A South China Sea ADIZ: China’s Next Move

American betrayal: Washington not only gave de facto approval of the East China Sea ADIZ, but also suggested that future Chinese moves would not be met with strong resistance. 
By Harry Kazianis

I hate making predictions. 

Truthfully, I am the type of person who likes to go to casinos for the latest sporting events or concerts and would never throw my money away in a slot machine or on the blackjack table. 

However, I can guarantee Vegas would lose its shirt on this bet, an easy wager to make: Look for China in the next year to eighteen months to declare an ADIZ over the South China Sea — in fact, Beijing’s ambassador to the Philippines appears to have alluded to such a move. 

Heck, I will even take it a step further and bet the wife and dog on this one: Beijing will create such a zone in the Yellow Sea as well at some point in the near future.

Why am I making such a prediction? 

Two recent factors come into play that in my view give China the rationale along with the ample cover they need to make such a move.
First, Washington appears to have given Beijing the green light to go forward — albeit unintentionally it seems.
Various reports based off a Kyodo news agency article have suggested a senior official traveling with Vice President Joseph Biden to Asia explained that “Washington is also asking China not to set up an air defense zone in the South China Sea, where Beijing is locked in territorial rows with Southeast Asian nations, without first consulting countries concerned.”
So let me see if I have this correct: It would be OK if China crafted an ADIZ in the South China Sea as long as it tells its neighbors in some fashion, in advance? 

Considering Beijing has already made a veiled reference that it could set up additional ADIZ in the future, the timing of such a comment was ill advised at best.
Honestly, I am hoping the official was misunderstood or misspoke because if accurate, Beijing could use such wording to openly declare such a new ADIZ in the South China Sea — an area with sovereignty disputes involving multiple claimants. 

In fact, Beijing has already gone so far to claim 80 percent of the area, effectively taking control of Scarborough Shoal last summer, which is well within the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the Philippines and is pressing its claims now on Second Thomas Shoal. 

China has also deployed its new aircraft carrier to the region in what could be seen as a show of force (although, let’s be frank, the carrier won’t be operational for sometime, however, the point is still made).
Second, when America’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gave guidance that U.S. domestic carriers should inform Beijing of their flight plans, Washington not only gave de facto approval of the East China Sea ADIZ, but also suggested that future moves would not be met with strong resistance. 

Yet, any move that gives this ADIZ declaration on China’s part any legitimacy will certainly be used by Beijing as a sign of acceptance. 

If we got away with it once, why not try the same move again and again?
As I explained in a piece for the Washington Times recently, creating an ADIZ, an area that is essentially an early-warning buffer zone for possible intrusions into a nation’s airspace, is not aggressive. 

It is the arc of Chinese actions dating back to 2006 onward that should worry the international community. Looked upon as a whole, the trend is truly concerning. 

No one is saying Beijing does not have the right as a great power and possible someday a superpower to shape the international stage in a way that is friendly to its own national interest. 

It is the optics of how it is going about doing it that frightens its neighbors. 

For all of China’s worries about being contained by the U.S. “pivot” to Asia, China is doing a great job of aligning its neighbors against its actions — effectively containing itself and giving credence to the growing narrative as Asia’s new regional bully. 

Bad move Beijing.

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Japan caught in dilemma over China air defence zone

By Jonathan Soble in Tokyo and Demetri Sevastopulo in Hong Kong

Any Asian country trying to preserve its hold on remote territory coveted by China, the region’s increasingly powerful and assertive giant, faces a daunting challenge.
For Japan, the task of retaining control of the disputed Senkaku Islands is especially fraught – as the delicately orchestrated visit to Tokyo by US vice-president Joe Biden highlighted this week.
On Tuesday, Mr Biden reiterated US criticism of China’s decision to declare an “air defence identification zone” over much of the East China Sea, including the Japanese Senkaku.

But he stopped short of joining Japan in calling for the zone’s removal – disappointing some Japanese officials.
Japan’s unusual security arrangements, under which its defence is largely outsourced to Washington, mean it must read the intentions of two different countries in managing the dispute: China, the adversary that is trying to wrest the islands away, and the US, the "ally" that is supposed to protect them. 

Neither is always easy.
Japanese officials say their biggest worry is that China will strengthen its influence over the islands in steps so gradual that no single move invites a decisive response, but that ultimately adds up to a change of de facto control.
Washington, not surprisingly, is setting the bar for action especially high – it is keen to avoid conflict with China over what many Americans would see as a few inconsequential Japanese rocks.
China has been employing a similar strategy elsewhere, in what one well known Chinese navy officer has dubbed the “cabbage strategy” to wrest control of the Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines – surrounding the area in thin layers until it is eventually enveloped.
“It’s very obvious that they’re doing the same thing they did in the South China Sea,” says one Japanese foreign policy official. 

“First they send fishing boats, then survey boats, and finally the military to guard their national assets.”
The Senkaku conflict flared up in 2012 after Japan’s government purchased three of the islands from their private owner, prompting China to accuse it of hatching its own plot to assert more control. 

Since then, however, Tokyo has been at pains to avoid escalating the dispute.
Before he came to power a year ago, Shinzo Abe had suggested Japan might station soldiers or government workers on the islands, a step that would infuriate Beijing. 

That idea was shelved once he became premier, but some worry that nationalist pressure could mount on Mr Abe if US and Japanese protests fail to deter Beijing.
“He will be accused by some of lacking backbone,” the official said. 

“When it comes to a critical point, we may have to act.”

Another high-ranking Japanese official familiar with Mr Abe’s thinking said Tokyo would have “rejoiced” if Mr Biden had sent a stronger message to China. 

But he added that there was a “common sense” that putting too much pressure on him ahead of his Beijing visit – he arrived on Wednesday – would have been counterproductive.
While the US does not take a position on the sovereignty of the Senkaku, Washington has made clear that they fall under the auspices of the US-Japan security treaty because they are under Japanese administrative control.
But the official said it was clear that China’s strategy was to produce an outcome where “one day in the future, the Japanese assertion of administrative control will appear questionable”. 

Once that happens, he adds, “it is easy for China to assume that if the Senkaku are not under Japanese administrative control, the US will have to have second thoughts” about defending the islands.
With few concrete options to respond to Chinese pressure, Mr Abe has been trying to build alliances with other Asia-Pacific countries concerned about the consequences of China’s rise. 

He visited southeast Asia earlier this year, is scheduled to make a trip to India – which has its own border disputes with China – in January, and is expected to visit Australia in 2014.

Japan has been bolstering its coast guard and shifting its military assets toward its southwestern seas, away from the north of the country where they had been concentrated during the cold war against the Soviet Union. 

The latest update of its national defence strategy, due to be announced this month, is expected to continue the trend.
Japan patrols the Senkaku by sea and air 24 hours a day, but the efforts of the Japanese coast guard and military benefit from the presence of the US navy in the region, including in the East China Sea. 

The Japanese official close to Mr Abe said it was important that Japan extend independent efforts to maintain control.
“Of course, Japan wants the US to commit to protect the Senkaku, but at the end of the day the islands are our own territory, so the Japanese government is now attempting to protect them,” he said.

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Safeguarding the Seas

How to Defend Against China's New Air Defense Zone
By Michael J. Green

A helicopter of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force lifts off from the aircraft carrier USS George Washington during Annual Exercise 2013.

Much of the coverage of China’s November 23 announcement of a new Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over waters claimed by Japan and South Korea has focused on the reactive and blundering nature of Chinese diplomacy. 

China’s sudden insistence on its right to take defensive action against foreign aircraft in this zone, the argument goes, was either an attempt to play to domestic nationalism or else to respond to Japan’s own increasing assertiveness in the region. 

Either way, the coverage concludes, China underestimated how quickly and vigorously other countries in the region would respond, including with flights directly into that airspace.
The implication of this analysis, which may be tempting to the overstretched Obama administration, is that Beijing made a hasty move that the region will now correct with a little help from Washington. 

Unfortunately for the administration, however, this was not just an ill-conceived slap by Beijing against a testy Japan. 

The reality is that the new ADIZ is part of a longer-term attempt by Beijing to chip away at the regional status quo and assert greater control over the East and South China Seas.
To understand this reality, one must begin the story of the ADIZ before Japan’s nationalization of three of the eight disputed Senkaku Islands in 2012, which is where most assessments start. 

Over three decades ago, China and Japan agreed to set aside their disagreement over the islands and focus on a common problem: the Soviet Union. 

It was China that first nullified the understanding by staking claim to the islands in 1992. 

It was also China that, in 2008, began significantly expanding its maritime patrols in and around those waters. In recent years, the Chinese maritime services have conducted patrols at least once a day near the islands and have crossed Japan’s 12-nautical-mile border around the islands on hundreds of occasions. 

Meanwhile, Chinese navy units have circumnavigated Japan and conducted major military exercises on all sides of the Japanese archipelago. 

In other words, by the time Tokyo purchased some of the Senkaku Islands from private landowners in 2012, Chinese pressure had reached alarming levels for Tokyo.
Both Japanese and Chinese diplomacy on the issue have been inept at times, of course, but the difference is that Japan -- which has effective administrative control of the islands -- is trying to preserve the status quo, whereas China is bent on using coercive pressure to try to change it. 

