Consider these three incidents:
• June 9, 2019 midnight, Recto Bank off Palawan: a speeding China steel-hulled maritime militia launch trained its lights on an anchored Filipino wooden fishing boat, rammed and sunk it, then switched off the lights, abandoning 22 Filipinos thrown into the cold dark sea;
• Aug. 19, 2019, Sibutu Strait, Tawi-Tawi: four China warships entered Philippine territorial waters without prior coordination with the Armed Forces of the Philippines; automatic identification systems turned off, zigzagging instead of on straight path as required when sailing through foreign jurisdiction, and ignoring AFP radio communications;
• Feb. 17, 2020, Malampaya Sound off Palawan: A China frigate aimed its gun control director at a Philippine Navy patrol, detected on radar and clearly seen by Filipino sailors – a hostile act since it meant the frigate’s weapon system already was locked in by radar and ready to fire at its target, well within the Philippines’ and outside China’s exclusive economic zone.
Those were not isolated maritime incidents. They were part of China’s gray operations against the Philippines, according to geopolitics expert Dr. Renato de Castro.
Gray zone operations, by Western definition, are measures short of war but made to look innocuous or non-confrontational. In Chinese context, it is political warfare designed to achieve political goals, explains de Castro, professor of international studies at De La Salle University.
“Gray-ops is the use of persuasive power to force adjustments in military, economic, political, and cultural relations with other states short of war,” de Castro says. “It involves dividing or weakening the power of enemies and rivals. The line separating military and non-military actions is blurred.”
Political warfare traces back to China’s imperial past. The ancient general Sun Tzu had said the best military victory is when no battle needed to be fought. When China’s Communist Party adopted the tenet, Mao Zedong declared, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
The aim of China’s present gray-ops is global re-expansion. De Castro shares the view of many watchers that China’s communist rulers aim to re-establish empire, with China as the Middle Kingdom.
China’s eastward expansion was spelled out by the People’s Liberation Army-Navy as far back as 1989. It consists first of taking control of the entire South China Sea, then setting up a maritime Great Wall up to the Central Pacific.
China sought to justify its SCS claim with a concocted “historic nine-dash sea border”. The commissars since 1949 taught every citizen and general that the SCS was their internal lake. Scholars who knew otherwise were silenced. Retired Supreme Court justice Antonio Carpio exposed China’s “historic right” as the “fake news of the millennium.” Digging up more than three dozen ancient Chinese maps and a dozen more European, Japanese and Philippine cartographs, he proved that China’s southernmost border since time immemorial was Hainan island-province. China’s names for SCS “islands” were mere translations of British terms for the reefs, shoals, sandbars, banks and other sea features.
The Hague arbitral court in 2016 outlawed the farcical “nine-dash line” and China’s sea incursions. Upheld was Philippine maritime right over a 200-mile EEZ, under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Yet despite being bound by the international law as signatory, China refuses to abide. Bellicosely for China, might is right, say a growing number of Filipino and foreign leaders.
In the SCS, China gray-ops go on, de Castro warns. “They keep China’s sea aggression below the level of actual naval operation, and are performed hidden behind the cloak of deniability,” he says. “China is working to achieve nothing less than subjugation of neighbors’ civilian populations – and in turn their governments. China is waging ‘maritime insurgency’ to snuff out freedom of the sea” – without firing a shot.
De Castro lists among China’s SCS gray-ops its:
• Continued occupation of Scarborough Shoal, strategic in air and sea control of the SCS just off Subic Bay, Zambales;
• Concreting seven Philippine reefs into missile-equipped island-fortresses;
• Deploying fighters, bombers, troop transports, and warships;
• Using ill-gotten territories as staging hubs for China’s coast guard and maritime militia to intimidate Southeast Asian fishers;
• Constructing a base on Cambodia’s coast to enable China to encircle Vietnam and cut off its sea lines of communications at will.
Add to that China’s dispatch of 3,000 military spies on “immersion mission” in the Philippines, as revealed by Sen. Panfilo Lacson.
President Rody Duterte treated last year’s ramming of the Filipino boat as “an ordinary maritime traffic accident”, de Castro recounts. And Defense Sec. Delfin Lorenzana, while calling the aiming of gun control systems at a Philippine Navy vessel “offensive”, said China meant no harm and would never attack Philippine sea and aircraft in the EEZ.
Ignoring those gray-ops emboldens China to escalate, de Castro cautions. “It lulls our people and armed forces to a false sense of security, making them oblivious to the threat to the nation by China’s maritime expansionism,” he adds. “It isolates us from other countries that have been victimized by China.”
Downplaying the incidents “enables China to advance its maritime expansion through subtle aggressive actions that do not trigger serious and effective responses from targeted states like the Philippines,” he says. “Thus, China finds no more need for a major naval operation to control the disputed waters. It will eventually gain fishing grounds and strategic waterways in the SCS without outright armed conflict with the littoral states... China intends to ‘win all without fighting’.”
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