The Puzzle of Chinese Escalation vs Restraint in the South China Sea
Tensions between China and the Philippines have escalated dramatically in recent months around Second Thomas Shoal, a submerged reef in the eastern Spratly Islands. The Chinese Coast Guard has repeatedly attempted to block delivery of food, water, and building supplies to the Philippine marine detachment aboard the BRP Sierra Madre, a World War II–era warship grounded on the shoal since 1999. In at least two incidents since March, China’s use of coercion has injured Philippines sailors. The risks of escalation are serious. The United States has said its defense obligations under the Mutual Defense Treaty extend “to armed attacks on Philippine armed forces, public vessels, or aircraft — including those of its Coast Guard — anywhere in the South China Sea.”
But while China has been escalating with the Philippines at unprecedented levels around Second Thomas Shoal, it has exercised striking restraint toward Vietnam’s far larger and more militarized expansion of its South China Sea outposts. There is no record of China using paramilitary or military forces to disrupt Vietnam’s land reclamation in the Spratly Islands. As Zack Cooper and Greg Poling have recently noted, China’s assertiveness toward the Philippines and restraint toward Vietnam is especially puzzling given that the former is a U.S. treaty ally while the latter is not. Alliances with great powers are supposed to deter aggression, not to invite it. This is a puzzle that warrants scrutiny not just to help illuminate the nature of Chinese strategy in one of the world’s leading flashpoints. Deciphering the logic behind China’s conduct also has direct implications for how the United States and its allies can best defend their interests in the South China Sea and beyond.
There are a number of potential explanations for China’s behavior. Below I describe five possibilities, each of which is derived from a more general explanation of China’s conduct in the South China Sea. Although several capture important elements of Chinese strategy, none are able to satisfyingly explain the variation in Beijing’s conduct highlighted above. So, I offer an alternative explanation, one rooted in how Chinese leaders conceptualize the South China Sea disputes and the dilemmas they present. Beijing’s conduct toward the Philippines and Vietnam differs because Manila and Hanoi have different capacities to impose strategic costs on Beijing. Relative to the Philippines, Vietnam has a greater ability to impose such costs on China. Paradoxically, Manila’s alliance with Washington circumscribes its capacity to impose such costs, while Vietnam’s nonaligned status increases its ability to do so.
Five Possibilities
The first explanation focuses on China’s interest in preventing its rivals from taking collective action against it. This so-called “divide and rule” strategy holds that Beijing uses combinations of carrots and sticks to drive wedges between its rival claimants to doom any prospect for collective action among them. From such a perspective, Chinese restraint toward Vietnam could be a function of its ongoing standoff with Manila at Second Thomas Shoal and meant to avoid creating another crisis with another rival at the same time.
While Beijing certainly has an interest in preventing or forestalling the emergence of collective resistance among its rivals, this is an unsatisfying explanation. Chinese coercion around the BRP Sierra Madre began over 10 years ago, and since then it has regularly escalated concurrently with Vietnam (and its other South China Sea rivals). More to the point, even if concern about pushing Manila and Hanoi into a united front contributed to Beijing’s restraint toward the latter, this explanation is unable to tell us why Beijing elected to continue to contest Philippine consolidation instead of challenging Vietnamese land reclamation while exercising restraint toward Manila — a policy combination with presumably the same effect.
The second explanation focuses on China’s interest in remaining in the “gray zone” and avoiding war in the South China Sea. Beijing, of course, has gone to lengths to advance its South China Sea claims while avoiding armed conflict. From this perspective, variation in Beijing’s responses to Philippine and Vietnamese consolidation could be explained with reference to their respective propensity for escalation. While Vietnam has a demonstrated history of resisting Chinese predations, Manila does not. Chinese analysts attribute Manila’s restraint in large part to Washington’s unwillingness to allow its ally to run risks of the kind likely to trigger its mutual defense commitments. The United States, Chinese analysts argue, seeks to “intervene but not become entrapped” in the South China Sea disputes.
While this explanation, too, captures an important element of Chinese strategy, it obfuscates deeper drivers of it. Most obviously, it begs the follow-on questions: Why is Beijing so keen to stay in the gray zone, and why would it be so concerned with the possibility of Vietnamese escalation? China has used military force in the South China Sea before, including in the post-Mao era, and it did so by targeting Hanoi. In a conflict today, China would quickly dispatch with Vietnamese resistance, as it did in 1974 in the Paracels and in 1988 in the western Spratly Islands. As argued below, it is not the risk of escalation itself — or even the possibility of war with Hanoi — that has produced restraint in Beijing. Rather, it is the potential second-order consequences of such a conflict.