And Japan is not China’s only target. 

Beijing has also been pressing Manila over the Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea. 

China has increased its maritime and air presence around the contested area and imposed export bans on key products from the Philippines. (This strategy smacks of the same mercantilism China showed when it halted rare earth exports to Japan because of those two countries’ island disputes.)
Unlike the ongoing dispute with Japan, the Scarborough Shoal confrontation going badly for Manila. 

In 2012, Chinese maritime patrol ships finally overwhelmed the tiny Philippine navy and took de facto control of the shoals. 

Filipinos whose families have fished those waters for a millennium are now barred from entering.
Japan’s air force and navy are too strong for China to attempt a similar grab of the Senkaku Islands anytime soon. 

But Hanoi, Manila, Taipei, and Tokyo all sense that, in the Scarborough Shoal, Beijing “killed the chicken to scare the monkey,” as officials from those governments say. 

Most observers would agree that China has every intention of following the same strategy against Japan, just in slow motion. 

Although the smaller powers have remained quiet about the announcement of a new Chinese defense zone, most are privately urging Japan not to back down.
Japan, South Korea, and the United States have stated that they will not let the Chinese ADIZ announcement change their military operations in the area. 

To prove the point, the Pentagon sent two B-52 bombers out of Guam to fly through the new defense zone. Japan and South Korea quickly followed suit with their own patrols. 

The administration’s opening move certainly demonstrated by word and deed that Beijing went too far. 

But if the Chinese announcement comes from a deeper strategy of coercing smaller states and establish greater control in the Western Pacific -- as many governments in the region rightly suspect -- then Washington had better be prepared for a longer-term test of wills with Beijing.
The administration needs to consider the larger context that the rest of the region sees. 

Some of the policies included in the so-called rebalance to Asia will help, including the announcement in October that Washington and Tokyo will revise their bilateral defense guidelines to deal with new contingencies, including from China. 

Other moves have been less helpful. 

It was not lost on China or Japan, for example, that U.S. service chiefs testified in front of Congress that planned defense budget cuts would leave the armed forces unable to fulfill their current missions or security commitments; that U.S. President Barack Obama threw the decision about honoring his redline in Syria to Congress; or that senior U.S. officers in the Pacific continue trying to calm the waters by speaking of a new strategic partnership with China and naming climate change as their greatest security concern in the region.
More immediately, the disconnect between Washington and Tokyo this week over whether commercial flights should recognize the ADIZ and file flight plans with Beijing (Tokyo says no and Washington says yes) was a poor case of alliance management and an embarrassment for Tokyo during a serious security problem. 

Whatever the merits of each side’s respective policies in terms of strategic signals and airline safety, the two will have to work as one in the future.
The Obama administration needs to stick to a disciplined message of resolve and reassurance. 

And that would mean accurately assessing Beijing’s strategic intent. 

Confrontation with China is far from inevitable, and the potential areas for productive U.S.-Chinese cooperation remain vast. 

Vice President Joe Biden will no doubt emphasize the positive in U.S.-Chinese relations when he travels to Beijing this week. And that makes sense. 

But he should also leave no doubt that the United States is prepared to work with regional allies and partners to ensure Beijing understands that its attempts at coercion will not work. 

Then, when he is in Tokyo and Seoul, he should take time to listen carefully to what those allies think is at stake in the troubled East and South China Seas. 

Their problem is our problem, not just because we are allies but also because this moment could determine how China uses its growing power.

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China’s Aggressive Expansionism Hits Archaeology

China Has Begun Asserting Ownership of Thousands of Shipwrecks in the South China Sea
By JEREMY PAGE

A replica of a treasure ship sailed by Zheng He about 600 years ago at a museum in Nanjing. 
Underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio's team was exploring the wreckage of a 13th-century Chinese junk off the coast of the Philippines when it made an unwelcome discovery about China's maritime muscle in the 21st century.
As a twin-prop plane swooped overhead, a Chinese marine-surveillance vessel approached the team's Philippines-registered ship and began broadcasting instructions in English over a loudspeaker.
"They said this area belonged to the People's Republic of China, and they told us to scram," recalls one of the people on board last year. 

"It was pretty scary." 

Chinese officials confirm the incident took place but say the archaeologists' mission was illegal.

A boatman paddles away from the Sarangani, a ship on which archaeologists became embroiled in a standoff with China, in Manila Bay.

With territorial disputes escalating in the waters off China, the Chinese government has begun asserting ownership of thousands of shipwrecks within a vast U-shaped area that covers almost all of the South China Sea, which it says has been part of its territorial waters for centuries.
China has ordered its coast guard to prevent what it considers illegal archaeology in the waters it claims, and it is pouring money into a state-run marine-archaeology program. 

Chinese archaeologists are preparing their first comprehensive survey of undersea sites, including in disputed areas.
Chinese officials say their efforts will curb the theft and treasure hunting they say has destroyed numerous sites and flooded the global market with looted Chinese antiquities.

There is a political dimension to China's plans. 

Chinese archaeologists openly aspire to bolster their country's historical claims to the contested South China Sea, which overlap with those of Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines.
"We want to find more evidence that can prove Chinese people went there and lived there, historical evidence that can help prove China is the sovereign owner of the South China Sea," says Liu Shuguang, head of the Chinese government's Center of Underwater Cultural Heritage, set up in 2009 to oversee underwater archaeology in the country.
Tensions have been running high in the region over China's intensifying campaign to assert territorial claims, not only in the South China Sea, but in the East China Sea, which is contested by Japan. 

On Nov. 23, China proclaimed a new air-defense identification zone over Japanese Senkaku islands.
The South China Sea, one of the world's busiest trading routes, is littered with wrecks from the last two millennia, including Chinese junks, Indian and Arab dhows, Dutch and British trading schooners and World War II warships. 

Chinese archaeologists say they have gathered coordinates for 70 shipwrecks in those waters but estimate there are at least 2,000, and possibly many more.

A team working with French underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio, shown in 2010, was exploring the wreckage of a 13th-century Chinese junk off the coast of the Philippines when a Chinese marine-surveillance vessel ordered them to leave the area. 

Mr. Goddio, a Frenchman who is one of the world's leading marine archaeologists, had worked in the area since the 1980s, excavating 15th-century Chinese junks, 16th-century Spanish galleons and 18th-century British merchant ships. 

In addition to the trip last year, his team had visited the cluster of reefs and rocks off the Philippines, called the Scarborough Shoal, in 2011. 

Both expeditions were part of a joint research project with the National Museum of the Philippines, which collaborates with foreign archaeologists because of a shortage of state funding.
Different countries refer to the disputed islands by different names.
People involved in the project say it has no political or commercial agenda. 

During last year's trip, they say, they were examining pieces of celadon, a form of green-glazed ceramic, from a wreck that long ago broke apart on the sharp coral.
Chinese officials see ulterior motives.
"The Philippines sent some French archaeologists to do what? To drag away this shipwreck," says Mr. Liu of China's Center of Underwater Cultural Heritage. 

"Because this was material evidence that Chinese people first found the Scarborough Shoal, they wanted to destroy evidence that was beneficial to China." 

The archaeologists deny that.
Chinese archaeologists haven't started excavating sites at the Scarborough Shoal, but they have begun work on Chinese wrecks around the Paracel Islands, which lie about 200 miles from the coasts of China and Vietnam and are claimed by both countries. 

China has controlled the islands since 1974, when it defeated Vietnam in a brief naval battle.

Mike Hatcher prepares to dive from his ship in the South China Sea in 1986. On the expedition he found the 'Nanking cargo,' a haul of Chinese porcelain and gold from the wreck of the Geldermalsen, an 18th-century Dutch East India Co. ship that raised more than $20 million at auction in Amsterdam. 

"Marine archaeology is an exercise that demonstrates national sovereignty," Li Xiaojie, the vice minister of culture, was quoted as saying by state media in September 2012 as he examined porcelain retrieved from a wreck off the Paracels.
Chinese archaeologists say the survey encompassing other disputed areas will begin this year or next.
They also say they hope to support the government's efforts to re-establish China as a world maritime power, by focusing their research on the "Maritime Silk Road," which connected China by sea with India and Africa beginning in about the second century B.C.
China's five-year plan for 2011 to 2015 calls for the government to promote a seafaring heritage embodied by Zheng He, a eunuch admiral who sailed an armada of treasure ships as far as Africa about 600 years ago. 

The admiral is celebrated in China as the face of an era when it projected power far beyond its shores.
Xi Jinping, China's new president, has repeatedly emphasized the importance of maritime power—at times invoking Zheng He—as part of a vision to reclaim China's world prominence.
Zhang Wei, one of China's first underwater archaeologists, says the nation is "extremely focused on being a great and strong maritime power," which he calls the "grand backdrop" to China's marine-archaeology program. 

The program was launched, he says, under the auspices of President Xi's father, who served as vice premier under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s.

Two enameled globular teapots painted with peony and bamboo below a border of trellis-pattern; the porcelain survived the wreck and lasted more than two centuries under the sea so well because it was packed inside the tea, which in turn was in wooden chests.

