Pressure points: China’s air and maritime coercion

27 March 2025

New research from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute reveals a range of nations are increasingly willing to challenge China’s excessive claims in the South China Sea than they were previously.

The analysis, detailed in Pressure points—a world first online resource tracking the activity and behaviour of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the South China Sea and beyond.

The website highlights almost a dozen recent incidents of unsafe military behaviour by China against countries including the United States, Australia, Canada, the Philippines, the Netherlands and others, and finds these unsafe incidents have ramped up in recent years, after first beginning in 2021.

The research also analyses the Chinese military’s use of air and maritime coercion to enforce Beijing’s excessive claims and advance China’s security and defence interests in the Indo-Pacific.

As outlined on the website, the PLA employs a variety of risky and dangerous tactics to try to deter others from operating in areas of the South China Sea and East China Sea, including through the release of flares, the use of lasers, sonar bursts and other dangerous manoeuvres.

Through a detailed examination of which countries do or don’t use their military forces to challenge China’s excessive claims, the research also finds that not all countries are regularly publicising the challenges they are engaged in.

While the US, Canada, France and the United Kingdom regularly publicise their challenges, Australia, Japan and New Zealand are among the countries that do not.

The project also provides governments, as well as regional and global militaries, with policy recommendations to help push back against China’s ambitions to reshape the regional order.

These focus on enhancing transparency through regular public statements to reinforce the importance of their military actions, building and strengthening networks between like-minded countries and demonstrating perseverance.

This new ASPI project fills an information gap regarding the PLA’s regional activity, and through greater data-driven transparency the project aims to deepen and inform public discourse on important defence and security issues.

It provides the public with a reliable and accurate account of the PLA’s regional activity by highlighting and analysing open-source data, military imagery and satellite footage and official statements. Future expansions of the work will occur in 2025-26.

Countering the Hydra: A proposal for an Indo-Pacific hybrid threat centre

7 June 2022

What’s the problem?

Enabled by digital technologies and fuelled by geopolitical competition, hybrid threats in the Indo-Pacific are increasing in breadth, application and intensity. Hybrid threats are a mix of military, non-military, covert and overt activities by state and non-state actors that occur below the line of conventional warfare. The consequences for individual nations include weakened institutions, disrupted social systems and economies, and greater vulnerability to coercion—especially from revisionist powers such as China.

But the consequences of increased hybrid activity in the Indo-Pacific reach well beyond individual nations. The Indo-Pacific hosts a wide variety of political systems and interests, with multiple centres of influence, multiple points of tension and an increasingly belligerent authoritarian power. It lacks the regional institutions and practised behaviours to help ensure ongoing security and stability. And, because of its position as a critical centre of global economic and social dynamism, instability in the Indo-Pacific, whether through or triggered by hybrid threats, has global ramifications.

Because hybrid threats fall outside the conventional frameworks of the application of state power and use non-traditional tools to achieve their effects, governments have often struggled to identify the activity, articulate the threat and formulate responses. Timeliness and specificity are problematic: hybrid threats evolve, are often embedded or hidden within normal business and operations, and may leverage or amplify other, more traditional forms of coercion.

More often than not, hybrid threat activity is targeted towards the erosion of national capability and trust and the disruption of decision-making by governments—all of which reduce national and regional resilience that would improve security and stability in the region.

What’s the solution?

There’s no silver-bullet solution to hybrid threats; nor are governments readily able to draw on traditional means of managing national defence or regional security against such threats in the Indo-Pacific.

Because of the ubiquity of digital technologies, the ever-broadening application of tools and practices in an increasing number of domains, it’s evident that policymakers need better and more timely information, the opportunity to share information and insights in a trusted forum and models of how hybrid threats work (we provide one here). Exchange of information and good practice is also needed to help counter the amorphous, evolving and adaptive nature of hybrid threats.

We propose the establishment of an Indo-Pacific Hybrid Threat Centre (HTC, or the centre) as a means of building broader situational awareness on hybrid threats across the region.¹ Through research and analysis, engagement, information sharing and capacity building, such a centre would function as a confidence-building measure and contribute to regional stability and the security of individual nations.

While modelled on the existing NATO–EU Hybrid Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Finland, the centre would need to reflect the differences between the European and Indo-Pacific security environments. Most notably, that includes the lack of pan-regional Indo-Pacific security institutions and practice that the centre could use. There are also differences in the nature and priorities assigned to threats by different countries: the maritime domain has more influence in the Indo-Pacific than in Europe, many countries in the region face ongoing insurgencies, and there’s much less adherence to, or even interest in, democratic norms and values.

