Over the weekend, the Philippines and China, which have been locked in a tense stand-off around the Second Thomas Shoal for months announced an agreement to deescalate tensions. While potentially positive, we believe that the long-term risk of conflict in the South China Sea remains alarmingly high. Our new dataset shows that China’s military coercion is more rampant than previously documented and disproportionately directed at the Philippines, the weakest link in the chain of U.S. alliances in Asia.
Recent skirmishes near Second Thomas Shoal, an obscure reef about 100 miles west of the Philippines’ Palawan Island, have brought this issue into sharp focus. The Philippines maintains a precarious military presence there, using a rusty shipwreck as a makeshift base for a handful of marines. An international court ruled in 2016 that the area lies within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. But China rejected the ruling and has repeatedly attempted to block resupply missions to the outpost by blinding Philippine crew members with high-powered lasers, ramming supply ships, and blasting them with water cannons.
These aggressive acts, and dozens of others going back to 2012, have not been primarily defensive reactions to foreign provocations, as China claims. Instead, they appear to be part of a premeditated assault on the soft underbelly of the U.S. alliance system, an attempt to undermine the credibility of U.S. security guarantees throughout the region by bludgeoning Philippine forces with impunity.
The Rodrigo Duterte administration (2016–2022) tried to shelve its territorial disputes with Beijing at various times and threatened to scuttle the U.S.-Philippine alliance. Yet Chinese military coercion toward the Philippines actually increased during Duterte’s term in office and was more intense than the coercion China directed at Vietnam — despite the fact that Hanoi aggressively expanded its military presence in the South China Sea. China also has harassed the Philippines more frequently than Japan, implying that China’s preferred target is a weak and floundering U.S. alliance rather than a strong one.
In sum, a comprehensive account of Chinese military coercion since 2012 suggests that Beijing’s behavior should be confronted rather than accommodated to avoid further escalation.
A History of Violence
China engaged in military coercion, ranging from seizing civilian vessels in contested waters to occupying new territory with military force, at least 132 times from 2012 to 2022 — a frequency roughly four times greater than previously estimated by scholars and an order of magnitude greater than any other country in the region. China has begun a new physical confrontation with its neighbors once per month on average, using all manner of hostile acts, including firing warning shots near foreign vessels or blocking their passage. China also paired this harassment with a dramatic expansion of its military presence across the South China Sea, including the construction of seven military bases atop artificial islands.
China claims it is simply defending its territory against foreign encroachments, engaging in what some Western analysts have called “reactive assertiveness.” In this view, which seemed plausible to some Sinologists in the early 2010s, China’s top leaders generally desire to avoid hostilities and employ coercion mainly in response to provocations from neighboring countries and the United States. The implication is that China might remain at peace, if other countries would cease their threatening and expansionist behavior.
The new data, however, suggests that this view is outdated, if it were ever true. Since at least 2012, China’s behavior in the South China Sea and East China Sea could be more accurately described as unprovoked aggression. Only 12 percent of China’s coercive acts were preceded by any sort of perceived hostile foreign move, such as when then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August of 2022. The remaining 88 percent of Chinese coercive acts were opportunistic, employed against vulnerable targets at times and in places of China’s choosing. More often than not, that place was the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone, a fact that underscores the grand geopolitical ambitions behind China’s fierce contestation of uninhabited rocks.
Targeting the Philippines
A decrepit ship in the Spratly Islands might seem an unlikely place for the world’s two most powerful countries to face off. But the United States has extended security guarantees to Philippine forces, aircraft, and public vessels operating in the South China Sea, presumably including the BRP Sierra Madre, which the Philippines deliberately ran aground on Second Thomas Shoal in 1999 — and which China has recently attempted to blockade. What might otherwise be a local territorial dispute has become a test of whether the United States will defend its allies, and for Beijing that seems to be the point.