Mr. Zhang says interest was kindled by commercial treasure hunters who operated in the South China Sea. Among the most famous was Mike Hatcher, a Briton whose haul of Chinese porcelain from the wreck of the Geldermalsen, an 18th-century Dutch East India Co. ship that sank in the South China Sea, raised more than $20 million at auction in Amsterdam in 1986.
Chinese leaders dispatched two officials to that auction to try to buy some of the items with cash, according to Mr. Zhang. 

"They only took about $30,000, and they couldn't buy a single thing," he says.
China's National Museum established its Underwater Archaeology Center the following year and appointed Mr. Zhang to head it—mainly, he says, because he was one of the few Chinese archaeologists who could swim.
The first big find in Chinese waters—a roughly 800-year-old merchant ship named the Nanhai One—was made in 1987 while a British salvage company was searching for a Dutch East India Co. wreck. 

The British team was forced to withdraw after the Nanhai One was identified as a Chinese ship.
Since then, there has been almost no foreign participation in marine archaeology in China, according to Chinese and foreign archaeologists. 

And only Chinese wrecks have been excavated in Chinese waters.
Chinese authorities, meanwhile, have trained more than 100 marine archaeologists, built at least three underwater-archaeology museums and invested millions of dollars in research. 

On Thursday, they announced a new project to remove up to 80,000 artifacts from the Nanhai One, which was lifted off the seabed in 2007 and placed in a water tank in a museum.
Next year, China plans to launch a 184-foot ship designed for marine archaeology, the first of its kind in the country, according to state-media reports.
China also is funding joint projects in other countries' waters, focusing mostly on locating wrecks linked to Zheng He. 

Last year, Chinese archaeologists using sonar identified five wrecks they believe were part of his fleet in the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz, according to Chinese state media.
One reason Chinese authorities are so interested in tracing Zheng He's travels is that he is said to have visited several rocks and islands in the South China Sea.

Chinese archaeologists work with porcelain artifacts from the Nanhai One shipwreck, which dated back to the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279), in a structure in Yangjiang, China, in 2009.

Foreign experts say they welcome China's new willingness to invest in underwater archaeology and relish the prospect of learning more about sites in China's waters.
But they are concerned that a political agenda might be driving China's choice of sites, its exclusion of foreign archaeologists and its relative lack of openness about its research.
"There's this strong sense of nationalism that flows through the Chinese program," says Jeffrey L. Adams, an anthropologist at the University of Minnesota who has written about Chinese archaeology.
Foreign archaeologists mostly agree that Chinese-built ships and cargo account for many of the sites in the South China Sea because of the international trade in Chinese porcelain and silk.
But many of the wrecks lie far from the Chinese mainland, around the reefs and rocks off the coast of Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines, because ships used to hug those shores to help with navigation and avoid bad weather.
Even if a wreck isn't in a disputed area, tracing its national "ownership" is often complicated. 

A ship, its owner, its cargo and its crew all may have originated in different countries.
Internationally, the trend in recent years has been toward acknowledging "common heritage," pursuing joint excavation and sharing results among academics from different nations. 

A 2001 Unesco convention on underwater cultural heritage encouraged states to cooperate when they had a shared interest in a site, but offered no guidance on jurisdiction and no mechanism for dealing with sites in disputed areas.
"If there's a disputed site, what we recommend is just get together and don't get into a fight over it," says Ulrike Guerin, who oversees protection of underwater cultural heritage at Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. 

"If you look around the world now, the majority of projects are multinational ones."
None of the countries involved in the South China Sea disputes have ratified the Unesco convention. 

Only China has the resources to enforce its claims to wrecks in the area and to excavate them.
China did little to enforce those claims until March 2012, when the government announced its first-ever crackdown on illegal salvage and archaeological work in China's territorial waters.
The incident at the Scarborough Shoal occurred less than a month later.
China says the standoff stemmed from an incident that April when a Philippines navy ship detained some Chinese fishermen near the Scarborough Shoal. 

But Chinese officials also have made it clear they regarded Mr. Goddio's project as illegal.
The Chinese marine-surveillance ship that approached the archaeologists was one of three Chinese vessels that took turns monitoring them over the next week or so, according to two people on board the archaeologists' ship and accounts in Chinese state media.
A Philippines coast guard ship was sent to the area but kept its distance. 

A tense standoff ensued as Chinese and Filipino officials accused one another of violating territorial boundaries.
Eventually, on April 18, the archaeologists' ship was forced to leave, prompting a formal protest from the Philippines' government. 

China has had effective control of the area since then.
The team abandoned its project. Mr. Goddio declined to comment.

Neither he nor the National Museum of the Philippines has a track record of using finds to justify territorial or ownership claims. 

"We don't really care who owns the ship," says Sheldon Clyde B. Jago-on, the head of underwater archaeology at the National Museum of the Philippines. 

"It's our shared heritage. It should be about collaboration. We care about the trade patterns, the trade routes, the cargo, the boat building."
Some experts say the overlap between politics and archaeology is neither surprising nor unique to China. Vietnam is expanding investment in its state-run archaeological program, and this year its Institute of Archaeology opened an underwater-archaeology department.
One of Vietnam's first projects has obvious political resonance—excavation of the site of a naval battle in which Vietnamese forces defeated a Chinese army in 938 A.D., bringing an end to centuries of Chinese rule over Vietnam. 

That site is on a river inside Vietnam.
The Scarborough Shoal incident, by contrast, marked the first time a country in the region used force to stop another nation's underwater archaeological project, experts say.
"China has the largest navy and the ability to chase people off, and then follow up with archaeological work," says Mark Staniforth, a marine archaeologist at Australia's Monash University who is working with Vietnam's Institute of Archaeology. 

"There's no sense they want to cooperate or collaborate with anyone."

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China's Latest Territorial Moves Renew Fears In Philippines

by FRANK LANGFITT

U.S. and Philippine navy personnel patrol the seas off a naval base west of Manila in June as part of joint exercises.

China is flexing its muscles these days. 

Over the weekend, it declared a sprawling air defense identification zone that covers disputed islands controlled by Japan. 

And it has sent its lone aircraft carrier for first-time trials in the South China Sea, where Beijing has territorial feuds with other neighbors, including Vietnam, Brunei and the Philippines.
None of this was making China any friends in Manila, where the Chinese government is particularly unpopular these days.
"It only tends to confirm and reinforce the fears and worries of many people in the region," says Jay Batongbacal, a University of the Philippines law professor, who has spent a decade and a half studying territorial disputes in the South China Sea. 

"Right now, I think they are seen more as a bully, because of the actions that they've taken."
Among those actions was last year's takeover of a disputed and potentially strategic shoal in the South China Sea that had been under Philippine control.
It started when Philippine authorities tried to arrest Chinese they accused of illegally fishing inside the shoal, which is really a shallow, triangle-shaped reef with a small opening at one end. 

China sent marine surveillance ships to block action by a Philippine navy frigate.
"One of the measures that they put in place was to string a line across the mouth of that entrance," says Batongbacal, "because if any vessel tries to cross that line, it will get entangled in the propellers."
The Chinese effectively sealed off the reef from Philippine fishermen and took control of Scarborough Shoal without firing a shot.
The shoal, rich in fish, is about 140 miles from the Philippine mainland and more than 500 miles from China. At high tide, only five rocks stick up out of the water, but Philippine officials worry China might one day declare them Chinese territory.
Batongbacal says in the worst-case scenario — from the Philippine perspective — China could turn the shoal into a safe harbor for Chinese government vessels and a way to extend its influence and power in the region.
"Right now, it's clear that their motivation is that they want to vindicate their claim to the entire South China Sea," Batongbacal says.
A huge amount of trade and oil passes through the South China Sea, which China has claimed since the 1940s. Back then, though, it was militarily too weak to do anything about it. 

Today, China is the world's No. 2 economy and a rapidly rising military power.
Dindo Manhit, president of Stratbase Research Institute, a strategic think tank in Manila, says China now wants to ensure it has a major say in what happens in the South China Sea. 

Like all economic powers, Manhit says, China wants to spread its influence.
"At the end of the day, any economic influence needs to be protected by either strong military or political influence," Manhit says. 

"I think that's where it's coming from."
Chito Santa Romana, who spent nearly four decades living in China where he served as the bureau chief for ABC News, thinks it also comes from a desire to restore China, which means "Middle Kingdom" in Mandarin, to what it sees as its rightful place as a respected global player.
"I would attribute it to what I call the resurgence of the 'Middle Kingdom Complex,' " says Santa Romana, who works in Manila with a think tank, trying to forge understanding on the South China Sea dispute between the two countries. 

"The 'China Dream' that the Chinese talk about, they want to recover the glory that was lost when they were a pre-eminent power."
The U.S. has dominated East Asia militarily for decades, ensuring the peace and security that allowed the region's economies to grow so rapidly. 

The Philippines hopes America will back it up if its dispute with China turns violent, but some worry Washington's deep and complex ties with Beijing will win out in the end.
"We just hope and expect that the U.S. remembers us really as the true ally here," says Manhit, "because some people are saying that in a conflict between China and the Philippines, the U.S. will choose China because of the economic relationship."
Jay Batongbacal, the University of the Philippines law professor, says turning its back on a longtime ally with whom it has a mutual defense treaty would have serious implications for America and its other diplomatic relationships. 

Most people in the Philippines are hoping it never comes to that.

