The simmering maritime disputes and land grabs in the South China
Sea have long been seen as a battle over its potentially vast undersea
deposits of oil and natural gas. That’s not quite true: There is a
sometimes violent scramble for resources in the region, but it’s more a fight for fish than for oil.
The latest evidence came Tuesday, when Indonesia blew up
23 fishing boats from Vietnam and Malaysia that it said were poaching
in Indonesian waters. It wasn’t the first time Indonesia’s flamboyant,
chain-smoking fisheries minister, Susi Pudjiastuti, has literally
dynamited her way to international headlines: The country demolished 27
fishing boats in February and has scuttled more than 170 in the last two
years.
But the move is significant all the same, because it underscores how
central fishing is to the simmering territorial disputes that are
turning the South China Sea into a potential global flash point — and
how far countries are willing to go to defend their turf, or at least
what they claim is theirs.
The maritime disputes between China and its neighbors over who
controls what part of the South China Sea are increasingly coming to a
head — not with bristling gunboats but with trawlers.
Large and growing fishing fleets in almost all the countries ringing
the South China Sea are at the front lines over the fight to control
tiny rocks with names like Mischief Reef, Fiery Cross, and Scarborough
Shoal. Because there are festering and unresolved territorial disputes
involving all countries in the region, seemingly innocent efforts by all
parties to fish in traditional waters are sparking international
showdowns, with potentially dangerous implications even for countries
far away, including the United States.
Although not the root cause of disputes over sovereignty in the
region, the clashes over fishing rights — which occur almost on a daily
basis and often go unreported — pose the greatest potential risk of
triggering a full-fledged crisis or even an armed conflict in the South
China Sea.
“They
are the most likely factor to cause an escalation that nobody
intended,” Gregory Poling, an Asia maritime expert at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, told Foreign Policy.
“They
are the most likely factor to cause an escalation that nobody
intended,” Gregory Poling, an Asia maritime expert at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, told Foreign Policy.
Military commanders in Washington are worried about escalation,
especially given recent U.S. efforts to enforce the area’s freedom of
navigation by sailing Navy ships through disputed waters. Against the
backdrop of rising friction over fishing, as well as other disputes,
Washington has repeatedly appealed to China to back off its coercive
moves in the region and warned Beijing against “militarization” of the
South China Sea.
In a clear signal to China, the U.S. Defense Department has deployed
5,000 troops for a major military exercise with the Philippines this
month. The drills, which got underway this week, include an amphibious
landing on the Philippines coast and a mock assault on an oil rig, with a
small contingent of Australian forces also participating. To add
symbolic weight to the event, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter will
visit the Philippines next week to observe the Balikatan exercises.
China has denied it is laying the ground to impose its military reach
over the strategic region. But its neighbors and the United States are
not convinced. Having built up artificial islands in a massive dredging
project in disputed waters, Beijing has constructed long runways and
deep harbors that can accommodate military aircraft and naval ships. In
response, Indonesia this week followed through on plans to deploy
advanced air-defense systems on its Natuna Islands in the South China
Sea, IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly reported Tuesday.
Underlying much of the jockeying for position among regional powers
is the quest for fish. China’s huge and growing appetite for seafood —
the country is expected to account for almost 40 percent of global fish consumption by 2030 — has been coupled with overfishing in the Western Central Pacific and South China Sea. That, in turn, pushes growing numbers of Chinese fishermen ever further away from their coast in search of shrimp, tuna, and scad.
Neighbors like Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines have also bolstered
their own fishing fleets to ensure an adequate haul of fish, which
makes up a crucial share of protein in their people’s diets, as well as
plays a significant part in economic growth and job creation. Those
waters are one of the few areas in the world where fish catches have
steadily increased since 1950.
But China’s huge fishing fleet isn’t just meant to help feed 1.3
billion people: It’s also a weapon in Beijing’s efforts to assert
control over the tiny reefs and atolls that dot the South China Sea. To
bolster its territorial claims, China points to its fishermen who, for
centuries, plied the waters around the Spratly and Paracel islands and
uses their presence there today to strengthen its claims.
What’s more, for decades, China has employed fishing boats in
disputed waters as the eyes and ears of its coast guard and military
vessels, blurring the line between peaceful, commercial activity and
military muscle-flexing.
