Here is another example of the Chinese using their auxiliaries to push around a weaker neighbor in the South China Sea. The Philippines is in a tough spot because if they send in Coast Guard and Naval assets to remove the auxiliaries than that gives the Chinese military the excuse to move in and protect them. This is a fight the Philippines cannot win thus why they are turning to the international media:
The Philippine defense chief on Sunday demanded more than 200 Chinese vessels he said were manned by militias leave a South China Sea reef claimed by Manila, saying their presence was a “provocative action of militarizing the area.”
“We call on the Chinese to stop this incursion and immediately recall these boats violating our maritime rights and encroaching into our sovereign territory,” Lorenzana said in a statement, adding without elaborating that the Philippines would uphold its sovereign rights.
A government watchdog overseeing the disputed region said about 220 Chinese vessels were seen moored at Whitsun Reef, which Beijing also claims, on March 7. It released pictures of the vessels side by side in one of the most hotly contested areas of the strategic waterway.
Stars & Stripes
You can read more at the link.
Increasingly more foreigners are choosing to not travel to China for fear of being detained:
The dramatic detention of a handful of foreigners in recent years has instilled a deep fear in some people, especially those with politically adjacent occupations. As President Xi breeds a culture of nationalism and forges increasingly hostile relations with Western governments, some fear that if a diplomatic spat between their government and Beijing occurred while they were in China they could become a target.
CNN
You can read more at the link, but depending on ones occupation or viewpoints people should legitimately be concerned about being detained.
Here is the latest strategy to counter China by the Biden administration:
The Biden administration is moving to put semiconductors, artificial intelligence and next-generation networks at the heart of U.S. strategy toward Asia, attempting to rally what officials are calling “techno-democracies” to stand up to China and other “techno-autocracies.”
The new framing for the U.S. rivalry with China has been given added urgency by the sudden global shortage of microchips needed in products such as cars, mobile phones and refrigerators. The strategy would seek to rally an alliance of nations fighting for an edge in semiconductor fabrication and quantum computing, upending traditional arenas of competition such as missile stockpiles and troop numbers.
Stars & Stripes
You can read more at the link, but the article says there is a global shortage of microchips because China has been stockpiling them. The theory is that if major microchip producers like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan restrict sales of technology to China it will quash large Chinese companies like Huawei.
Of these three nations I would expect there would be little pushback from Taiwan or Japan on such a strategy, but the Moon administration in South Korea may be a tougher sell. Samsung is the world’s largest producer of semiconductors so restricting sales to China would be a huge loss for them. Additionally the Moon administration has arguably a policy of not upsetting China or the U.S.; siding against China on this issue they know will lead to severe retaliation far worse than what they experienced on the THAAD issue. This is not an easy policy decision for the Moon administration and I would not be surprised if they just delayed any decision on this as long as possible to see if it goes away.
The Chinese government is once again pointing fingers at the U.S. to justify why the Chinese Communist Party should remain solely in charge of China:
BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s foreign ministry said on Friday that seeing the plight of Americans suffering in a severe winter storm that hit the state of Texas this week reinforced a belief among Chinese citizens that their country is “on the right path”.
Foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying made the comments in response to a question from a state media journalist on calls by western countries for an investigation into alleged human rights abuses in its western Xinjiang region.
During her lengthy response, made at a regular ministry news conference, Hua repeated China’s denials of abuse of Muslims in the region, and said that Australia, Canada and the United States had histories of genocide.
But she also contrasted the vulnerability of many Texans with the festive experience of Chinese during the recently-completed Lunar New Year holiday. State and social media in Communist Party-led China frequently draw attention to crises in the United States and other western countries.
“Not to be wanting of food or clothing, not to be hungry or cold, this is the fundamental human right that is the most real,” she said.
“In the meantime in Texas … millions of people found themselves caught in the terrible situation of not having electricity and heating at home, a few tens of people even lost their lives because of this,” she said.
“This gave the Chinese people a deeper appreciation for what is the real human right, and made us believe more strongly that China is on the right path. We are fully confident about our future,” she said.
Reuters
You can read more at the link.
Did anyone expect anything other than a sham investigation by this WHO team?:
The White House on Saturday called on China to make available data from the earliest days of the COVID-19 outbreak, saying it has “deep concerns” about the way the findings of the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 report were communicated.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement that it is imperative that the report be independent and free from “alteration by the Chinese government”, echoing concerns raised by the administration of former President Donald Trump, who also moved to quit the WHO over the issue.
A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy fired back with a strongly-worded statement, saying the United States had damaged multilateral cooperation and the WHO in recent years, and should not be “pointing fingers” at China and other countries that supported the WHO during the COVID-19 pandemic. (……)The team had requested raw patient data on 174 cases that China had identified from the early phase of the outbreak in the city of Wuhan in December 2019, as well as other cases, but were only provided with a summary, Dominic Dwyer, an Australian infectious diseases expert and member of the WHO team, told Reuters.
Korea Times
“It is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government,” Sullivan said.
You can read more at the link, but if this team was never going to get all the information it needed from the Chinese government it should have never went. Now the Chinese government can repeat the talking point that an independent WHO team found no evidence that the virus was released from the Wuhan lab even though that is not true considering they never received all the data they needed. At least one of the WHO scientists on the trip is not ruling out the lab theory.
The Chinese are already using their new Coast Guard law to pressure the Japanese over the Senkaku Islets:
Chinese government vessels entered Japanese territorial waters near the flash point Senkaku Islands on Saturday — the first time since China passed a new law earlier this month that allows its coast guard to use military force in waters the country claims — including those around the Senkakus.
Two China Coast Guard vessels, including one from its second-largest class of ships, entered the waters around the Japanese-administered Senkakus, which Beijing claims and calls the Diaoyu, around 4:45 a.m. on Saturday, approaching two Japanese fishing boats operating in the area, the Japan Coast Guard said in a statement.
The Japan Coast Guard said it had sent vessels to the area to protect the fishing ships while repeatedly urging the Chinese ships to leave the area. Two other Chinese government ships, including one sporting a cannon-like weapon, were spotted in the so-called contiguous zone just outside the territorial waters, it added.
Stars & Stripes
You can read more at the link.
China’s rhetoric continues to increase in regards to its territorial disputes with its neighbors:
Under Chairman-for-life Xi Jinping, Beijing’s belligerent rhetoric has been scaling new heights.
“Chinese people don’t want war, but we have territorial disputes with several neighbouring countries instigated by the US to confront China,” the Communist Party’s Global Times propaganda service declared in September.
Again, neighbouring countries would disagree over the identity of the instigator.
China has sea disputes with the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. It has land disputes with Russia, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Laos, Mongolia, Tibet and Myanmar.
But the intended audience isn’t those neighbours. It’s the rest of the world.
It wants to plant the seed of plausible deniability in the minds of the international community.
“First, we must make it clear that the other side, not China, is the one that breaks the status quo,” Communist Party appointed editor Hu Xijin states. “Second, we need to make it clear that the other side is the provocateur in a complex situation.”
He goes on to argue that any scenario must be couched in such a way as to justify China’s behaviour. That way “a just war can be started in an upright manner”.
News.com.au
You can read more at the link, but analysts believe that it is more likely than not that China will eventually use their military to enforce territorial gains. What is going on now is that they are trying to set conditions to where it looks like they are not the aggressors. That is why the U.S. and its allies have to be careful to not give the Chinese their rationale for a “Just War”.
This is complicated by Beijing’s use of paramilitaries, most notably their militia fishing boats that are used to provoke confrontations that Beijing can then use as propaganda domestically that country X is picking on the poor Chinese fishing boat who is just trying to make a living.