That will inevitably shape the placement, funding, and operations of an Indo-Pacific HTC. A decentralised model facilitating outreach across the region would assist regional buy-in. Partnership arrangements with technology companies would provide technical insight and support. Long-term commitments will be needed to realise the benefits of the centre as a confidence-building measure. The Quad countries are well positioned to provide such long-term commitments, while additional support could come from countries with experience and expertise in hybrid threats, particularly EU countries and the UK.

As with the NATO–EU Hybrid CoE, independence and integrity are paramount. That implies the positioning of the Indo-Pacific HTC core in a strong democracy; better still would be the legislative protection of its operations and data. Accordingly, we propose scoping work to establish policy approval, legislative protection and funding arrangements and to seed initial research capability and networks.

Introduction

Hybrid threats are a mix of military and non-military, covert and overt activities by state and non-state actors that occur below the line of conventional warfare. Their purpose is to blur the lines between war and peace, destabilise societies and governments and sow doubt and confusion among populations and decision-makers. They deliberately target democratic systems and state vulnerabilities, often leveraging legitimate processes for inimical ends, and typically aim to stay below the threshold of detection, attribution and retaliation.² They’re the same activities that the Australian Government attributes to the ‘grey zone’, involving ‘military and non-military forms of assertiveness and coercion aimed at achieving strategic goals without provoking conflict.’³

Hybrid threats are increasingly of concern to governments as they grapple with the effects of digital technologies, Covid-19 and an increasingly tense geopolitical environment. Ambiguous, evolving, at the intersection of society, commerce and security, and transnational in character, hybrid threats challenge and undercut ‘normal’ conceptions of security. Unmet, they stoke division and anxiety in societies and states. They threaten to erode national security, sovereignty and societal resilience, leaving nations and their people vulnerable to coercion, particularly by authoritarian states and criminal elements.

The immediate targets of motivated hybrid activity are typically non-traditional, in the sense that government security apparatuses aren’t expected to manage and repulse them. Hybrid activity takes advantage of other, easier targets and means of generating confusion and disruption at the nation-state level: individuals may be targeted for repression or assassination; fishing vessels harassed; intellectual property stolen; commercial advantage pillaged; researchers and journalists intimidated; ethnic communities hijacked; and elites co-opted for corrupt ends.

The Indo-Pacific region is particularly vulnerable. For example, it lacks the more practised security frameworks, cooperative mechanisms and understandings present in Europe. There’s little shared awareness and understanding of the nature and consequences of hybrid threats. The region is also especially economically and demographically dynamic and socially diverse, featuring a number of competing political systems and institutions.

That offers both challenge and opportunity. In this paper, we consider the nature of hybrid threats, explore the threat landscape in the Indo-Pacific, turn our attention to the potential ‘fit’ of an Indo-Pacific HTC and make recommendations for the way forward.

A number of the thoughts and insights incorporated in this paper emerged during ASPI’s consultations with governments, businesses and civil society groups in the Indo-Pacific, as well as in Europe and the UK. We thank those respondents for their time and insights.

Danielle Cave, Jacob Wallis, ‘Why the Indo-Pacific needs its own hybrid threats centre’, The Strategist, 15 December 2021. ↩︎
See NATO’s definition, online, and the Hybrid Centre of Excellence’s definition. ↩︎
Defence Department, Defence Strategic Update, Australian Government, 2020, 5. ↩︎

Assessing the South China Sea award

26 August 2016

The Philippines had a major, if unenforceable, win against China in the 12 July South China Sea Arbitration under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. But the implications go beyond the bilateral dispute between China and the Philippines and it carries great legal weight as an authoritative ruling by an international judicial body.

Bearing in mind that the award is legally binding only on the parties to the arbitration, there’s the question of what might this assertion mean for third countries who may opt to exercise navigational rights based on the Tribunal’s rulings on the status and maritime entitlements of features in the Spratlys.

The South China Sea award has produced a diverse range of opinions on ASPI’s blog The Strategist. This Strategic Insights assembles a selection of those articles.

Authors: Sam Bateman, Allan Behm, Anthony Bergin, Jay L Batongbacal, William Choong, Helen Clark, Malcolm Davis, Peter Jennings, Amelia Long, Donald Rothwell & Feng Zhang.

