TWO leading experts on the South China Sea conflict say Beijing is not ready to acknowledge that Manila, or any other Southeast Asian claimant in the disputed sea, has legal grievances that must be addressed and peacefully managed.

Gregory Poling and Jude Blanchette, both from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said China’s “unwillingness” to attend to the concerns of its regional neighbors as legitimate has now become “one of the most prominent challenges to its management of external relations.”

This key feature of China’s foreign policy was appropriately summed up in an article that came out in a Chinese nationalist newspaper that accused the Philippines of deliberately escalating the tensions in the South China Sea, particularly in Ayungin (Second Thomas) Shoal, to draw support from the United States, or was actually staged by Washington.

“When the Chinese leadership confronts a middle or small power that challenges or offends Beijing, they often accuse the smaller power of working in tandem with the United States or being used by the United States to drive an ‘anti-China’ strategy,” Poling and Blanchette pointed out.

The two said this was the same sentiment aired by former Chinese Foreign minister Yang Jiechi when he said that “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.”

“This sentiment is also the reason that Beijing sought to undermine the arbitration brought by the Philippines from 2013 to 2016 by insisting that it was engineered by the US and Japan,” said Poling and Blanchette.

They said Chinese government officials also see the US as “an architect of a long-term containment strategy” designed to erode China’s influence in the region and to “bring about the collapse of the Communist Party of China.”

Poling and Blanchette noted that even Chinese President Xi Jinping declared earlier this year that Western countries led by the United States have moved to “contain, encircle and suppress China that has resulted in ‘unprecedented severe challenges’” to the development of China.

Distorted narrative

However, Manila-based think tank Asian Century Philippines Strategic Studies Institute (ACPSSI) President Herman Tiu Laurel said Poling and Blanchette are presenting a “one-sided and distorted narrative” about China, particularly issues that arose after the Philippine government’s pivot to the US beginning in February 2023.

Laurel noted that Poling and Blanchette omitted the constant offer of the Chinese side to the Philippines to “meet halfway,” that is, to find a “win-win” compromise, in their disputes over areas in the South China Sea.

He said this was immediately proposed in August 2023 in the wake of the water cannon incident in Ayungin Shoal.

“That fell on deaf ears as the PCG (Philippine Coast Guard) escalated the tensions in the area and later started involving the Armed Forces of the Philippines chief in the diatribes against China,” said Laurel.

He stressed that dialogue to reach any compromise is “hardly possible” considering that the current situation follows a US plan in January 2023 dubbed “Project Myoushu.”

Established at Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation and presented to the Philippine ADRI-Stratbase think tank, Project Myoushu aims to increase “the reputational cost China pays for those very tactics (blocking or swarming) employed in disputed areas in the South China Sea.”

“China’s willingness to pay these costs is not limitless — and continued public exposure provides the most direct method to impose these costs. But the Americans continually make the same mistake by thinking that ‘red lines’ can be erased by propaganda and ‘reputational costs,’” said Laurel.