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Asia Rivalries Play Role in Aid to the Philippines

   

By ANDREW JACOBS

CEBU, the Philippines — The American aircraft carrier George Washington has arrived, its 5,000 sailors and 80 aircraft already busy ferrying relief supplies to storm-battered survivors, and the United States has committed an initial $20 million in humanitarian assistance.
Japan is dispatching a naval force of 1,000 troops, in what officials say is that country’s largest ever disaster-relief deployment.
Also on the way: the Illustrious, a British aircraft carrier stocked with transport planes, medical experts and $32 million worth of aid.
The outpouring of foreign assistance for the hundreds of thousands left homeless and hungry by Typhoon Haiyan is shaping up to be a monumental show of international largess — and a dose of one-upmanship directed at the region’s fastest-rising power, China.
China, which has its own newly commissioned aircraft carrier and ambitions of displacing the United States, the dominant naval power in the Pacific, has been notably penurious.

A shipment of food unloaded from an American military helicopter in Guiuan, Philippines, on Thursday.
Beijing increased its total contribution to the relief effort to $1.6 million on Thursday after its initial pledge of $100,000 was dismissed as stingy, even by some state-backed news media in the country.
The typhoon, described as the most devastating natural calamity to hit the Philippines in recent history, is emerging as a showcase for the soft-power contest in Asia.
The geopolitical tensions have been stoked by China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, and heightened by American efforts to reassert its influence in the region.
China has showered aid on countries it considers close friends, becoming the largest lender in Africa, rushing to help Pakistan after an earthquake in September and showing a more humanitarian side to its neighbors in Asia.
But the typhoon struck hardest at the country China considers its biggest nemesis in the legal, diplomatic and sometimes military standoff over control of tiny but strategic islands in the South China Sea.
Over the past year, Chinese and Philippine vessels have faced off over a reef called Scarborough Shoal, and the Philippines has angered China by taking the dispute to an international arbitration tribunal.
It did not help that the Philippines earlier this year said it would accept a gift of 10 coast guard vessels from Japan and voiced support for Tokyo’s plans to strengthen its military ties in the region, or that it is in discussions with the United States about hosting more American troops there.
The challenge for China comes shortly after the United States appeared to suffer a setback of its own in the contest for Pacific influence.
President Obama had to cancel a high-profile visit to the region this fall to grapple with the fiscal shutdown in the United States, an event that seemed to many in Asia to showcase American dysfunction.
So when the typhoon struck an old ally, the Pentagon did not waste much time offering a robust show of assistance.
“There is no other military in the world, there is no other navy in the world, that can do what we can do,” one American official said.
Michael Kulma, an expert on East Asia at the Asia Society in New York, said the Chinese reluctance to give more aid could hurt its chances to make a favorable impression in the country.
“There was an opportunity, right up front, for China to make a commitment,” he said.
“At the end of the day it could be that the Chinese end up giving more. But on the front end of it, they didn’t stand out.”
At the same time, the relief efforts by the United States could give a lift to its already strong influence in the Philippines.
Despite its longtime alliance with the United States, the Philippines has been tentative over what Washington sees as the country’s role in its so-called Asian pivot, which includes efforts to increase the presence of American troops on Philippine soil.
But the American relief effort — which is receiving a lot of news media attention in the country — might wear away at some of that reluctance, a legacy of the years when the Philippines was an American colony.
Already, some in Tacloban said they would not mind American boots on the ground there temporarily, if it would help.
“If the United States will come in, if it will be allowed to come, or if the United Nations can come in, it will really help us secure the city,” said Jerry Yaokasin, a senior municipal official.
China’s rise has been shifting geopolitics in the region for years.
With China’s investments in Southeast Asia mounting, even some countries worried about being overwhelmed by their imposing regional neighbor have found it hard to resist the pull of its economy — a dynamic that is very likely to continue.
But China’s increasing power has also in some cases worked against it, including in the Philippines, where the battle over maritime territory, including the Scarborough Shoal, has softened the wariness of Japan and the bitter memories of World War II, when Japan invaded.
In announcing their assistance on Thursday, Japanese officials spoke of it mostly as an effort to provide humanitarian assistance, though there was also an acknowledgment of growing security ties.
“The Philippines is geographically close to Japan and an important strategic partner,” said Japan’s defense minister, Itsunori Onodera.
The donated coast guard vessels are meant to help the Philippines better patrol its waters, including those contested with China.
On Thursday, officials said Japan’s military would send C-130 transport aircraft and helicopters to ferry supplies to areas that have been cut off by the disaster.
Japan will also send three navy ships, led by the Ise, Japan’s largest warship.
Tokyo also offered $10 million in emergency aid.
As more countries came forward with impressive aid packages — and after days of ignoring criticism that it was offering too little aid — China on Thursday said it would increase its assistance.
The Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, said that China had never intended the amount of assistance to remain fixed, and insisted that it had adjusted its contribution according to growing needs.
“An overwhelming majority of Chinese people are sympathetic with the people of the Philippines,” he said.
Analysts, however, said one factor in determining the initial size of the assistance was the hostility among Chinese Internet commentators toward foreign aid, and to help for the Philippines in particular because of territorial disputes.
“There must have been a debate” inside the government about how much aid to give and how to supply it, said Qin Yaqing, professor of international studies at the Foreign Affairs University in Beijing.
He continued, “Chinese culture takes an incremental way of doing things so as not to cause more trouble with the domestic” audience.
In an unusual turn, Global Times, a newspaper that often projects a nationalist editorial line, criticized the initial offer of aid as too small.
In an editorial on Tuesday, it noted that the Philippines was a two-hour flight from China’s southern coast, but that countries much farther away responded quickly.
“A twisted relationship between the two countries caused by maritime disputes is not the reason to block joint efforts to combat natural disaster,” the editorial said.

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China’s Revealing Typhoon Haiyan Response

By Daniel Baltrusaitis

In response to the tragedy that has unfolded over the past days in the Philippines, a number of countries have rushed to contribute to the recovery efforts. 

Altruism is its own reward, of course, but the aid ultimately gives these countries influence with the Philippine people and government. 

The recovery efforts have been rapid, albeit not rapid enough for those devastated by the disaster. 

One nation, however, has been notably absent: China.
China's foreign ministry announced that the country would provide $100,000 in cash and “humanitarian emergency relief assistance” to the Philippines, an absurdly paltry amount in comparison to the aid provided by other nations. 

For instance, the United Arab Emirates, home to approximately 700,000 Philippine nationals, has pledged $10 million, while regional powers Australia and the Republic of Korea have pledged $10 million and $5 million respectively. 

The United States has deployed a team of about 90 Marines and sailors as part of the first wave of promised U.S. military assistance amounting to $20 million.
As well as meeting the human needs of this tragedy, this disaster relief assistance is a remarkably effective — and inexpensive — investment in the future. 

Joseph Nye, Harvard Professor and former Assistant Secretary of Defense, coined the term “soft power” to describe this investment.

According to Nye, soft power is the process of attraction, which allows a state to attain its desired outcomes by co-opting people rather than coercing them through “hard power” actions such as military action or economic sanctions. 

Soft power events such as disaster relief are an important component of foreign policy because of the lasting goodwill that results from the support. 

The massive U.S. relief effort in response to the 2004 earthquake and tsunami built American goodwill in Indonesia and long-term ally Thailand. 

According to Jonah Blank, a senior political scientist at the non-profit, non-partisan RAND Corporation and a former policy director for South and Southeast Asia on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the tsunami relief effort may rank as one of the most concrete reasons Southeast Asian nations trust rather than fear the U.S. refocus on the Pacific Rim in its strategy of "Asian rebalancing."
China has recognized the effect of soft power in influencing other nations. 

In 2007, Hu Jintao, then General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, enjoined the Party leadership to increase its soft power. 

Since 2004 the Communist government has embarked on an aggressive campaign to champion Chinese language and culture by establishing a series of non-profit government funded Confucius Institutes. 

According to Nye, a rising power like China should use soft power to made its growing economic and military might appear less frightening to its neighbors. 

A smart strategy employing soft power should lesson the concerns of Chinese expansion and make balancing coalitions less effective.
Luckily the Chinese government has missed two important lessons regarding soft power. 

The first is that soft power is more effectively developed through civil society. Everything from universities and foundations to pop culture provide a strong attractive force for other societies and cultures. The least effective instrument of soft power is the government. Government attempts at building soft power are rarely credible. 

The second lesson is that disaster relief is probably the most effective method to give a “soft edge” to military force. China has repeatedly demonstrated its commitment to contesting territorial claims on the Scarborough Shoal by deploying naval, coast guard, and China marine surveillance vessels to the area. The lack of disaster assistance is telling of Chinese long-term intentions.

The current snub is a reflection of China’s dissatisfaction with a recent appeal by the Philippine government to a United Nations Arbitral Tribunal to resolve the dispute over the Scarborough Shoal. 

It is the first time that Beijing has been taken to a U.N. tribunal and China is fuming because a loss in arbitration could seriously affect its ambitions in the South China Sea, encouraging other countries to counter Chinese territorial claims through U.N. action. 

China insists that territorial disputes over islands in the South China Sea should be settled through bilateral negotiation, mainly because of its unmatched hard power in the region.
Typhoon Haiyan has given Beijing an opportunity to show that it can be a responsible regional leader, showing a softer side to its ambitions in Southeast Asia.