Agenda for Change 2016: Strategic choices for the next government

7 June 2016

The defence of Australia’s interests is a core business of federal governments. Regardless of who wins the election on July 2, the incoming government will have to grapple with a wide range of security issues. This report provides a range of perspectives on selected defence and national security issues, as well as a number of policy recommendations.

Contributors include Kim Beazley, Peter Jennings, Graeme Dobell, Shiro Armstrong, Andrew Davies, Tobias Feakin, Malcolm Davis, Rod Lyon, Mark Thomson, Jacinta Carroll, Paul Barnes, John Coyne, David Connery, Anthony Bergin, Lisa Sharland, Christopher Cowan, James Mugg, Simon Norton, Cesar Alvarez, Jessica Woodall, Zoe Hawkins, Liam Nevill, Dione Hodgson, David Lang, Amelia Long and Lachlan Wilson.

ASPI produced a similar brief before the 2013 election. There are some enduring challenges, such as cybersecurity, terrorism and an uncertain global economic outlook. Natural disasters are a constant feature of life on the Pacific and Indian Ocean rim.

But there are also challenges that didn’t seem so acute only three years ago such as recent events in the South China Sea, North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, and ISIS as a military threat and an exporter of global terrorism.

The incumbent for the next term of government will have to deal with these issues.

Launch Video

Time to start worrying again? Cross-strait stability after the 2016 Taiwanese elections

9 March 2016

The study argues that the Taiwan Strait will remain dangerous and that Canberra needs to pay closer attention to the evolving cross-strait situation. Of crucial importance is the question of whether Australia should support its US ally in a future Taiwan contingency.

The report calls for a comprehensive dialogue between Canberra and Washington to avoid a future ‘expectation gap’ on the Taiwan issue. As well, Australia should acknowledge Taiwan’s potentially constructive role in regional maritime territorial disputes. Finally, Canberra should proactively take steps to enhance Taiwan’s regional political and economic integration as a means to contribute to long-term cross-strait stability.

Sharing security interests, ASEAN’s big three step up cooperation

3 April 2025

Southeast Asia’s three most populous countries are tightening their security relationships, evidently in response to China’s aggression in the South China Sea. This is most obvious in increased cooperation between the coast guards of the three countries – Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

But the three are moving closer together in bilateral arrangements, not as anything like a united trio. Going that far would be too damaging for their relations with China.

The obvious, though unstated, reason for collaboration is that all three have shared interests in a rules-based maritime order in the South China Sea. China’s widely disputed nine-dash line overlaps some territorial claims of Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei. China also claims that areas of Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone in the North Natuna Sea slightly overlap its claims.

Principally due to Beijing’s increasingly assertive behaviour in the region, there has been an escalation of military standoffs between China and each of Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

The three are members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, but the grouping has been unable to collectively act on territorial disputes in the South China Sea. Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines have instead found security cooperation on a bilateral level much more effective in advancing their domestic security interests. This is understandable as ASEAN is not a security alliance like NATO. Its principal focus and greatest success has been in economic development and trade.

For instance, amid the growing instability in the region, Jakarta has strengthened bilateral defence ties with both Manila and Hanoi. In 2022, Indonesia and Vietnam agreed to the boundaries of their exclusive economic zones in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Before the deal, they had overlapping claims in the North Natuna Sea.

In October, the Indonesian and Vietnamese coast guards jointly exercised off Ba Ria-Vung Tau, a southern Vietnamese province. The occasion also marked the first visit by an Indonesian coast guard ship to a Vietnamese port since a 2021 memorandum of understanding on maritime security and safety cooperation.

Last month the two countries elevated their ties to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and committed to strengthening defence cooperation, particularly in maritime security.

Furthermore, Indonesia and the Philippines have deepened their security ties through the 2022 Indonesia-Philippines Defence Agreement. The Philippines and Indonesia run regular maritime border patrols in their respective maritime boundaries. In 2014, the two neighbours resolved their existing overlapping maritime claims under UNCLOS.

Working with Malaysia under a trilateral cooperative arrangement, Indonesia and the Philippines have run regular joint maritime patrols since 2017. This arrangement shows both Manila and Jakarta are willing and able to conduct a trilateral maritime cooperation with a third ASEAN country.

Also last month, the Philippines and Vietnam participated in the Indonesian navy’s annual multilateral naval exercise, Komodo, in Bali. In January, coast guard personnel from the US, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines took part in a two-week maritime training course in Mindanao in the Philippines.

