As of: April 7, 2024, 9:20 a.m
From: Foreign Policy
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The saber rattling in the South China Sea is getting louder as academic exchanges with China decline and Trump receives the support of Chinese disinformation channels.
Tensions between China and the Philippines are rising. Will there be an armed conflict over the Spratly Archipelago in the South China Sea?
Academic exchanges between China and the US have declined dramatically. This worries Chinese scientists.
A Chinese disinformation network has recently started posting pro-Trump content, probably to promote internal division in the USA
This article is available for the first time in German - it was first published by
Foreign Policy
magazine on April 2, 2024 .
This week's highlights: Tensions between China and the Philippines rise at a flashpoint in the South China Sea, Beijing's increasing academic isolation raises concerns for Chinese scholars, and a Chinese disinformation network shifts toward pro-Trump content.
Tensions are rising between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea
China's saber rattling against the Philippines in the South China Sea has intensified over the past month, apparently in an attempt to intimidate Manila into backing away from closer ties with Washington.
The Philippines grounded the BRP Sierra Madre on Second Thomas Shoal in the Spratly Islands archipelago to use it as an outpost against China. © IMAGO / Kyodo News
The current flashpoint is the BRP Sierra Madre, a World War II landing ship that the Philippines deliberately ran aground in 1999 on the disputed Second Thomas Shoal (or Ren'ai Jiao), a submarine reef in the Spratly Islands, and now serves as an outpost. On March 23, China used a water cannon against a Filipino boat on a resupply mission to the Sierra Madre.
The Spratly Islands lie between the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia. The islands, bays and reefs within the archipelago are the subject of numerous overlapping territorial claims and include some of the southernmost points of China's extensive nine-dash line. Although they have little value in themselves, they lie on an important trade and supply route.
Focus Sierra Madre: A ship that has already been through two wars
The history of the Sierra Madre is a microcosm of the wars in Asia. Built by the United States in 1944 for the Pacific War, the ship was also used extensively during the Vietnam War, transferred to the South Vietnamese Navy in 1970 and acquired by the Philippines in 1976 after the fall of Saigon. China has established its own outpost on nearby Mischief Reef, part of its extensive sand dredging operations in the South China Sea.
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The Philippines maintains a permanent garrison of about two dozen Marines in the Sierra Madre, who are frequently replaced. This requires constant resupply, often hampered by Chinese harassment. The 80-year-old ship is also on the verge of breaking up and the need for refitting has become urgent, causing clashes between the supply boats and the Chinese boats to become more frequent.
Marcos and Duterte: US or China sympathies in the Philippine government
However, there are even larger forces at play. China has long-standing maritime disputes with the Philippines. In 2016, Beijing refused to attend a UN Convention on the Law of the Sea tribunal or recognize its decision, which was largely in Manila's favor. But from then on, China had then-Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in its pocket; his pro-China views clashed with the military's focus on Beijing as the biggest threat to the nation.
Towards the end of his term in office, Duterte increasingly distanced himself from China, partly because some of the investment promises were not kept. Current President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, the son of the Philippines’ former dictator, has taken a more traditional pro-U.S. line. Washington has eagerly reciprocated, quietly ignoring U.S. court rulings that ordered hundreds of millions of dollars from his father's estate to be paid to victims of the regime in the 1970s and 1980s.
China does not want any “interference” from outside powers in the South China Sea
Marcos' attempts to build alliances go beyond the Philippines' closer ties with the United States. He has reached out to several possible partners, including Vietnam (another target of Chinese maritime aggression), Australia and Japan. China - by far the largest power involved in the disputes - rejects such efforts: Over the past decade, it has stressed that the South China Sea disputes should remain bilateral and accused outside powers of meddling.
Marcos faces opposition from a defiant Duterte, who is demanding independence for his home region of Mindanao - even though his daughter currently serves as vice president. That could be one reason why Beijing is now turning the screws in the South China Sea in the hope of weakening Marcos.
So far, the Chinese have also laughed at warmongering rhetoric - but will it stay that way?
Chinese nationalists such as former Global Times editor Hu Xijin have engaged in aggressive rhetoric, including calling for Philippine ships to be “riddled with bullets.” But such figures do not necessarily represent Chinese politics or even fully believe their own rhetoric. The Chinese public ridiculed Hu's bombastic threats that China would shoot down then-US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's plane during her visit to Taiwan in 2022.
Any conflict between China and the Philippines would be particularly dangerous: Manila could invoke its mutual defense treaty with Washington. Of course, there are many steps between the clashes with the Chinese coast guard in the Spratly Islands and World War III. Still, the possibility of fatalities or even sinking of a ship is real. This would trigger a serious crisis that would require rapid de-escalation efforts between China and the United States.
Massive decline in intellectual exchange between USA and China
The COVID-19 pandemic led to a massive decline in intellectual exchanges between the United States and China, starting with students. While there are many Chinese students in the United States - about 290,000 - that is still a decline of more than 20 percent from 2019. In contrast, the number of U.S. students in China in the 2022-2023 academic year is only about 350, up from 15,000 ten years ago.