A third explanation focuses on the close political relationship between China and Vietnam. Although distrustful of each other, both states are run by communist parties that have much in common. They are united in their collective resolve to preserve their party’s monopoly on political power and both are acutely threatened by Washington’s promotion of democracy and human rights. They are also determined not to allow their bilateral relationship to deteriorate as it did in the late 1970s, and they have built an unparalleled network of government and party ties to help buttress it. From this perspective, Chinese restraint toward Vietnam’s land reclamation may reflect its interests in maintaining healthy ties with Hanoi. Beijing may be particularly inclined to soft peddle the disputes now, as the country’s conservative new president seems likely to be especially deferential to Beijing.
While China’s relationship with Hanoi is unique among its South China Sea rivals, close political bonds between the two can — and often have — cut the other way. Confident that its political ties with Hanoi will enable it to manage escalation and avoid incurring major costs, China has regularly escalated with Vietnam in the South China Sea and done so increasingly over the last 20 years. This explanation sheds little light on why Beijing has exercised such restraint when confronted with the large-scale expansion and fortification of Vietnam’s South China Sea outposts.
A fourth explanation centers around China’s perception of threat associated with the U.S.–Philippine alliance. Since the late-1990s, Chinese leaders have believed that the United States is using its alliances as anchors of an anti-China coalition aiming to thwart Beijing’s rise. This view, of course, has grown in recent years. Chinese analysts and state-controlled media regularly suggest that Washington uses the Philippines’ and Japan’s offshore disputes with China to advance its hostile strategic intentions toward Beijing. From this perspective, Manila’s alliance with Washington may make its conduct in the South China Sea more threatening for Beijing than that of nonaligned Vietnam.
To be sure, Chinese leaders perceive this alliance to be threatening. This cannot, however, explain China’s variable approach to Philippine and Vietnamese efforts to consolidate their South China Sea occupations. Most basically, it stretches credulity to suggest that the Philippine presence on a decaying ship is especially threatening. However, even accepting the premise that China’s conduct is driven by fear of the U.S.–Philippine alliance, Beijing would not focus its coercive efforts on the most vulnerable of Manila’s outposts. It would focus instead of one of Manila’s eight larger occupations, some of which have been expanded in recent years and all of which would have greater military utility. Furthermore, to whatever degree Washington benefits from the South China Sea disputes, it seems clear that the Philippine presence on Second Thomas Shoal is on balance a liability — not an asset — for it. As Chinese analysts correctly note, the United States does not want to be dragged into an armed conflict in the South China Sea, and especially not one over a submerged reef that does not even have the legal status of a rock.
A fifth, and related, potential explanation also centers around the U.S.–Philippine alliance but for different reasons. Because Beijing views the alliance in threatening terms, some analysts suggest that Beijing coerces Manila in the South China Sea to drive a wedge into the U.S.–Philippine relationship. Chinese pressure around Second Thomas Shoal, the thinking goes, will expose and exacerbate cleavages between Washington and Manila, undermining the alliance. China scholar Robert Ross has recently put forward just such an argument, suggesting that Beijing targets Manila not simply because it is a more menacing rival but because it is a more enticing target. Vietnam’s lack of an alliance with the United States, on the other hand, means that coercing it carries less strategic upside.
This argument is intuitively appealing but there does not seem to be any evidence supporting it. Of course Beijing would be pleased to weaken the U.S.–Philippine alliance, but its conduct in the South China Sea is not designed to do so. Over the last 30 years, Beijing has watched as its assertiveness toward the Philippines has time and again strengthened — not weakened — the alliance. Even when it had opportunities to weaken the alliance, as it did under the administration of Rodrigo Duterte, its coercive conduct in the South China Sea ensured that it would be unable to do so. If it were interested in using the disputes to undermine the alliance, it would have changed course.
As noted below, the existence of the U.S.–Philippine alliance — and the lack of an American alliance with Vietnam — are key factors shaping China’s approach to each. This has nothing to do, however, with Beijing viewing Philippine behavior as especially threatening or with it pursing a wedging campaign. Rather, the existence of the U.S.–Philippine alliance has counter-intuitively circumscribed Manila’s capacity to impose strategic costs on Beijing. This is a limitation that Vietnam does not have.