The Philippines and Vietnam have reinforced their maritime security awareness capabilities. Early last year, they signed a landmark maritime security deal. In it, Hanoi and Manila agreed to enhance maritime cooperation between their coastguards in the South China Sea, with a particular focus on working together to prevent and manage incidents in disputed waters.

However, the three countries may be reluctant to go as far as establishing a trilateral arrangement, because doing so could further provoke China, which now has the world’s largest navy. For instance, in 2023 China’s Nansha, the largest coast guard ship in the world, was sent to the North Natuna Sea. The incident occurred shortly after the Indonesia-Vietnam agreement on the boundaries of their exclusive economic zones. Some maritime security experts interpreted the deployment of the vessel as evidence that the new deal discomforted Beijing, which counts on intra-ASEAN divisions to prevent the emergence of a united front of claimant states against China over territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

Another major obstacle to such a trilateral arrangement could be the three countries’ significant economic relationships with China. China remains the largest trading partner for both Indonesia and Vietnam. It is also one of the Philippines top trading partners.

Nonetheless, the three strategic partners have accepted that they cannot leave it to ASEAN multilateralism to advance their shared security interests in the South China Sea. Deepening bilateral defence ties between the trio could be an incentive to build toward a united and effective trilateral maritime partnership.

Pressure Points: The importance of Australia’s military presence in East and Southeast Asia

27 March 2025

This week ASPI launched Pressure Points, an interactive website that analyses the Chinese military’s use of air and maritime coercion to enforce Beijing’s excessive territorial claims and advance its security interests in the Indo-Pacific.

The project highlights and analyses open-source data, military imagery, satellite footage, official government responses and other resources to provide the public with a reliable and accurate account of Chinese regional activity, from its intercept tactics to its excessive claims. It analyses China’s unsafe military interactions with a range of countries, and looks at the way countries use (or don’t use) their military forces to challenge China’s excessive claims in the South China Sea.

A powerful Chinese task group recently circumnavigated Australia, energising debate among Australian commentators and politicians. Canberra was provided a close-up view of Beijing’s rapidly expanding military capability and intent to deploy forces that could—under different circumstances—threaten our cities, population and vital supply routes.

Coupled with growing anxiety around the US alliance and the state of our own aging fleet, the circumnavigation led some to question the activities of Australia’s military, including our commitments within the Indo-Pacific region. Why is Australia deploying military forces to China’s backyard? Aren’t our forces better used closer to home? Why are we provoking our largest trading partner?

These anxieties discount three important facts:

First, Australia’s economic and security interests are intertwined with the Indo-Pacific region. The Indo-Pacific has prospered for decades on the back of international law and rules and norms that have helped to shape the behaviour of states, both large and small. As outlined on Pressure Points, China is increasingly using its military and tactics below the threshold of war to challenge these rules and norms, coerce and deter other countries, and advance its strategic interests.

Regional deployment of Australia’s military helps push back on China’s unwanted advances and protect existing rules and norms, especially when our military conducts activities that challenge China’s excessive territorial claims (such as transits through the Spratly or Paracel Islands). International law is only likely to hold if countries such as Australia are willing to physically enforce it. But, as we have seen on five separate occasions since early 2022, these activities are not without risk. We should expect China to continue to use aggressive and unsafe behaviour to deter our military presence.

But the risk is worth it. Australia cannot afford the continued expansion of China’s excessive claims and the development of a Sinocentric order, which prioritises laws that favour Beijing’s interests, rather than an agreed set of international rules and norms. A continued military presence that supports international law and Australia’s partnerships is firmly in our interest.

Second, we should take stock that it is Beijing’s behaviour that is changing, not our own. Australia’s military has a long history in the Indo-Pacific region. Our warships have been sailing through the South China Sea since World War II. Our defence force has worked with partners across East and Southeast Asia (including China) for decades to increase common understanding and build military interoperability. Our military presence has been longstanding and consistent, and it is founded on longstanding regional partnerships with countries that want Australia to remain militarily engaged in the region.

In comparison, since late 2021 China has used unsafe military manoeuvres to coerce and deter the armed forces of the United States, Australia, Canada, the Philippines and the Netherlands. The actions of China’s Coast Guard and maritime militia have mirrored this increase in aggressive military behaviour, but they rarely project beyond the first island chain.