“It used to be [that] the flag followed trade, helping you acquire
colonies; now, the [Chinese] flag follows fishing, helping you acquire
indisputable sovereignty,” said James Holmes, a professor of strategy at
the U.S. Naval War College. “In both cases, private interests act as
the vanguard, justifying the state’s reaching for the gun.”
In the last few years, countries around the region have begun
seizing, ramming, or destroying each other’s fishing boats amid claims
of poaching and territorial encroachment. Australia demolished Vietnamese clam fishers in 2014, as Palau did a year later. Indonesia’s destruction of a Chinese fishing boat in 2015 sparked the ire of Beijing, and last month Indonesia’s government formally protested the presence of Chinese fishing boats and coast guard vessels in its waters. Just this spring, Malaysia summoned
the Chinese ambassador over what it called the illegal encroachment by
100 China-flagged fishing vessels. The Chinese coast guard rammed a Philippine fishing boat in March and a Vietnamese vessel, too. Just this month, Vietnam seized what it called a “disguised” Chinese fishing boat.
Fishing matters greatly for the economies and bellies of nearly all
the states in the region. Indonesia’s more than 460,000 fishing boats
account for 3 percent
of GDP and help bring in the bulk of the country’s animal protein,
critical to fighting malnutrition. Those vessels, big and small, are
also the tip of the spear of the Indonesian government’s new maritime strategy,
meant to help knit together the sprawling islands of the world’s
largest archipelago. Fisheries play a similarly important role in the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand.
Indonesia’s crusade against illegal fishing includes an international
campaign to get more countries to view poaching at sea as a type of
organized crime, which would put efforts to crack down on illegal
fishermen on sounder legal footing. U.S. President Barack Obama’s
administration has itself begun to focus on reining in the “outlaw sea” and has largely supported Indonesia’s efforts.
Alleged encroachment and illegal fishing by Chinese vessels that
threaten those fisheries is one reason states in the region have begun
pushing back so hard. That’s especially true because China has dredged
huge amounts of the seafloor to create artificial islands to house
harbors, airfields, and air-defense emplacements. That dredging, many
scientists say, has decimated the coral reefs that birthed the South China Sea’s diverse marine population.
But many experts see another, more ominous edge to China’s huge and
aggressive fishing fleet: It is consistently used as a geopolitical
weapon by leadership in Beijing.
In 2013, newly installed Chinese President Xi Jinping paid a surprise visit to the southern fishing port of Tanmen, where he urged local fishermen to stake their claim to the waters around the disputed islands. More recently, the Straits Times reports,
owners of Chinese fishing vessels received cash payments of about
$30,000 from the government to take up station around disputed features
like the Spratly Islands and help solidify de facto Chinese possession —
regardless of whether they do any actual fishing.
With subsidies from Beijing to pay for fuel, and under the protection
of coast guard vessels, the Chinese fishermen are heading to distant
waters off Indonesia in unprecedented numbers, Poling, the Asia maritime
expert, said.
“They are being escorted by Chinese coast guards. They’re organizing
these very large flotillas that go out for a couple weeks and then go
back,” Poling said. “It’s becoming much more organized, much more
frequent. The scale is changing.”
China’s commercial fishing fleet also often serves as a surrogate
navy, bolstering Beijing’s claims and acting as a vanguard in disputes
with Vietnam and the Philippines, according to experts and U.S. military
officers.
U.S. officials privately acknowledged that the growing number of
fishing disputes in the South China Sea pose a danger to security.
Beijing, in particular, is using civilian fishing vessels as a way of
gradually imposing its maritime claims, the officials said.
“China is using a steady progression of small, incremental steps to
increase its effective control over disputed areas and avoid escalation
to military conflict,” a Pentagon official, who spoke on condition of
anonymity, told FP.
U.S. officials also voice concern about the long-term environmental
effect of vast dredging operations carried out by China over the past
two years, which have severely damaged or destroyed coral reefs.
Using fishermen to plant the flag rather than cast a net is nothing
new for China, according to scholars. Forty years ago, when China and
Vietnam got into a brief shooting war over the Paracel Islands, Chinese
fishing boats were the “first responders,” used to help the small and
under-equipped Chinese military fend off Vietnamese forces. China
reached for a similar playbook in the 2012 standoff with the Philippines
over Scarborough Shoal.
“In contrast to a naval presence that could have conveyed
belligerence, the trawlers gave China a low-profile means to back up its
territorial claims,” noted Toshi Yoshihara, also a professor of
strategy at the U.S. Naval War College, in a recent study of the 1974 campaign.
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