Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s team plans “to take control once again” of a valuable lagoon occupied by China's forces, an intention that could escalate the simmering dispute over sovereignty in the South China Sea.
“Since the new administration took office, we have already strategized [about] 'how can we be able to take control once again of Bajo de Masinloc?' Especially the lagoon in Bajo de Masinloc,” Philippine Coast Guard Commodore Jay Tarriela said on local media. “But I don't want to detail in public how [we are] going to do that.”
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Such an initiative would build on recent efforts to enhance Philippine capabilities to operate near Scarborough Shoal, as the disputed reef was known traditionally in British naval records. On Monday, coast guard forces from the Philippines removed a “floating barrier” placed near the lagoon by Chinese coast guard forces, which seized control of the lagoon in 2012. Yet Marcos's team is prioritizing the rebuff of Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping and his regime's claim to sovereignty over the area — a vital waterway for the Philippine economy, global shipping, and the balance of military power in the Indo-Pacific.
“China’s resolve in safeguarding its sovereignty and maritime rights and interests over Huangyan Dao is unwavering,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Tuesday, using Beijing’s preferred name. "We call on the Philippines not to make provocation or stir up trouble.”
Marcos has adopted an assertive policy toward Chinese claims since his inauguration last year, enabling Tarriela to boast that Philippine vessels can now drop anchor "at a distance of 300 meters” from the disputed area.
"The Philippines is well within its rights to remove any barrier in Bajo de Masinloc since it infringes on our maritime rights," Philippine national security adviser Eduardo Ano said in a separate media appearance.
Their self-assured posture has found a supportive audience in the United States and Japan. The top diplomats from the three countries met on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly “to look at how we can strengthen trilateral cooperation among us to maintain peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific,” as Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it on Friday. Japan was quick Monday to accuse China of escalating the dispute.
Chinese forces, accustomed to cowing their Philippine counterparts, have seemed uncertain about how to respond to such a defiant posture. But they appear to remain committed to Beijing’s decade-plus custom of taking a truculent approach to pressure the Philippine government and private vessels through nonlethal means, leaving international analysts to wonder when a new policy or sudden crisis will arise.
“That doesn't mean that there will never be a decision made in Beijing that ‘if X happens, you're allowed to escalate to Y,’ but it doesn’t seem like that’s happened yet,” Center for Strategic and International Studies Senior Fellow Gregory Poling, who directs the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, told the Washington Examiner. “What worries me is that [the Chinese are] just going to keep running these plays over and over until eventually there is a collision, and if there's a loss of life, it might well escalate before anybody can actually get Xi Jinping on the phone.”
The confrontation, which from afar might appear like a picayune dispute over fishing rights, takes on added significance from China’s wider militarization of the South China Sea and the mutual defense treaty between the U.S. and the Philippines.
“China is increasingly assertive, the whole region itself is more contested, and certainly China is testing the U.S.-Philippine alliance, and where the United States might might come in,” U.S. Institute of Peace Senior Expert Brian Harding, who specializes in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, told the Washington Examiner. “And it's very difficult, for all sides, to make those calculations in the gray zone. And certainly, China is probing.”
Tarriela, the Philippine coast guard spokesman, hinted that the effort to take control of the Scarborough Shoal lagoon would occur “with the support of our armed forces to Philippines” as well as “the intelligence cooperation that we have already established,” although he didn’t specify the intelligence agencies.
“It was already decided by the arbitral award, that it's not just for the Filipinos, but this is a traditional fishing ground for both Chinese, Vietnamese and Filipino,” Tarriela said. “So we are going to abide with the decision of the international ruling, and that's our end goal.”
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China, for its part, has declared the international ruling “null and void,” even though the communist regime is a signatory to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea that established the arbitration court. As a result, the South China Sea is simmering with a potential “to spark a contained military crisis” that may exceed any other hot spot in U.S.-China relations, according to Poling.
“The ceiling on escalation is probably lower than it is in Taiwan, but getting into that escalation is a much higher probability,” Poling said. “You have ... on the Chinese side, literally hundreds of individual actors, very loosely controlled by the government, who are basically being told to go out and drive like a**holes in order to intimidate everybody else. And eventually, that leads to low-level incidents, each one of which could escalate.”