We are not provoking China—China is provoking us. Beijing seeks to disrupt and deter our longstanding military presence, as well as the presence of other militaries. Thankfully, the tide isn’t necessarily flowing in China’s favour. We have seen more countries deploy military forces to East and Southeast Asia in 2024 than in the previous decade. This presence acts as a bulwark against China’s aggressive behaviour.

Third, China has shown its ability to project military force into our region. We can expect this to continue. The circumnavigation was not a quid pro quo—Beijing was not trying to say ‘if you stay out of our backyard, we’ll stay out of yours’. China’s development of a blue-water navy capable of undertaking extended deployments in our region is part of a broader strategy of national rejuvenation, in which China becomes the pre-eminent global military and economic power.

The pursuit of this strategy will increasingly challenge Australia’s interests. But if we are going to challenge military actions from China, this is best done transparently with partners in the South China Sea, rather than on our own doorstep. China has demonstrated its ability to employ multifaced and flexible tactics to achieve incremental advances over time.

It is necessary to challenge China’s excessive claims in the region, while also responding to its increased military presence in our immediate vicinity. But to do both, Australia must dramatically boost the currently depleted capacity of the Australian Defence Force.

Editors’ picks for 2024: ‘Three concessions after three weeks: Prabowo leans China’s way’

3 January 2025

Originally published on 15 November 2024.

Indonesia’s new president, Prabowo Subianto, needed only three weeks in office to make three big concessions to China.

In a joint statement with President Xi Jinping in Beijing on 9 November, Prabowo acknowledged Chinese maritime claims that Indonesia had long rejected. Despite leading the most populous Muslim-majority country, he affirmed China’s right to deal with Xinjiang as it pleased. He also endorsed China’s vague vision of the geopolitical order, something that Indonesia has long been wary of.

Indonesia has long rejected China’s nearby territorial assertions in the South China Sea, arguing that they have no basis under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. A 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling against China, which declared its claims illegitimate, became the basis for Indonesia’s campaign against the nine-dash line.

That hasn’t deterred China. Rejecting the ruling, Beijing has persisted in seeking recognition of its claims, particularly from Southeast Asian nations. For years, Indonesia’s diplomats have challenged Beijing, but now the Prabowo-Xi joint statement has sparked fears that this may change.

It said the two nations had ‘reached important common understanding on joint development in areas of overlapping claims.’ The key point is that Indonesia thereby acknowledged China’s claim, giving them some legitimacy. The statement further mentioned an agreement to ‘establish an Inter-governmental Joint Steering Committee to explore and advance relevant cooperation’, indicating mutual interest in jointly exploiting resources in the sea.

The Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs later released a statement clarifying that Indonesia still did not recognise China’s nine-dash line. That won’t stop Beijing from using the joint statement as expressing Indonesia’s capitulation.

This has implications for Indonesia’s broader interests in the South China Sea disputes, including how Indonesia has framed itself as a non-claimant in the disputed waters.

As for Xinjiang, the joint statement affirmed it was an issue of ‘internal affairs of China’ and said that Indonesia ‘firmly supports China’s efforts to maintain development and stability in Xinjiang.’

While Indonesia has always recognised Beijing’s sovereignty over Xinjiang, the province has not previously been directly mentioned in a joint statement by the two countries. This contrasts with Jakarta’s solidarity with the Muslim world in opposing Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.

The joint statement seemed to present some new enthusiasm from Indonesia for China’s Global Security Initiative and Global Civilization Initiative, two of three major Chinese initiatives, the third being the Global Development Initiative, that present a Chinese vision of the international order. Indonesia has been willing to support the Global Development Initiative because of potential economic benefits. But it has been reluctant to endorse the other two initiatives due to their vagueness and a concern that doing so may undermine its non-aligned position in world affairs.

Overall, the joint statement reads as a turn towards China, particularly by diminishing the long-term efforts of Indonesian diplomats to preserve the sanctity of international maritime law. Not only does it harm Indonesia’s ability to counter to Chinese claims; it also affects the recently resolved maritime boundary dispute with Vietnam.

The shift is all the more demeaning for Indonesia because it closely followed a series of Chinese coast guard intrusions in late October, the same week Prabowo assumed the presidency.

