Phl more tempting target for China in sea showdown

WASHINGTON – The Philippines and Vietnam are China’s main frontline opponents in the South China Sea dispute, the US monthly magazine The Atlantic reported.

In its November issue, the magazine said China might view the Philippines as a more attractive target “to bully and humiliate as an object lesson to other neighbors that resistance is futile and decisive help from the United States unlikely to come.”

It reported China was intensifying efforts to remake its maritime borders to gain exclusive access to potentially rich oil and gas reserves, secure its supply lines and create a much larger buffer against what it regards as US naval intrusions.

A new Cold War – in which a rising China gradually seeks to push the US military out of the Western Pacific – is inevitable, said the lead article by Howard W. French entitled “China’s Dangerous Game.”

“Any such conflict would of course be dangerous whenever it happened, because the United States is likely to resist these efforts strenuously,” the article said.

Many Western analysts view China’s approach in the South China Sea as a sort of calibrated incrementalism, whereby a Chinese presence and de facto Chinese rights in disputed areas are built up gradually, in a series of provocations that are individually small enough to make forceful resistance politically difficult, but that collectively establish precedents and, over time, norms.

The Chinese name for this approach is the cabbage strategy.  

An area is slowly surrounded by individual ‘leaves’ – fishing boat here, a coast guard vessel there – until it’s wrapped in lawyers, like a cabbage. “Salami slicing” is another metaphor for the approach. 

One might think that a defense treaty the Philippines has with the US would prove to be a deterrence to Beijing but if the goal is to cut the US down to size in what China regards as its own backyard then Chinese leaders might view the Philippines as a more attractive target than Vietnam, The Atlantic said.

This thought was captured vividly in comments in June by Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu, a professor at China’s National Defense University who warned America’s allies in Asia that the United States had become a paper tiger, the article said. Zhu likened Washington’s response to the Ukraine crisis to “erectile dysfunction.”

From China’s perspective, the perfect scenario might be for the inexperienced Filipino armed forces to venture the use of newly acquired hardware such as frigates, attack helicopters and a fleet of coast guard patrol vessels, prompting a limited military encounter that would display Chinese superiority and enable China to make a new or stronger territorial claim to a few small atolls in the area, the article said.

The US might find it difficult to respond satisfactorily given the stakes.

To some elites in China, the opportunity to reveal the US as an unreliable alliance partner across the Pacific is surely alluring, the article said.

But the risks for China are also considerable.

It might be revealed instead as the paper tiger should the US call Beijing’s bluff, defending the Philippines if, for example, China tried to evict Filipino soldiers from their rust-bucket outpost, the BRP Sierra Madre, in the disputed Second Thomas Shoal in the Spratlys, the article said.