Unfortunately it is failing miserably. 

The Chinese state-run Global Times newspaper said in an editorial on Tuesday, “China’s international image is of vital importance to its interests. If it snubs Manila this time, China will suffer great losses.” 

The editorial is prescient in its prediction. 

Haiyan has shown that China’s ambitions are hard power related. 

Southeast Asia and the U.S. have a right to be concerned.

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A Game of Shark and Minnow

By JEFF HIMMELMAN

In a remote corner of the South China Sea, 105 nautical miles from the Philippines, lies a submerged reef the Filipinos call Ayungin.

In most ways it resembles the hundreds of other reefs, islands, rock clusters and cays that collectively are called the Spratly Islands. But Ayungin is different. In the reef’s shallows there sits a forsaken ship, manned by eight Filipino troops whose job is to keep China in check.

Ayungin Shoal lies 105 nautical miles from the Philippines. 

There’s little to commend the spot, apart from its plentiful fish and safe harbor — except that Ayungin sits at the southwestern edge of an area called Reed Bank, which is rumored to contain vast reserves of oil and natural gas. 

And also that it is home to a World War II-era ship called the Sierra Madre, which the Philippine government ran aground on the reef in 1999 and has since maintained as a kind of post-apocalyptic military garrison, the small detachment of Filipino troops stationed there struggling to survive extreme mental and physical desolation. 

Of all places, the scorched shell of the Sierra Madre has become an unlikely battleground in a geopolitical struggle that will shape the future of the South China Sea and, to some extent, the rest of the world.
In early August, after an overnight journey in a fishing boat that had seen better days, we approached Ayungin from the south and came upon two Chinese Coast Guard cutters stationed at either side of the reef. We were a small group: two Westerners and a few Filipinos, led by Mayor Eugenio Bito-onon Jr., whose territory includes most of the Philippine land claims in the South China Sea. 

The Chinese presence at Ayungin had spooked the Philippine Navy out of undertaking its regular run to resupply the troops there, but the Chinese were still letting some fishing boats through. 

We were to behave as any regular fishing vessel with engine trouble or a need for shelter in the shoal would, which meant no radio contact. 

As we throttled down a few miles out and waited to see what the Chinese Coast Guard might do, there was only an eerie quiet.
Bito-onon stood at the prow, nervously eyeing the cutters. 

Visits to his constituents on the island of Pag-asa, farther northwest, take him past Ayungin fairly frequently, and the mayor has had his share of run-ins. 

Last October, he said, a Chinese warship crossed through his convoy twice, at very high speed, nearly severing a towline connecting two boats. 

This past May, as the mayor’s boat neared Ayungin in the middle of the night, a Chinese patrol trained its spotlight on the boat and tailed it for an hour, until it became clear that it wasn’t headed to Ayungin. 

“They are becoming more aggressive,” the mayor said. “We didn’t know if they would ram us.”

We didn’t know if they would ram us, either. 

As we approached, we watched through binoculars and a camera viewfinder to see if the Chinese boats would try to head us off. 

After a few tense moments, it became clear that they were going to stay put and let us pass. 

Soon we were inside the reef, the Sierra Madre directly in front of us. 

As we chugged around to the starboard side, two marines peered down uncertainly from the top of the long boarding ladder. 

The ship’s ancient communications and radar equipment loomed above them, looking as if it could topple over at any time. 

After a series of rapid exchanges with the mayor, the marines motioned for us to throw up our boat’s ropes. Within a minute or two the fishing boat was moored and we were handing up our bags, along with cases of Coca-Cola and Dunkin’ Donuts that naval command had sent along as pasalubong, gifts for the hungry men on board.
From afar, the boat hadn’t looked much different from the Chinese boats that surrounded it. 

But at close range, water flowed freely through holes in the hull.
With the tropical sun blasting down on it, the ship was ravaged by rust. 

Whole sections of the deck were riddled with holes.
Old doors and metal sheets dotted paths where the men walked, to prevent them from plunging into the cavernous tank space below.
It was hard to imagine how such a forsaken place could become a flash point in a geopolitical power struggle.
But before we had much time to think about that, someone pointed out that the Chinese boats had started to move. 

They left their positions to the east and west of the reef and began to converge just off the starboard side, where the reef came closest to the ship.

Chinese Coast Guard cutters patrol within sight of the Sierra Madre.

The mayor and several others stood quietly on deck, watching them as they came. 

The message from the Chinese was unmistakable: We see you, we’ve got our eye on you, we are here.
As the Chinese boats made their half-circle in front of the Sierra Madre, the mayor mimed the act of them filming us. 

“Wave,” he said. “We’re going to be big on YouTube.”

Dangerous Ground
To understand how Ayungin (known to the Western world as Second Thomas Shoal) could become contested ground is to confront, in miniature, both the rise of China and the potential future of U.S. foreign policy. 

It is also to enter into a morass of competing historical, territorial and even moral claims in an area where defining what is true or fair may be no easier than it has proved to be in the Middle East.
The Spratly Islands sprawl over roughly 160,000 square miles in the waters of the coasts of the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and China — all of whom claim part of the islands.
Since the 18th century, navigators have referred to the Spratlys as “Dangerous Ground” — a term that captures not only the treacherous nature of the area but also the mess that is the current political situation in the South China Sea.
In addition to the Philippines, the governments of China and Vietnam also claim the Spratlys for themselves, and have occupied some of them as a way to stake that claim. 

Malaysia and Brunei make more modest partial claims.
The Chinese base their claims on Xia and Han dynasty records and a 1947 map made by the Kuomintang. The nine-dash line derived from that map pushes up against the coastlines of all the other countries in the area.
The current Philippine claim is based mostly on the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea from 1982, which established an Exclusive Economic Zone of 200 nautical miles off the shore of sovereign states.
Why the fuss over “Dangerous Ground”? 

Natural resources are a big piece of it. 

According to current U.S. estimates, the seabed beneath the Spratlys may hold up to 5.4 billion barrels of oil and 55.1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. 

On top of which, about half of the world’s merchant fleet tonnage and nearly one third of its crude oil pass through these waters each year. 

They also contain some of the richest fisheries in the world.
In 2012, China and the Philippines engaged in a standoff at Scarborough Shoal, after a Philippine warship attempted to expel Chinese fishing boats from the area, which they claimed had been harvesting endangered species within the Philippine EEZ. 

Although the shoal lies well to the north of the Spratlys, it is in many ways Ayungin’s direct precedent.

The Cabbage Strategy
China is currently in disputes with several of its neighbors, and the Chinese have become decidedly more willing to wield a heavy stick. 

There is a growing sense that they have been waiting a long time to flex their muscles and that that time has finally arrived. 

“Nothing in China happens overnight,” Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt, the director of Asia-Pacific programs at the United States Institute of Peace, said.

“Any move you see was planned and prepared for years, if not more. So obviously this maritime issue is very important to China.”
It is also very important to the United States, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made clear at a gathering of the Association of Southeast Nations (Asean) in Hanoi in July 2010. 

Clinton declared that freedom of navigation in the South China Sea was a “national interest” of the United States, and that “legitimate claims to maritime space in the South China Sea should be derived solely from legitimate claims to land features,” which could be taken to mean that China’s nine-dash line was illegitimate. The Chinese foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, chafed visibly, left the meeting for an hour and returned only to launch into a long, vituperative speech about the danger of cooperation with outside powers.
President Obama and his representatives have reiterated America’s interest in the region ever since. 

The Americans pointedly refuse to take sides in the sovereignty disputes. 

But China’s behavior as it becomes more powerful, along with freedom of navigation and control over South China Sea shipping lanes, will be among the major global political issues of the 21st century. 

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, of the $5.3 trillion in global trade that transits the South China Sea each year, $1.2 trillion of it touches U.S. ports — and so American foreign policy has begun to shift accordingly.
In a major speech in Singapore last year, Leon Panetta, then the secretary of defense, described the coming pivot in U.S. strategy in precise terms: “While the U.S. will remain a global force for security and stability, we will of necessity rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region.” 

He referred to the United States as a “Pacific nation,” with a capital “P” and no irony, and then announced a series of changes — most notably that the roughly 50-50 balance of U.S. naval forces between the Pacific and the Atlantic would become 60-40 Pacific by 2020. 

Given the size of the U.S. Navy, this is enormously significant.
In June, the United States helped broker an agreement for both China’s and the Philippines’s ships to leave Scarborough Shoal peacefully, but China never left. 

They eventually blocked access to the shoal and filled in a nest of boats around it to ward off foreign fishermen.
“Since [the standoff], we have begun to take measures to seal and control the areas around the Huangyan Island,” Maj. Gen. Zhang Zhaozhong, of China’s People’s Liberation Army, said in a television interview in May, using the Chinese term for Scarborough. (That there are three different names for the same set of uninhabitable rocks tells you much of what you need to know about the region.)
He described a “cabbage strategy,” which entails surrounding a contested area with so many boats — fishermen, fishing administration ships, marine surveillance ships, navy warships — that “the island is thus wrapped layer by layer like a cabbage.”

There can be no question that the cabbage strategy is in effect now at Ayungin and has been at least since May. 

