Philippine Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio also stated that it was "highly likely that a Chinese maritime militia vessel rammed the Filipino fishing vessel".[13] The People’s Liberation Army’s maritime militia, estimated to field 300 vessels and 4000 personnel, is made up of civilian fishermen who receive military training and pay. Their boats are equipped with reinforced hulls for ramming other vessels, as well as high-powered water hoses and sophisticated communications gear.[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Reed_Bank_incident
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For two years scores and sometimes hundreds of
The beauty of these militia units from Beijing’s point of view is the ambiguity of their status. Other coast guards, navies or fishery protection units find it impossible to know conclusively whether they are facing regular Chinese fishing vessels and crews or Beijing’s irregular forces who have a clear military purpose in mind
Because of the difficulty in identifying Xi’s fishermen-soldiers the security forces of other South China Sea littoral states involved, such as the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia, usually act with restraint. They try to avoid using force that might cause injuries or deaths, and thus international accusations of human rights abuses.
Beijing and its Maritime Militia have used this restraint by their opponents to their own advantage for 40 years and more. The militia has been key to Beijing’s strategy over territorial disputes in all of China’s surrounding seas and to evading serious confrontations when extending the territory under its control.
In 1974 the militia was at the forefront of the sea battle in which Beijing’s forces captured the last island held by Vietnam in the Paracel archipelago in the northern reaches of the South China Sea.
Since then, Sansha in the Paracel Islands has been developed as a base for the most militarised, professional and well-paid units in the Maritime Militia. According to Andrew Erickson, a professor at the US Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute, the Sansha fishermen are also equipped with close to 100 purpose-built trawlers with reinforced hulls for ramming and sophisticated communications suites for spying. The Sansha fishing fleet is used as a fast response unit to confront any activity Beijing considers an affront to its territorial claims.
In March 2009 the USS Impeccable, a US spy ship, was about 100 km south of China’s Hainan Island. It was trying to monitor traffic in and out of the submarine base at Sanya on the southern tip of the island.
Chinese warships and coast guard cutters approached the Impeccable and sent warnings for it to leave the area. When it did not, the ship was swarmed by Maritime Militia trawlers, which not only blocked its passage but used grapple hooks to snag the Impeccable’s towed sonar array used to track submarines.
In May and June 2011 the militia trawlers were again in action, this time against research ships operating within Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone and looking for evidence of submarine oil and gas reserves. Maritime Militia ships cut the towed survey cables of both the Binh Minh and the Viking 2. These incidents prompted most major oil companies to cancel exploration agreements with Vietnam.
Three years later, in May 2014, the shoe was on the other foot. When Beijing sent the Hai Yang Shi You 981 oil platform to disputed waters southwest of the Paracel Islands and within the exclusive economic zone off Vietnam’s east coast, Hanoi deployed its own maritime militia trawlers to try to disrupt the operation….
Maritime Militia ships led the charge when Beijing occupied Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands in 1994. The feature, also claimed by the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam, has since been built into an island by Beijing’s forces, and is now one of seven militarized islands it has created in the South China Sea.
In 2012 militia fishing vessels again led the charge for Beijing’s occupation of the Scarborough Shoal, which had been clearly part of the Philippines’ territory since the early 18th century. The seizing of this territory by Beijing led the Manila government to launch an action at the Permanent Court of Arbitration. In July 2016 the court ruled that there was “no legal basis for China to claim historic rights” over any areas of the South China Sea. Beijing has dismissed the court ruling with contempt and has doubled down on taking possession of the South China Sea. Most of the construction of the seven islands equipped with airfields and military outposts has been done since the court judgment.
Ships of the Maritime Militia have also been used to trespass into territorial waters around the Japanese-owned Senkaku Islands, which Beijing claims and calls the Diaoyu Tai. For decades the Japanese Coast Guard, on orders from Tokyo, monitored Chinese trawlers operating in territorial waters off the islands but did not interfere. That changed in March 2010,when about 30 Chinese trawlers invaded Japanese territorial waters around the islands and another 100-or-so Chinese fishing vessels lurked just outside the territorial zone.
The Japanese Coast Guard ordered the Chinese ships to leave, and all did except the Minjinyu 5179, which not only refused to budge but then rammed the side of the Japanese ship. The captain and crew were arrested, and the captain was put on trial and convicted. This led to a heated diplomatic exchange between Tokyo and Beijing, and a round of economic sanctions. Since then there have been relatively few incursions around the islands by the Maritime Militia, but the number of overflights by Chinese military aircraft has grown dramatically. https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/04/article/beijings-maritime-militia-the-scourge-of-south-china-sea/
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6-25-2018 China has succeeded in manufacturing a strategic ambiguity to blur its motive to challenge militarily the United States, the only adversary militarily capable of stopping China’s rising ambitions to replace the U.S. as the preeminent global superpower.
