five others. And Whitsun Reef sits astride the crucial international shipping lanes that constitute the world’s most valuable commercial artery.

“China is pressing and will continue to press on all fronts against the Philippines and Vietnam and Indonesia and the like until one of the nation states essentially cedes,” says McGregor. And, in the case of the Whitsun Reef occupation, “even if they don’t press the sovereignty issue and just stay there, they’ve still managed to change the facts on the water”.

Chinese activity in the South China Sea, turning coral reefs into artificial islands, expanded its influence in the strategically important maritime area.Credit: AP

You might recall that China chose the Philippines in 2012 as the starting point for its stunningly successful takeover of large swathes of its neighbours’ maritime territory. President Benigno Aquino likened it to Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia in the prelude to World War Two.

When Manila took its case to an international arbitral tribunal at The Hague under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the tribunal found in 2016 that China’s claim had “no basis in law”. China ignored the ruling, seized more territory claimed by more countries and built seven islands on disputed reefs. An American admiral said China was building a “Great Wall of Sand”.

Not so. After manufacturing 1300 hectares of land on the seized reefs, China’s regime actually has built a string of military fortifications on them, equipped with hardened shelters for missiles and missile launchers, radar and communications bases, and runways on which one of its heavy nuclear-capable bombers has conducted demonstration landings. The bases serve to project China’s military power and enforce its further claims to territories also claimed by its neighbours.

And Xi Jinping’s government managed all this without firing a single shot through an unrelenting series of incremental expansions known as “salami slicing”. It uses non-military ships as its vanguard, drawing on fishing fleets, coast guard vessels, maritime administration ships and so on.

They move in overwhelming numbers against neighbours including Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and the Philippines, endlessly pushing and shoving. Often, they’re backed up by Chinese naval vessels, just beyond the horizon where they are out of sight but intimidatingly visible on the radar screens of their rivals.

China’s strategy has been so successful in the South China Sea that it’s applying it to its border war against India. “Just as China has employed flotillas of coast guard-backed civilian fishing boats for expansionist forays in the South and East China Seas, it has been sending herders and grazers ahead of regular army troops into desolate Himalayan border areas to foment disputes and then assert control,” writes Indian strategist Brahma Chellaney at New Delhi’s Centre for Policy Research. “Such an approach has enabled it to nibble away at Himalayan territories, one pasture at a time.”

Like covert cyber attacks, like Vladimir Putin’s undeclared invasion of Ukraine by “little green men”, these techniques are called “grey zone” because they don’t fit the binary choice in which the West defines its existence; they are neither peaceful nor warlike in the traditional industrial mode.

They are nonetheless part of what the US diplomat George Kennan once called the “perpetual rhythm of struggle” between nations. And they are hard to deal with.

The Philippines has said it is considering invoking its military treaty with the US. If so, it might come to be Joe Biden’s first serious test against a determined and aggressive China. But if the Philippines or the US were to use military force against the Chinese fleet, it would be accused of an act of war against a civilian target.

McGregor points out one instructive precedent. Indonesia’s former minister for fisheries, Susi Pudjiastuti, dealt with hundreds of illegal fishing vessels by seizing them and sinking them, either blowing them up or flooding them. “China calls it fishing, Indonesia calls it crime,” said the straight-talking Pudjiastuti. And that was very black and white.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.