General Zhang, in his interview several months ago, listed Ayungin in the P.L.A.’s “series of achievements” in the South China Sea. 

He had already put it in the win column, even though eight Filipino marines still live there. 

He also seemed to take some pleasure in the strategy. 

Of taking territory from the Philippines, he said: “We should do more such things in the future. For those small islands, only a few troopers are able to station on each of them, but there is no food or even drinking water there. If we carry out the cabbage strategy, you will not be able to send food and drinking water onto the islands. Without the supply for one or two weeks, the troopers stationed there will leave the islands on their own. Once they have left, they will never be able to come back.”

‘If You Want to Live, Eat’
On the deck of the Sierra Madre, with morning sun slanting off the bright blue water and the crowing of a rooster for a soundtrack, Staff Sgt. Joey Loresto and Sgt. Roy Yanto were improvising. 

Yanto, a soft-spoken 31-year-old, had lost an arrow spearfishing on the shoal the day before. 

Now he had pulled the handle off an old bucket and was banging it straight with a rusty mallet in an attempt to make it into a spear. 

Everything on the Sierra Madre was this way — improvised, repurposed. 

“Others came prepared,” Loresto said of previous detachments that had been briefed about life on the boat before they arrived and knew they would need to fish to supplement their diet. 

“But we were not prepared.”
For the final touches to the arrowhead, Yanto used a hammer and a rusted, machete-like blade.
They made spearfishing guns from a piece of wood, a bolt repurposed as a trigger and two pieces of rubber for propulsion.
In the afternoons, if the weather was good and the tide was low, they would don snorkels and old goggles and swim around the boat.
A successful spearfishing session meant avoiding barracudas and sharks and gathering a basket full of Philippine grouper known as lapu-lapu.
Yanto lived alone at the stern of the boat, in a room with a bed, a mosquito net, an M-16 propped against the wall and nothing but a tarp wrapped around a steel bar to separate him from the sea. 

He also took care of the three fighting cocks on the boat.

They were lashed to various perches at the stern and took great pleasure in crowing at anybody who tried to use the “toilet,” a seatless ceramic bowl suspended over the water by iron pipes and plywood.
Yanto has a wife and a 6-year-old son back in Zamboanga City. 

Like the others, he is able to talk to his family once a week or so, when they call in to one of the two satellite phones that the men take care to keep dry and charged. 

“It’s enough for me,” he said, of the 5 or 10 minutes he gets on the phone with his family. 

“What’s important is that I heard their voice.”
Like Yanto, Loresto was wearing a sleeveless jersey with “MARINES” printed across the front and a section of mesh between the chest and waistline, uniforms for the world’s most exotic basketball team. 

“It’s a lonely place,” Loresto said.

“But we make ourselves busy, always busy.”
When his arrow was complete, Yanto turned to two tubs covered in plastic, which were filled with fish that he had picked off his line the previous night. 

Fishing lines descended at regular intervals from the port side of the boat, with each soldier responsible for his own; they spend hours tending to them. 

Yanto split the fish open, covered them with salt, then laid them out to dry on a plank hanging above the deck. 

“Good for breakfast,” he said, gesturing to the fish he was putting up.

The men depend on fish as their main means of physical survival.

The men depend on fish — fresh, fried, dried — as their main means of physical survival. 

They were all undernourished and losing weight, even though eating and meal prep were the main activities on board, after fishing. 

Asked what meal he missed most from the mainland, Yanto said, “Vegetables,” without hesitation. 

“That’s more important than meat or any other kind of dish.” 

The motto of the boat, spray-painted on the wall near the kitchen, was “Kumain ang gustong mabuhay” — basically: “If you want to live, eat.”
In the long hours between lunch and dinner, most of the men would disappear into their quarters to pass the time. 

Aside from Yanto and the one Navy seaman on board, who occupied an aerie above everybody else, the marines lived in the old officer’s quarters and on the boat’s bridge. 

When the Sierra Madre was first driven up on the shoal in 1999, it was apparently a desired posting: there was less rust, you could sleep wherever you wanted and people played basketball in the vast tank space below deck. (Now that space was filled with standing water and whatever trash the men threw into it.) 

Aside from the quarters, which were themselves full of leaks and rust, there was hardly any place inside the boat to congregate that wasn’t either a health hazard, full of water or open to the elements. 

In bad weather, they gathered in the communications room on the second floor, where Loresto’s DVD player and computer were kept, to watch movies or sing karaoke. (They were all pretty good, but Yanto stood out. He nailed George Michael’s “Careless Whisper,” down to the vividly emotional hand gestures.) 

If they weren’t at the computer, they were just off to the side, in a small, dark workout area that held an exercise bike (extra resistance supplied by pulling a strap with your hands), an ancient bench press and a bunch of Vietnam-era American communications equipment.

Servicemen Roel Sarucam, Joey Loresto, Charlie Claro, Lionel Pepito, Israel Briguera and Antonio Olayra on the deck of the Sierra Madre.

The Sierra Madre at one time was the U.S.S. Harnett County, built as a tank-landing ship for World War II and then repurposed as a floating helicopter and speedboat hub in the rivers of Vietnam. 

In 1970 the U.S. gave the ship to the South Vietnamese, and in 1976 it was passed on to the Philippines. But nobody had ever taken the time to strip all of the communications gear or even old U.S. logbooks and a fleet guide from 1970.
In good weather, the men socialized outside, under the corrugated-tin roof that sheltered the boat’s small kitchen and living area. 

The “walls” were tarps, repurposed doors, old metal sheets and the backs of storage lockers. 

The “floor” consisted of two large canted metal plates that met in the middle of the boat, suspended above a large void in the deck. 

The plates popped and echoed with deep thuds whenever anybody walked over them. 

Everything was on an incline, so the legs of the peeling-leather couches and tables were sawed to various lengths to square their surfaces. 

A locker at the center, the driest spot on deck, held mostly inoperable electronic equipment and a small television that had a satellite connection but stayed on for only five minutes at a time. 

The men got together in the evenings to watch the Philippine squad make a surprising run in the FIBA Asia basketball tournament, only to be interrupted as the television repeatedly went dark. 

To fix it they had to insert a thin metal wire into a hole in the set and then power the machine off and back on again. 

“Defective,” one of marines said, by way of explanation. 

Loresto smiled and shook his head. “Overuse,” he said.

Loresto was the life of the boat. 

When the men played pusoy dos, a variation of poker, he displayed an impressive and sustained level of exuberance, often plastering the winning card to his forehead, face out, and shouting with laughter. 

He comes from Ipilan, on the island of Palawan. 

He’s 35, with a wife and three children, ages 2, 10 and 12. 

Before this posting, he spent 10 years fighting Islamic extremists in Mindanao, the southernmost island group in the Philippine archipelago. 

Asked whether he preferred combat or the Sierra Madre, Loresto thought for a second and then said, “Combat.”
He also had one of the only real military jobs on the boat, manning the radio and reporting the number and behavior of the boats outside the shoal. 

He was also the one to note and record that a U.S. intelligence plane, a P-3C Orion, tended to fly over the shoal whenever the Chinese made a significant tactical shift.
Loresto regularly updated his “sightings” — a Hainanese fishing vessel there, a Vietnamese one here.
When the Chinese swapped their maritime surveillance boats out for Coast Guard cutters, Loresto took note.
Every four hours, he radioed his reports. 

He didn’t love being there, but he knew why it was necessary. 

“It’s our job to defend our sovereignty,” he said.
One morning, as a Chinese boat circled slowly off the Sierra Madre’s starboard side, Mayor Bito-onon pulled out his computer to deliver a PowerPoint presentation about the various Philippine-held islands in the Spratlys. 

Most of the men had never seen anything like it before, and they gathered eagerly behind the mayor as he sat on a bench and walked them through it. 

Bito-onon was surprised at how little they knew about the struggle that was playing out around them. 

“They are blank, blank,” he told me after the presentation. 

“They don’t even know what’s on the nightly news.”
Other than a couple of jokes about “visiting China without a passport” (i.e., being captured), life at the tip of the gun didn’t feel much like life at the tip of a gun. 

It felt more like the world’s most surreal fishing camp. 

The Chinese boats were always there, but they were a source more of mystery than fear. 

“We don’t know why they’re out there,” Yanto said at one point. 

“Are they looking for us? What is their intention?”
To Bito-onon, the Chinese intentions were clear. 

At breakfast he had said, “They could come take this at any time, and everybody knows it.” 

What would these guys do if that happened? 

He raised both hands, smiled and said, “Surrender.”

Mayor Eugenio Bito-onon Jr. has 288 voting constituents across a domain called the Kalayaan Island Group.

Later, as he sat on the bamboo bench that was his workplace, television-viewing station and bed for five days and nights on the deck of the Sierra Madre, he talked about Ayungin as the staging ground for China’s domination of the Pacific. 

“The Chinese want both the fisheries and the gas. They’re using their fisheries to dominate the area, but the oil is the target.” 

Almost as if on cue, one of the Chinese Coast Guard cutters chased off a fishing boat north of the shoal. 

As the mayor watched, he said that he hoped they wouldn’t do the same to our boat when we tried to leave. “What does that mean for me if they do?” he asked. 

“I can’t even come here or to Pag-asa?” 