Coercing the Philippines enables China to confront the United States with a dilemma: defend a weak and shaky ally over its territorial claims or stand aside as China expands its control of the South China Sea and undermines U.S. alliance commitments. China could wipe out the two frigates and handful of corvettes that comprise the Philippine Navy in a single skirmish, so there is little risk for Beijing in shoving Philippine forces around — and potentially much to gain. The U.S.-Philippine alliance is a vital component of the U.S. defense perimeter in Asia, providing U.S. forces with their only major bases within unrefueled combat range of the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, besides the two vulnerable bases on Okinawa, Japan that China has targeted with dozens of missiles. Yet the U.S.-Philippine alliance has often been tenuous since the Cold War, and Beijing has good reason to question how vigorously the United States would defend Filipino possessions in the South China Sea. “Would you go to war over Scarborough Shoals?” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was overheard saying in 2016. Every time China batters Philippine forces unopposed, it shows observers worldwide that America’s answer is “no.”
In addition, the Philippines is a symbolically important target for China. In 2016, Manila took Beijing to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague and won, with the tribunal ruling that China’s South China Sea claims were null and void. In response, China declared that it would not be bound by the rulings of a “puppet” court half a world away. Ejecting Filipino forces from their isolated South China Sea outposts enables China to back up that declaration in dramatic fashion and demonstrate resolve to consolidate its territorial claims throughout the region.
Perhaps for these reasons, China seems to be singling out the Philippines for special abuse. The contrast with Vietnam is striking. Over the past decade, Vietnam has aggressively contested Chinese territorial claims, openly challenging the legitimacy of China’s self-proclaimed Nine-Dash Line, such as by sending armed naval assets to counter the Chinese Coast Guard during the 2014 oil-rig standoff. Yet the Philippines has faced far more Chinese coercion since 2012 measured both by the duration and intensity of the confrontations. The Philippines is the only country in the region to have had territory permanently seized by China during this period, as occurred following the Scarborough Shoal incident in 2012. Dozens of Philippine fishing vessels have been sunk, robbed, or turned away from their traditional fishing grounds, thousands of Chinese flagged maritime-militia vessels have illegally operated in waters belonging to the Philippines, and nearly every military mission conducted by the Philippine navy has been met by resistance from Chinese forces.
The Philippines also has experienced more than twice the amount of Chinese coercion as has Japan — China’s hated historical enemy — and most of China’s confrontations with Japan in recent years have been non-kinetic, involving, for example, Chinese military flyovers of Japanese airspace rather than the ship-ramming, territorial seizure, and other violent punishment that Beijing has meted out to Manila.
Japan has strengthened its military forces and alliance with the United States in recent years and is much more militarily powerful than the Philippines. Those factors may explain why Beijing has focused more of its animus on Manila than Tokyo. Whereas the Philippines sought to appease China during the 2010s, Japan increased its joint military exercises with the United States, expanded the rotational presence of U.S. forces in Japan, and enhanced their integrated air and missile defense systems — all while reviving the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue as a not-so-subtle anti-China alliance. These steps signaled to Beijing that aggressive actions, such as the frequent confrontations between Chinese and Japanese forces near the Senkaku Islands in the early 2010s, will inspire a robust strategic response from Tokyo.
Duterte’s Failed Appeasement
China’s targeting of the Philippines is especially notable because Manila tried to placate China, off and on, from 2016 to 2022. Duterte chose not to enforce the 2016 arbitration ruling on the South China Sea, opting instead for bilateral engagement and joint development discussions with China. His administration prioritized economic cooperation, securing billions in investment pledges for infrastructure projects by linking his “Build, Build, Build” program with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Duterte made multiple visits to China, emphasizing collaboration and downplaying territorial disputes. He frequently praised China’s support, once stating, “I simply love Xi Jinping,” and highlighted the benefits of Chinese investment for the Philippines.
Simultaneously, Duterte’s stance towards the United States was characterized by frequent criticism and actions that strained bilateral relations. He insulted then-President Barack Obama with derogatory remarks, calling him a “son of a whore,” and expressed a desire for the U.S. to “go to hell.” Duterte also threatened to terminate the Visiting Forces Agreement, which governs the presence of U.S. troops in the Philippines, declaring, “Bye-bye, America” and hinting at seeking arms from Russia and China instead. While he ultimately suspended and then reinstated the agreement, the threat highlighted his intent to distance the Philippines from its longstanding military ally. Duterte also reduced the scope of joint military exercises with the United States, sought to diversify military procurement by exploring arms purchases from China and Russia, and suspended joint patrols in the South China Sea.