A recent study from the
Center for Strategic and International Studies
shows just how bad things have become, lamenting U.S. securitization and much broader ideological control by China. A surprisingly blunt essay in the report by eminent Chinese scholar Wang Jisi notes how dominant Xi Jinping thought has become, leading to demands on academics that go beyond traditional Marxist-Leninist constraints.
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Xi Jinping thought is more restrictive for scientists than Marxism
“Questions such as the geographical origin of the first humans are not important to traditional Marxists, but they are sensitive and essential to China's ideological workers,” writes Wang, referring to nationalist (and racist) claims that the first humans were in China and not originated in Africa.
Wang can write like this relatively safely because he is 76 years old and has long-standing ties to the Chinese diplomatic and intelligence apparatus. However, some leading Chinese scholars in the field of international relations are deeply concerned about China's academic isolation: Yan Xuetong, also writing from a position of relative safety, recently called for more "openness" and lamented the turn to nationalism and conspiracy theories among young people people in China.
Xi-Biden conversation: regular exchange again?
U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday held the first of a series of planned phone calls that it is hoped will become regular after a face-to-face meeting last November led to a slow normalization of bilateral exchanges.
Little is known from the call, which covered familiar topics such as Taiwan and the sensitivities surrounding the inauguration of the new president next month. However, this kind of undramatic, regular contact brings much-needed baggage back into a dangerously unstable relationship.
Chinese propaganda supports Trump
A long-running Chinese disinformation network largely focused on directly pro-Beijing content, which researchers call Spamouflage, appears to have shifted gears. It is now producing content supporting former US President Donald Trump in an apparent attempt to exacerbate social divisions and influence the US election, taking a cue from previous Russian efforts.
As researcher Elise Thomas noted, spamouflage is "notorious among researchers for two things: its enormous scale and its almost complete ineffectiveness." (China, for example, has had less success planting false stories in US media than in Taiwanese media). Online trolling is hardly a new or effective tool, but it could be indicative of what Beijing wants.
However, it is also possible that the network is also producing pro-Biden content that has gone unnoticed - or that Chinese content is focused on attacking whoever is in power in the United States.
Coffee war: price war within China
Chinese coffee chain Luckin is facing a price war with rival Cotti Coffee, launched by Luckin's own founders, Lu Zhengyao and Qian Zhiya. Both companies' prices are already cheap, with both offering a range of options on their delivery app for 9.9 yuan ($1.37). The Starbucks menu in China starts at 27 yuan ($3.73) for a small Americano.
It remains strange that Luckin survived revelations of massive fraud in 2020 - and that Lu and Qian managed to avoid prison and return with funding for another cheap coffee venture. Both companies operate on a massive scale: Luckin, with 18,257 stores, has almost three times as many stores as Starbucks in China, while Cotti already has 6,570 stores within two years of its founding.
Luckin is now reporting record profitability, perhaps helped by Chinese consumers' turn to savings. I'd like to see a breakdown of how a delivery model that offers coffee for less than $2 works for both companies - even with the low-paid and overworked delivery workers in Chinese cities.
A bit of culture by Brendan O'Kane
In the following poem, the lines about reclusive poet Tao Yuanming's "little alley" and his friends' "carriages" are a constant point of contention for readers and commentators. In a straightforward reading of the lines as chosen here - literally: "[My] narrow street is far from deep ruts / and tends to bring back friends' carriages" - Tao realizes that no surprise visits will bother him , while he devotes himself to his reading.
In another interpretation, the second part of the line is read as "and tends to cause friends' carriages to return," which makes sense if the reader assumes that the isolation of Tao's house was an incentive. Some commenters have even suggested that the lines are an interpolation.
True reading lovers will recognize the veracity of my image: Tao cozying up to some precious and hand-copied books, including The Book of Mountains and Seas, a geographical fantasy, to have a little time to himself, and beyond thinks that friends probably won't come, but smiles at the thought that someone might come. (Brendan O'Kane, translator)
Read the Book of Mountains and Seas
by Tao Yuanming, (365-427)
The first month of summer: everything grows,
and the trees around my house have all filled up;
Flocks of birds rejoice in their new homes,
and I am happy about my little home;
The plowing is done and the planting is completed
and now the time has come to read my books again.
My little alley is far away from the crowd,
and tends to scare off friends' carriages.
I feel good when I pour myself a cup of home brew
and pick some vegetables from the bed,
And a fine rain comes in from the east,
accompanied by a pleasant breeze.
I'm leafing through The Travels of the King of Zhou,
and let my eyes wander over the book of mountains and seas,
One swing and I captured the entire universe.
If that isn't joy, then I don't know what is.
To the author
James Palmer is deputy editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter (X): @BeijingPalmer
Brendan O'Kane is a Chinese translator.Twitter (X): @bokane
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com” on April 2, 2024 - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.