Earlier he joked about the headline if the Chinese stopped him: “A Mayor Was Caught in His Own Territory!”

Threadbare Settlements
The official name of the mayor’s domain is the Kalayaan Island Group, which technically encompasses most of the Spratlys but in reality amounts to five islands, two sandbars and two reefs that the Philippines currently controls. 

He has 288 voting constituents, of which about 120 live at any one time on Pag-asa, the only island with a civilian population.

About 120 people live at any one time on Pag-asa, including civilians.

He is a slender, spry man of 57, with a quirky sense of humor that enables him to leaven his criticisms of graft and corruption at the higher levels of the Philippine government with friendly jokes and oblique asides. 

But his frustration with the lack of resources and the lack of political will is obvious. 

The Philippines, he says, has done very little to develop the islands they hold, while Vietnam and Malaysia have turned some of the reefs and islands they occupy into resorts that the Chinese would find much more difficult to justify taking as their own. 

Except for Pag-asa, the Philippines has mustered only the most threadbare of settlements, some even more desolate than Ayungin.
Three days later, we would ride in a small dinghy over the break and up onto the sloped beach of Lawak, 60 nautical miles to the north of the Sierra Madre. 

Like Ayungin, Lawak serves as a strategic gateway to the rich oil and gas reserves of the Reed Bank. 

Unlike Ayungin, Lawak also happens to look like a postcard picture of a deserted-island paradise — a circle of crushed-coral beach enclosing nearly 20 acres of scrub grass, palm trees, a bird sanctuary and a sea-turtle nesting ground.
Second Lt. Robinson Retoriano runs the detachment of 11 worn Filipino troops there. 

Most of the men under his command wear shorts, flip-flops and tank tops, but he led us on a tour of the island in full camouflage, pointing out with pride their recently constructed barracks and a basketball court with a spectator swing made of “drifted things.”

Lawak is a circle of crushed-coral beach enclosing scrub grass, palm trees, 11 worn Filipino troops and one basketball court.

As we sat down in the courtyard, Pfc. Juan Colot, an M-16 slung low off his bony shoulders, whistled to the camp’s domesticated gull, which flew directly into his hands and chirped complacently. 

Retoriano is from Manila, and when we asked what a city boy like him was doing on an island in the middle of the South China Sea, he said, “I’m still wondering myself.”
In some ways, the guys on Lawak were even more isolated than Loresto and Yanto and the others on Ayungin. 

They were not allowed any use of the satellite phones whatsoever, not even for calls from loved ones. 

“It doubles the distance,” Retoriano said. 

To combat the loneliness, Retoriano sometimes gave the marines jobs to do, just to keep them busy. 

In the mornings they got up at 6 to sweep the camp. 

In the afternoons they fixed their hammocks outside, to sleep in the fresh air.
Over the course of a few hours, Retoriano referred to the island as “paradise” several times — which it was, if you focused on its physical beauty and didn’t think of how hard it would be to actually live there. 

And in truth these guys had it better than some of the other detachments — Kota, Parola, Likas, Rizal Reef, Patag — because at least they had ground to live and sleep on.

The settlements on Rizal Reef, Patag and Panata are mostly crude stilted structures over shallow water or small sandbars, with very little room to maneuver and fishing as the sole activity and consolation. 

According to Bito-onon, the troops on Rizal Reef used to tie themselves to empty oil drums when there was particularly bad weather at night, so that if a high sea or an errant piece of ocean debris wiped out the stilts, they’d at least be able to float.
“A lot of Filipino people might not know why we’re fighting for these islands,” Retoriano said as we prepared to leave Lawak. 

“But once you see it, and you’ve stepped on it, you understand. It’s ours.” 

He accompanied us into the water and out to our launch boat, still in full fatigues and big black combat boots, getting drenched up to his chest. 

As he helped me swing up and over the lip of our boat, he said, “I’m glad we didn’t talk much about the sensitive political situation. But if you ask me, I think China is just a big bully.”

‘I’ve Never Seen More White Knuckles’
The Philippines’ best hope for resisting China currently resides inside a set of glassy offices in the heart of the K Street power corridor in Washington. 

There, Paul Reichler, a lawyer at Foley Hoag who specializes in international territorial disputes, serves as the lead attorney for the Philippines in its arbitration case over their claims in the South China Sea. 

Initiated in January, the case seeks to invalidate China’s nine-dash line and establish that the territorial rights be governed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which both China and the Philippines have signed and ratified. 

The subtleties of the case revolve around E.E.Z.’s and continental shelves, without expressly resolving sovereignty issues. 

China has refused to participate, but the Philippines has proceeded anyway.
The key element, as far as the Sierra Madre is concerned, is that the case is growing to reflect the new reality on the water. 

“Ayungin will be part of the case now, now that the Chinese have virtually occupied it,” Reichler told me. 

He was hoping that the tribunal would define Ayungin as a “submerged feature.” 

A submerged feature, he explained, is considered part of the seabed and belongs to whoever owns the continental shelf underneath it, not to whoever happens to be occupying it. 

“The fact that somebody physically occupies it doesn’t give them any rights,” he said.
This took a second to sink in. 

Historically, the physical presence of troops on the Sierra Madre had been a vital part of the Filipino strategy; currently their presence was the only thing stopping a complete Chinese takeover there. 

Wasn’t that against the Philippines’ own interests? 

“No,” Reichler said. 

“Not if we’re not occupying it.” 

What he meant was that the Philippines wants to nullify any claim to a submerged feature based on who has control above the water — which applies beyond Ayungin to Mischief Reef and others, which the Chinese currently occupy. 

Surely this is a strong legal strategy, calibrated for an international tribunal. 

But if this is the strategy, you couldn’t help wondering what those guys were still doing out there, getting choked off a little bit more each day, while the legal process sought to make them irrelevant.
Mischief, a submerged reef similar to Ayungin and roughly 20 miles to its west, makes for an instructive example. 

It used to belong to the Philippines, but in 1994 the Chinese took advantage of a lull in Filipino maritime patrols caused by a passing typhoon and rapidly erected a stilted structure that they then made clear they were not going to leave. 

Slowly they turned it into a military outpost, over the repeated protests of the Filipinos, and now it serves as a safe harbor for the Chinese ships that patrol Ayungin and other areas.
What China has done with Mischief, Scarborough and now with Ayungin is what the journalist Robert Haddick described, writing in Foreign Policy, as “salami slicing” or “the slow accumulation of actions, none of which is a casus belli, but which add up over time to a major strategic change.” 

Huang Jing, the director of the Center on Asia and Globalization at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, noted that in all of these conflicts — Scarborough, Ayungin — China insists on sending its civilian maritime force, which is theoretically unarmed. 

This has a powerful double significance: first, that the Chinese don’t want to start a war, even though in many ways they are playing the aggressor; and second, that they view any matter in the South China Sea as an internal affair. 

As Huang put it: “What China is doing is putting both hands behind its back and using its big belly to push you out, to dare you to hit first. And this has been quite effective.”

In bringing their complaints to arbitration, the Philippines has used the only real lever it has: to try to occupy the moral high ground and focus international attention on the issue. 

In response, China has tried to isolate the Philippines — discouraging President Benigno S. Aquino III from attending the China-Asean Expo in Nanning last month and continuing to steer the Asean agenda away from a final agreement on a legally binding code of conduct in the South China Sea. (One former U.S. official told me, “So far, China has been able to split Asean the way you would split a cord of wood.”) 

China has stated that they view the overlapping claims as bilateral issues, to be negotiated between China and each individual claimant one at a time, a strategy that maximizes what China can extract from each party.
While an arbitration outcome unfavorable to the Chinese — which could be decided as early as March 2015 — would create some public-perception problems for them, China is unlikely to be deterred, in part because there is no enforcement mechanism.

“Let’s be honest,” Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt says, “China has essentially studied how the U.S. has conducted its hegemony, and they’re saying, ‘We have to respect some court case?’ They say that the United States blatantly violates international law when it’s in its interest. China sees this as what first-class powers do.” (Multiple requests for comment from the Chinese government went unanswered.)
The official U.S. position, articulated by Secretaries Clinton and Kerry, has been that the U.S. will not take sides in disputes over sovereignty. 

As the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Daniel R. Russel, told me, “Our primary interest is in maintaining peace, security and stability that allows for economic growth and avoids tension or conflict.” 

Basically, we’re staying out of it. 

But the U.S. has stepped up its joint operations with the Philippines, including a recent mock amphibious landing not far from Scarborough Shoal. 

There has also been talk of increasing U.S. troop rotations into some of its former bases.
“I think we want to find a way to restrain China and reassure the Philippines without getting ourselves into a shooting war,” James Steinberg, the former deputy secretary of state under Hillary Clinton, told me. 

“We have a broad interest in China behaving responsibly. But sovereignty over the Spratly Islands is not our dispute. We need to find a way to be engaged without being in the middle.” 

Kurt Campbell, a former assistant secretary of state with the Obama administration, put it more bluntly: “Maritime territorial disputes are the hardest problem, bar none, that diplomats are currently facing in Asia. On all of these issues, no country has any flexibility. I’ve never seen more white knuckles.”
According to Huang Jing: “Everyone in this region is playing a double game. Ten years ago, the United States was absolutely dominant in the region — economically, politically, militarily. People only had one yardstick to measure their national interest and their foreign policy, and the name of that yardstick was U.S.A. Now there are two yardsticks. On the political one, it’s still the U.S., but on the economic one, it is China.”