Despite Duterte’s rhetoric and actions favoring China, his policy of appeasement failed to reduce hostilities. In fact, Beijing instead dialed up its coercion of the Philippines during his administration, increasing the yearly rate of incursions into the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. In addition, this time saw the emergence of new areas of contestation as China deployed ships around the Second Thomas Shoal, Whitsun Reef, Sabina Shoal, and Thitu Island — all of which are located within the Philippines exclusive economic zone — and regularly harassed Filipino fisherman.
Duterte’s failed gambit shouldn’t have come as a surprise. In 2012, the United States attempted to mollify China on behalf of the Philippines by brokering an agreement for both countries to withdraw their forces from a contested area near the Scarborough Shoal. The Philippines respected the arrangement and removed its ships from the area. But the Chinese navy quickly returned, and has maintained de facto sovereignty over it ever since. Scholars found that due to this lackluster response, the Chinese government determined that the United States was unlikely to follow up on its redlines towards these uninhabited territories and saw it as a green light to expand operations across the South China Sea.
Implications
China’s actions in the South China Sea seem to weaken U.S. alliances by targeting the most vulnerable links, primarily the Philippines. The empirical record since 2012 suggests that avoiding confrontations and appeasing China does not guarantee a reduction in hostilities and may simply invite more coercion. By contrast, strengthening military capabilities and alliance ties can potentially deter further Chinese encroachments, as the bolstering of the U.S.-Japanese alliance seems to have done in the East China Sea. Currently, the U.S.-Philippine alliance is in the worst of all positions: provocative enough to arouse China’s ire, but too weak to deter China’s rampant use of maritime coercion.
Since 2022, Manila and Washington have started to rectify their vulnerabilities by resuming military exercises, preparing additional bases for potential use by U.S. forces, and transferring military equipment from the United States to Philippine forces, including reconnaissance drones, coastal patrol vessels, and radar systems. The United States also has temporarily deployed a mid-range missile system in the northern Philippines for annual joint military exercises. Prominent U.S. think tanks are proposing ways to enhance the Philippines’ maritime domain awareness and coast guard capabilities — for example, by transferring advanced surveillance technologies, including unmanned systems, and non-lethal capabilities such as water cannons, laser dazzlers, and long-range acoustic devices — so that Manila can impose costs on Beijing’s aggressive tactics without requiring the United States to answer the difficult question of which peripheral territories it is willing to defend itself.
Even if these efforts come to fruition, however, the U.S.-Philippine alliance will remain vulnerable because Manila’s military and coast guard are extremely weak, a problem that won’t be solved for years, if ever. Bolstering the alliance thus will require the United States to become more directly involved in confronting Chinese coercion in the South China Sea. The United States could, for example, convoy Philippine resupply missions to the BRP Sierra Madre at Second Thomas Shoal or simply use U.S. ships to resupply the base there. These efforts could be backed up by multinational patrols involving other regional allies such as Japan and Australia. Bullying the Philippines might not look so attractive to Xi if coercion consistently yielded a tightening ring of allied security cooperation. These steps obviously carry risks for U.S. forces.
The agreement this past weekend, will purportedly allow the Philippines to temporarily conduct resupply missions to the BRP Sierra Madre without militarized interference, while China maintains its claim that the atoll is firmly within Chinese territorial water. As the text of this agreement has yet to be made public, we cannot firmly say how these gains were won, but it is possible that the recent strengthening of the U.S.-Philippines alliance, or even explicit offers from the United States to assist in defending the atoll have caused China to reconsider its aggressive stance. However, agreements with China built on détente have historically failed to achieve their goals. If recent history is any guide, the best way to avoid a further escalation of the conflict in the South China Sea is to make clear that Beijing cannot conquer the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone at anything like an acceptable cost.
Simon Weiss holds a bachelor’s degree in international relations from Tufts University with a focus area on U.S. foreign policy and the trilateral relationship between the United States, China, and Taiwan. He is the original creator of this dataset.
Michael Beckley is associate professor of political science at Tufts University, nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Asia director at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Image: Philippine Coast Guard via Wikimedia Commons
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