Weiquan and Weiwen
Since at least 2011, Chinese leaders have framed Beijing’s policy in the South China Sea as one aiming to “harmonize” a tension (or, in their view, a dialectic) between weiquan (维权) and weiwen (维稳). Weiquan refers to Beijing’s interest in defending and advancing its offshore claims. Weiwen refers its interests in maintaining stability and, more broadly, maintaining a favorable regional security environment conducive to its rise. A congenial regional security environment has required preserving friendly ties with its Southeast Asian rivals and avoiding pushing them into what Beijing views as a hostile U.S.-led coalition bent on thwarting its rise.
China’s maritime and territorial interests (weiquan) are at tension with its broader strategic interest in maintaining a favorable external environment (weiwen). To the extent it advances its South China Sea claims, it risks destabilizing the region, alienating its Southeast Asian rivals, and pushing them closer to Washington. However, just as China’s rival claimants have different capacities to impose territorial costs on it by damaging weiquan, so too do they have different capacities to impose strategic costs on it by damaging weiwen. Because of this, the same escalatory conduct directed at different rivals can involve different degrees of strategic risk. China is more likely to escalate with a rival when it has less capacity to impose strategic costs on Beijing; it is more likely to exercise restraint with rivals that have a greater capacity to impose strategic costs.
The capacity of a rival to impose strategic costs on Beijing is largely a function of the extent to which it is already imposing costs on it. The more costs that a rival imposes, the less capacity it has to impose additional costs in the future. There are a number of ways in which rivals can impose strategic costs. They can, for example, impose reputational costs, publicly casting Beijing as a threatening state and propagating an alarming narrative about it across the region. They can impose political or economic penalties on Beijing, damaging the bilateral relationship, and they can forcibly resist China’s advances, escalating the conflict and destabilizing the region. Lastly, and of particular importance for the Philippines and Vietnam, a rival can tighten strategic ties with a hostile great power — such as the United States in the post-Cold War era — imposing “balancing costs” on Beijing.
A rival that regularly imposes reputational costs on China will have less capacity to impose such costs in the future, a rival already aligned with a hostile great power has less capacity to impose “balancing costs.” A nonaligned state retains the possibility of forming a new formal or informal alliance with the great power, which would constitute a major change in the status quo and a major cost on Beijing. A rival in an existing alliance can upgrade the relationship, but this will often be a marginal change, imposing a marginal cost. Beijing thus has less to lose escalating with a rival claimant already aligned with a hostile great power.
In the 1980s, for example, Sino–Vietnamese hostility and Vietnam’s alliance with the Soviet Union, a Chinese adversary, made Hanoi less able to impose strategic costs on Beijing. China’s late-Cold War efforts to advance in the South China Sea thus disproportionately targeted Hanoi, most obviously in its decision to occupy six features along the western edge of the Spratly Islands, many of which were just adjacent to existing Vietnamese outposts. Beijing was, furthermore, willing to risk armed conflict with Hanoi in 1988 because it was confident that, just as Moscow refrained from intervening during the 1979 Sino–Vietnamese border war, it would not intervene on Hanoi’s behalf in a South China Sea conflict.
Contemporary Conditions
Today, the situation is different, but the same logic applies. As long as frictions remain in the gray zone — and the United States does not intervene militarily — the Philippines has less capacity than Vietnam to impose strategic costs on China. Beijing has less to lose in escalating with Manila so it can afford to be more assertive; it has more to lose in escalating with Hanoi, so it must be more restrained.
The Philippines imposes more reputational costs on China than any other rival. Manila recently escorted journalists to Second Thomas Shoal to observe and publicize China’s coercive conduct, a practice it has occasionally used since the mid-1990s. Even during the tenure of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who was often personally obsequious to Beijing, his administration regularly publicized and impugned Chinese actions in the South China Sea, contributing to a schizophrenic foreign policy that failed to meaningfully deter China. In contrast, Vietnam is more circumspect and has thus retained a greater capacity to impose such costs on Beijing in the future.