The United States does not have the unlimited leverage that it once did, and so for the time being it is allowing the Chinese to slice their salami all the way up onto the shallows of Ayungin.

Beneath a Ceiling of Clouds
The first rains of the typhoon came after dark, howling sideways across the deck of the Sierra Madre. 

We’d been hearing about the storm for a couple of days over the radio, tracking its course as it made landfall on Luzon and then turned west toward the South China Sea.
Under the supervision of Second Lt. Charlie Claro, the 29-year-old commander of the outpost, the men drilled holes in the boards with hand-cranks and pulled old, bent, rusted nails out of stray pieces of wood, hammered them straight, then reused them.
A couple of wooden doors were added to the walls of the living area, and additional tarps went into place.
A ceiling of clouds had lowered and blackened, and the wind began battering parts of the ship’s deck.
Rain poured into the laundry room through the ceiling, drenching everything. 

A rooster took shelter in a dry corner.
By nightfall, the wind had intensified into a gale. 

We gathered in the living area to listen to it, more awed than scared. 

Lieutenant Claro surfaced every so often to make sure that his improvements were holding. 

The rest of the marines stayed inside, singing karaoke. 

Later, they watched the FIBA Asia finals, the Philippines vs. Iran. 

Miraculously, the satellite held for most of the game. 

It felt as if the wind might rip the roof off from above our heads, but the marines were in good cheer. 

A victory for the underdog Philippine squad would have made for a nice David and Goliath moment in a David and Goliath kind of story, but the Iranians appeared to be about nine inches taller at every position and were just too much for the Filipinos. 

At halftime the marines went out to check on whether their fishing lines were surviving the storm, then straggled off to bed.
The next two days passed with wind and rain and long hours with nothing to do. 

Yanto and Loresto led a tour of the cavernous, foul tank space below decks, where old fluorescent light bays hung overhead on dangerously rusted cables.
We started to be able to identify individual marines by their footfalls. 

Jokes that weren’t funny doubled us over. 

At one point, Pfc. Michael Navata walked in from checking his fishing line and said: “Cards. To pass the time.” 

We played hours of pusoy dos, making fun of one another, volume levels rising every time Loresto stuck the two of diamonds on his forehead. 

The slow, steady backbeat of bad weather and desolation fell away for a while, and it felt as if we could have been in Loresto’s living room in Ipilan. 

Yanto sat to my left, coaching me out of charity, his nonverbal instruction registering levels of depth and intelligence that language hadn’t made available to us. 

For a moment we could see them as they really were, these marines: men who were serving their country in an extreme and unrelenting and even somewhat humiliating situation and trying bravely to make the best of it.
On the afternoon of the second bad day, the sun came out. 

Yanto promptly went spearfishing. 

One by one, the other marines stripped down and jumped in. 

This turned into most of us taking turns leaping off the high starboard side of the Sierra Madre, about halfway up the deck, down into the light blue water below. 

You had to pick your way barefoot up to the rusted lip and then, with everybody watching, try to forget that you were on a devastated ancient boat run aground on a reef in the shark-infested South China Sea and just jump. 

It was maybe a 30-foot drop, which took a half-second longer than you expected it to, but the water was warm and clear. 

We splashed around on our backs like otters. 

The storm had passed, and we were safe. 

Lieutenant Claro led a small group in a swim around our fishing boat, which he pronounced seaworthy, but then proceeded to chuckle about for several minutes. 

It was so woeful looking. 

After five days on the Sierra Madre, it was also a reminder of the real world, of how we had gotten there, and of the fact that we’d be leaving soon while these guys had to stay behind and eat to live.

Flying Past the Death Star
A month or so later, I spoke with a U.S. pilot with extensive combat experience and knowledge of Special Forces operations. 

I wanted to know what the American foreign-policy pivot looked like from the inside, and he was willing to tell me only if I didn’t name him. 

“The Chinese are more aggressive because we’re not around,” he said. 

His most recent training would seem to reflect the American rebalancing to the Pacific theater: more counter-Chinese-technology operations, more engagement over water, island-hopping campaigns. 

He said that the joint operations with the Philippines were “a show of presence: Hey, we’re [expletive] sailing through the South China Sea, look at us. And you can’t do a thing about it.” 

But then he paused. “It’s funny, because China’s not that far from doing that off the California coast.”
Whatever America’s pivot might be, there’s no denying that Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific, is historically where United States foreign policy — and too many young men sent out to enforce it — has gone to die. 

For now, the course is a diplomatic one: the Philippines pursues its arbitration, the Asean states apply pressure for a binding code of conduct in the South China Sea, and the United States counsels patience (within reason) and the peaceful resolution of disputes. 

As it turns out, this somewhat scattershot approach may actually be starting to work. 

The Chinese leadership has undertaken a new charm offensive of late, visiting the capitals of some Asean countries (notably not the Philippines) and signaling that it might be willing to soften its positions on adopting a code of conduct and multilateral negotiations.
At the East Asia Summit meetings in Brunei two weeks ago (which John Kerry attended in place of President Obama because of the government shutdown), Kerry pushed for a quick implementation of a binding code of conduct. 

“That’s sort of a new thing,” Ricky Carandang, the secretary of communications for the Philippines, told me when we spoke after the meetings. 

“He said, ‘We welcome a code of conduct, we welcome legal processes and we think these things should happen faster.’ That’s different from saying, ‘Hey, let’s do what we can to avoid tension, and we’re not picking sides here.’ ” 

But Carandang also noted that Obama’s absence in Brunei had allowed the Chinese to loom larger. 

If he fails to show up to the next meeting, or the administration fails to follow up on some of its promises, the Southeast Asian nations will have cause to wonder about our resolve. (Obama is said to be mulling a trip to Asia in the spring.)
Nobody is questioning China’s resolve. 

The day after we left Ayungin, we arrived at the island of Pag-asa, the mayor’s home base and the place for which he has the grandest plans — a resort, a commercial fishery, a sheltered port. 

As we pulled in, we saw several large Chinese fishing boats a couple of miles off the island. 

Aerial photos would later confirm that they were cutting coral from the reef, which is often done to harvest giant clams and other rare species. 

Nobody on Pag-asa, with its broken boats, low-slung civilian buildings and quiet Air Force base, could do anything about it. 

There was recently a food shortage because the last two Filipino naval resupply vessels haven’t been able to make the trip because of inclement weather. 

After a night there, rather than getting back on our fishing boat for a 30-hour journey, we were happy to board a Philippine naval plane and begin the trip home.
We sped down the bumpy, grass-covered runway and lifted off, looking down on the ragtag island.
Just 12 nautical miles from Pag-asa and its airstrip lies Subi Reef, one of the more developed Chinese settlements in the South China Sea.
Anchored just outside the reef were about 20 enormous Chinese fishing boats, along with 50 or so smaller sampans busily working.
At the southwest corner sat a complex of concrete multistory structures, including a large-domed radar station, a helipad and a dormitory.
It’s easy to make China out as the villain in all of this. 

Most Western narratives do, even though several U.S. government officials assured me that there weren’t truly any “good guys” in these territorial disputes. 

One benefit of China’s political system, whatever its problems, is its farsightedness, its ability to stomach intense upheaval in the present in order to achieve a long-term goal.
Subi was a result of this commitment. 

After spending a few days on Pag-asa, where everything is free but nothing works quite like it’s supposed to, it was hard not to see Subi reef as the Death Star.
An hour later, we flew over Lawak, where we’d met Lieutenant Retoriano. 

Soon after, the pilot asked Ashley Gilbertson, the photographer on our trip, to put his headset on. 

We were due north of Ayungin, and our pilot had radioed the guys on the Sierra Madre to see how they were doing. 

Loresto answered the call, and when he heard that we were on the plane, he asked to speak with us. Gilbertson put on the headset and smiled as broadly as he’d smiled since the night Loresto fleeced us at pusoy dos during the typhoon. 

The weather was good, Loresto said; they were going spearfishing that afternoon. Didn’t we want to come down and join them? 

There was animated talk about karaoke, and then Loresto signed off. 

It was obviously the last time that we would ever talk to him, or maybe that any Filipino would ever be at that radio post to talk to anybody like us.
The entire world has an interest in the South China Sea, but China has nearly 1.4 billion mouths and a growing appetite for nationalism to feed, which is a kind of pressure that no other country can understand. What will happen will happen, whatever the letter of the Asean code of conduct or however the arbitration turns out. 

Loresto and Yanto, meanwhile, still abide on the Sierra Madre, fishing for their subsistence and watching the surf to see what wave the Chinese will choose to ride in on.
“You’ve got the wrong science-fiction movie,” one former highly placed U.S. official later told me, when I described what we saw at Subi, and what it might mean for the guys on Ayungin. 

“It’s not the Death Star. It’s actually the Borg from ‘Star Trek’: ‘You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.’ ” 

The scholar Huang Jing put it another, more organic way. “The Chinese expand like a forest, very slowly,” he said. 

“But once they get there, they never leave.”

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