China’s deployment of more vessels in the West Philippine Sea is part of “maritime occupation” that the Philippines should resist at all costs until a “negotiated settlement” is reached, American maritime security expert Raymond Powell said.

As its “monster ship” lingers near Zambales province, China’s smaller vessels have ventured closer to the coast, ignoring radio challenges from the Philippine Coast Guard monitoring illegal patrols in the country’s exclusive economic zone. 

“I think what the Philippines is looking at increasingly is a maritime occupation situation,” said Powell, founder and director of SeaLight, a maritime transparency project of Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation.

“China has increased its presence in the West Philippine Sea to the point at which you have to start thinking about [it] being more like an occupation and less like individual incursions,’’ he said in an interview via Zoom on Tuesday. 

It won’t be a surprise if Beijing sends “three to four” large China Coast Guard ships and “half a dozen” large maritime militia ships around Scarborough Shoal any time, he said.

The West Philippine Sea is part of the South China Sea, which China claims almost in its entirety through its so-called 9-dash (now 10-dash) line. These claims were invalidated by an international arbitral tribunal in 2016, but China has refused to recognize the ruling. 

Long-term strategy

To counter the occupation, Manila should employ a long-term strategy to “wear out” Beijing by modernizing its armed forces, intensifying its transparency campaign on China’s sea aggression, and ramping up its alliances with other countries, Powell said.

He said China’s occupation of the West Philippine Sea is an opportunity for the Philippines to “raise awareness” of the problem to Filipinos and the international community, and added that by exposing Chinese activities at sea through its transparency campaign, the Philippine government can drum up support for the modernization of its armed forces. 

“The Philippines is a maritime nation,” the security expert said. “It’s an archipelagic nation, and its Navy and its Coast Guard are way too small to really deter an adversary. And so this is the perfect time to address that.” 

Late in January, China Coast Guard 3103 employed a long-range acoustic device to keep the Philippine Coast Guard’s BRP Cabra at bay in the West Philippine Sea. The Chinese vessel was escorted by the 12,000-ton CCG 5901, the “monster ship” that was first spotted off Capones Island, Zambales, on Jan. 4 and has since stayed in the area.  

The past several months saw China Coast Guard vessels block and ram Philippine ships and use lasers and water cannons as part of what security analysts called “gray zone tactics,” or the use of nonmilitary means below the threshold of armed conflict to achieve its objectives.

‘Credible self-defense’   

At a recent Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism training session on West Philippine Sea reporting, retired Supreme Court senior associate justice Antonio Carpio said: “If we don’t develop credible self-defense, we will lose the West Philippine Sea.”

China plans to reunify Taiwan by 2027 but will fail, Carpio said at the training session titled “Uncovering the Depths.”

And because the Philippines is the low-hanging fruit, “China can always grab more territory from us,” Carpio said. “It can tell the Chinese people, we advanced already in the South China Sea.” 

Powell acknowledged that the Philippines’ Visiting Forces Agreement with the US, Status of Visiting Forces Agreement with Australia, and Reciprocal Access Agreement with Japan are “crucial” to deterring China’s occupation of the West Philippine Sea.

On its own, the Philippines can appear an “easy target’’ for China, he said, adding: “You want them to see a Philippines that’s networked together with a number of powerful friends so that China thinks, if we end up going too far with the Philippines we could end up in a huge problem with a network.

“In the end, what you want is China to say, ‘It’s not in our national interest to be creating all these problems for ourselves.’”

Powell also said it’s all about increasing Manila’s “leverage” vis-à-vis Beijing in the coming years. 

“The Philippines’ job is to sort of just make China’s occupation as difficult and as problematic as possible so that they can’t…consolidate their gains. You know, make them keep working for it,” he said.

Powell said the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (Edca) that allows the increased rotational presence of US troops in nine agreed sites in the Philippines will help to “complicate China’s strategic problem.” 

“You’re trying to make China have to work extra…And so what you really want is for Xi Jinping to wake up every morning and think, ‘Today’s a bad day to go to war,’” he said.

According to Powell, the concept of maintaining “smaller bases’’ such as the Edca locations should be replicated elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific region.

“What you’d like to see is a proliferation of these not just in the Philippines, but [also] in Japan and in other places, and in Australia, so that he [Xi] has to look out and see all of these places and say, ‘I can’t win a quick, sharp war,’” he said.

China doesn’t want a “long, protracted war” in which it cannot guarantee victory, he added.

‘Position of strength‘

Powell said he cannot blame the Armed Forces chief, Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr., for wanting to keep in the country the US Typhon launchers that can fire missiles to China. 

“That just gives you more options…more leverage. Ultimately, the solution for the West Philippine Sea almost certainly needs to be a negotiated solution, right?” Powell said.

He added: “It needs to be a negotiated agreement, but you don’t want to negotiate from a position of weakness. You want to negotiate from a position of strength, and Typhon missiles and Edca bases and…joint patrols and building modernization—all of those help you increase your leverage because it helps you increase your strength.”

Contrary to speculations, Powell said, US President Donald Trump is “generally favorably disposed” to the Philippines, which can even benefit from the Trump administration’s freeze on military aid. 

“I think he generally…likes the fact that the Philippines is a friend to the United States. And I think he believes that the Philippines…represents an important, what we would call, key terrain in the larger context. So I think he’s generally well disposed to the Philippines,’’ the security expert said.

“Generally speaking, you’ll see…probably more continuity with respect to US-Philippine relations than you would see disruption,” he said.

In Powell’s estimation, the Philippines should not worry about the 90-day freeze on all foreign aid funded by the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development. 

 “It’s possible the Philippines even benefits from this freeze because if the determination is made that, ‘Hey we’re giving too much money to these countries that don’t like us very much and not giving enough to the countries that do like us a lot,’ then, who knows, the Philippines might even come out ahead,” he said.   

The Biden administration announced in July that Washington would allocate $500 million in military financing to Manila.

Read more: ‘Atin Ito’ sets new mission to Scarborough Shoal to assert Filipinos’ fishing rights.