More importantly, because Manila is already a close U.S. ally, it lacks the ability to impose meaningful balancing costs. It can further tighten the alliance, but this marginal cost is one that Beijing has been consistently willing to incur. Vietnam’s nonaligned status, however, gives it the possibility of forming a formal or informal alliance with the United States — that is, the possibility of imposing a major strategic cost on Beijing that would negatively transform its security environment. Further, Vietnam is a continental neighbor sharing a 1,350-kilometer land border with China, and it has one of — if not the most — formidable militaries in Southeast Asia. Its addition to a U.S.-led coalition would seriously damage China’s interests in weiwen. The Philippines, by contrast, is across the sea, possesses an anemic military, and is already (from China’s perspective) a member of the U.S.-led anti-China coalition.
The disparity in the strategic risks Vietnam and the Philippines pose is particularly stark in terms of Beijing contesting their efforts to consolidate and expand their outposts. Beijing has good reason to believe that escalation around Second Thomas can be controlled — and the United States kept out — because it has been successfully doing so since 2013. It has also harassed Philippine vessels around its other South China Sea occupations with little in terms of costs incurred. If, on the other hand, Beijing endeavored to thwart Vietnam’s land reclamation, Hanoi would likely perceive such an effort as imperiling its hold on the feature themselves, the anchors of its South China Sea claims, and the likelihood of Vietnamese resistance and escalation would be high. It would be under these condition that Hanoi would be most likely to impose on China the most serious kinds of strategic costs available to it.
Implications
This analysis has several important implications for deterring Chinese aggression in the South China Sea and beyond that are relevant both to the United States and Beijing’s territorial rivals. First, to bolster deterrence for the Philippines at Second Thomas Shoal and elsewhere in the South China Sea, Manila and Washington need to undermine China’s confidence that it can comfortably stay in the gray zone. Without the prospect of spiraling escalation and U.S. intervention, China will believe it continue to coerce the Philippines and apply pressure on its territorial occupations at minimal strategic cost. A greater U.S. military presence around Second Thomas Shoal, including assistance resupplying the BSP Sierra Madre, would likely help undermine China’s confidence in this regard.
Second, for China’s Southeast Asian rivals, this analysis suggests that costs credibly threatened are often more effective deterrents than costs actually imposed. For years, American analysts have argued that ASEAN states must impose costs on Beijing to counter and deter its assertive conduct in the South China Sea. This analysis, however, suggests that as more costs are imposed, Beijing has less to lose in escalating further. Manila, and its fellow Southeast Asian claimants, should be more deliberate about imposing costs on Beijing. Imposing reputational costs, for example, may be effective to help bolster the credibility of more serious threats, but by themselves such costs do little good and may be counterproductive. Southeast Asian states need to better husband their capacity for imposing costs and place more emphasis on maximizing their latent capacity to do so.
Third, the distinction between costs threatened and costs imposed should help to inform U.S. partnership-building efforts in Southeast Asia, a priority of the U.S. National Security Strategy. While deepening regional security partnerships is often regarded as an unalloyed good in which more is better, this analysis paints a more nuanced picture. Tightening such partnerships too deeply and too quickly could weaken deterrence by diluting the costs that Southeast Asian states could later threaten to impose on China. Southeast Asian states — and regional stability — may benefit most by deepening security partnership slowly and incrementally.
Fourth, although small and middle-sized states seek alliances with great powers to enhance their security and deter foreign aggression, at low levels of escalation they may have the opposite effect. The Philippines’ alliance with the U.S. has undermined its ability to deter Chinese coercion and territorial aggrandizement, while Vietnam’s nonaligned status enables it to impose the full range of strategic costs on Beijing. In a world increasingly characterized by gray zone competition, policymakers and planners need to formulate creative ways of bolstering deterrence at low levels of escalation without reflexively resorting to cost imposition. Scholars meanwhile need to address this empirical anomaly, which challenges conventional wisdom on the relationship between alliance formation and deterrence.
Lastly, the tension between weiwen and weiquan likely has implications beyond the South China Sea and for China’s other territorial disputes. The dilemma illuminates how Beijing thinks about pursuing its revisionist territorial ambitions, including what facilitates and what restrains its pursuit of them. Analysts of Chinese territorial dispute strategy — and its foreign policy more generally — are best positioned to understand their subject when they approach it using the same concepts as Chinese leaders themselves.
Andrew Taffer is a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at the U.S. National Defense University. He is completing a book manuscript on the evolution of China’s strategy in the South China Sea since 1979. This essay represents only his views and not those of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
Image: Philippine Navy via X