China usually adopts two approaches in achieving such strategic ambiguity, both inherited from the country’s ancient strategic wiles, and both are currently studied in China’s many military colleges and defense universities. The first one is called “Hide a dagger in a smile,” the second is “Battle of Pride.” “Hide a dagger in a smile” is famously celebrated as Strategy Ten of the renowned military classic The Thirty Six Strategies. The actual text is this: “Reassure the enemy to make it slack, work in secret to subdue it; prepare fully before taking action to prevent the enemy from changing its mind: This is the method of hiding a strong will under a compliant appearance.” Or as China’s late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping put it as an overall national policy, “Hide your strength, bide your time.”
“Battle of Pride” refers to the tactic of showering your enemy with flattery, making it proud of its own virility to soften its vigilance against your own plan. Thus senior U.S. military leaders or defense officials are usually told repeatedly by their Chinese counterparts that the U.S. is much stronger than China militarily and there should be no worry about China’s military buildup and that the U.S. should feel proud about its military might. https://www.hoover.org/research/chinas-strategic-ambiguity
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Greg Poling, director of CSIS’s Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, said stocks in the sea, which accounts for about 12% of the global fish catch, “now are on the verge of collapse.” Southeast Asian communities that rely on fishing in the sea "will be devastated," Poling said in an interview with PBS NewsHour in the U.S.
"You're talking about hundreds of thousands of people that rely on fishing or fishing related industries and millions of more that rely on the fish and other marine life for food security." Poling said the impact will be felt more greatly by Southeast Asian countries than by China, whose moves to assert its claim to virtually the entire crucial waterway have contributed to the damage to fisheries.
All six governments that exercise overlapping claims in the area are incentivized to catch as much fish as possible at the expense of their rivals, Poling said. https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/05/20/looming-collapse-of-fisheries-in-the-south-china-sea/
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4-29-19 The US Navy has reportedly warned China that it could treat the Chinese coast guard and the paramilitary fishing fleet known as the maritime militia the same as the Chinese navy — as combatants. Adm. John Richardson, the chief of naval operations, "made it very clear" to his Chinese counterpart in January that "that the US Navy will not be coerced," the Financial Times reported, citing an interview with the Navy's top admiral. "By injecting greater uncertainty about how the US will respond to China's grey-zone coercion, the US hopes to deter Chinese destabilizing maritime behavior," Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told the Financial Times. https://www.businessinsider.com/us-navy-tough-on-china-paramilitary-fishing-fleet-gray-zone-tactics-2019-4
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4-9-2016 A Chinese vessel within Argentina's exclusive maritime economic zone ignored radio communications, audio and visual signals, and warning shots. After it attempted to force a collision, the Argentine coast guard followed defense protocols and sank the vessel. In this March 16 incident, all 32 Chinese crew members were rescued. Beijing has offered little explanation for their conduct. On March 19, the Chinese and Indonesian coast guard skirmished as the latter attempted to escort a Chinese fishing boat away from Natuna Island. The Chinese coast guard vessel rammed the seized ship to prevent the Indonesians from keeping it as evidence. In contrast to the subdued diplomatic response to the Argentine incident China's foreign ministry angered regional leaders by stating that the waters surrounding Natuna Island, northwest of Borneo, were "traditional Chinese fishing grounds." Taiwan's coast guard in turn announced on March 24 that it had taken 41 Chinese fishermen into custody after they were found poaching turtles and coral in waters near Dongsha Atoll National Park, 450km southwest of Taiwan. These events are the latest incidents in longstanding disputes between Chinese fishermen and coastal countries across the globe....
the Argentina incident has heightened vigilance across the continent to the increased presence of Chinese fishing boats in coastal waters, particularly those of Peru, Ecuador, Chile and Colombia....Not only is China the largest consumer of fish it is the world's largest seafood exporter. Approximately half of the seafood processed in China is exported to the U.S., Japan and Western Europe. Although it is Chinese fishing boats that are getting into trouble, the world's seafood is being routed through China in the service of developed world diners.... For decades European, American and Japanese fishing ships flouted international treaty conventions, recklessly fishing in sensitive ecosystems and trafficking in exotic and endangered species. However, China's national fishing fleet is the largest in world history. With more than 200,000 fishing vessels and 3,000 long-distance ship China's far-reaching fishing practices pose political, environmental and security challenges to nations around the world. https://asia.nikkei.com/NAR/Articles/Julie-Michelle-Klinger-Chinese-fishermen-face-global-entanglements
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