It had always been apparent that the new Indonesian president, despite his strongman image and past criticism of his predecessor’s approach to the South China Sea, would deal with China cordially. Indonesia has security concerns about Chinese maritime claims, but Prabowo’s concessions was probably economically motivated. This motivation will continue to dominate, since Prabowo is aiming to achieve 8 percent annual economic growth. Indeed, the Beijing visit came with considerable pledges for economic cooperation on green energy and tech, amounting to US$10 billion.

But economic gain does not need to come at the cost of sovereignty. Past Indonesian administrations were able to get economic benefits from China and even the Soviet Union without sacrificing sovereignty.

The joint statement reflects poorly on Indonesia’s new non-career foreign minister, Sugiono. It was likely agreed upon without consulting senior foreign affairs officials. They have worked tirelessly to fight the proposition that China and Indonesia have overlapping claims in the South China Sea and to prevent Indonesia from embracing China’s vision of the international order and its narratives on Xinjiang. If they were consulted, then they were likely overruled.

These developments reflect the diminished role in foreign policymaking of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under Prabowo’s leadership—a risk that we have identified in the past. Traditionally, the ministry has acted as a check on the ability of any single president to unilaterally direct Indonesia’s foreign policy away from its principle of non-alignment.

With the foreign minister now seemingly an extension of Prabowo, but the foreign affairs ministry likely to keep defending long-standing positions, the country’s foreign policy may start to look inconsistent.

A task for Trump: stop China in the South China Sea

13 November 2024

For more than a decade, China has been using an increasingly aggressive hybrid-warfare strategy to increase its power and influence in the strategically important South China Sea. Countering it will be one of the defining challenges for US president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Chinese dream of global preeminence depends significantly on achieving dominance in the South China Sea and ending America’s primacy in the Indo-Pacific region, an emerging global economic and geopolitical hub. And China has not hesitated to use coercive tactics in service of these objectives.

In recent years, boats belonging to countries whose territorial claims China disregards, such as the Philippines and Vietnam, have faced blockades, ramming, water-cannon attacks, and even bladed-weapon assaults by Chinese vessels. Offshore energy operations endure frequent harassment. Simply fishing in waters that China calls its own can expose a person to a Chinese attack with iron pipes. Such violent confrontations have heightened regional tensions and undermined stability in a crucial corridor linking the Pacific and Indian Ocean.

One might have expected the United States to take action to rein in China’s behavior, especially given its mutual defense treaty with the Philippines. And yet, three successive presidents—Barack Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden—have failed to offer anything beyond statements of support and symbolic action. In 2012, Obama allowed China’s brazen seizure of the disputed Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines to go unpunished.

This was hardly the first time the US had failed to live up to its defense commitments to the Philippines. In 1995, the Philippines requested US help to block Chinese forces from capturing Mischief Reef, just 129 nautical miles from the Philippine island of Palawan. US President Bill Clinton, smarting over the termination three years earlier of America’s right to maintain military bases in the Philippines, refused. Mischief Reef is now an important Chinese military base.

The more China has got away with, the bolder it has become. Following the capture of the Scarborough Shoal, Xi embarked on a land-reclamation frenzy, creating 1300 hectares of land in the South China Sea, including seven artificial islands that now serve as forward operating bases. China has built 27 military outposts on disputed islands, which now bristle with short-range missiles, reconnaissance gear, radar systems and laser and jamming equipment. Its larger islands also feature aircraft hangars, runways and deep-water harbors. By unilaterally redrawing South China Sea’s geopolitical map, China is ensuring that it is uniquely positioned to project power in the region.

Even as China has gradually eroded the Philippines’ security, including Philippine control of areas within its exclusive economic zone, the US has continued to underscore its ‘ironclad’ defense commitment to its ally. Late last year, the Biden administration affirmed that any armed third-party attack against the Philippine military, coast guard, aircraft or public vessels ‘anywhere in the South China Sea’ is covered by the US–Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty. Yet China remains unpunished—and undeterred.

What explains this yawning gap between rhetoric and action? First and foremost, the US fears escalation, especially when its resources and attention are being consumed by the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Moreover, the US prefers not to weigh in on sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea, where it has no territorial claims of its own. It has not even taken a position on the sovereignty of the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands, which China also claims.

The US has, however, made clear that its security treaty with Japan covers those islands and cautioned against ‘any unilateral action that seeks to undermine Japan’s administration.’ It should do the same for the Philippines, stating unequivocally that its treaty commitment to the country covers any efforts to compel a change in areas currently under Philippine administrative control, including Second Thomas Shoal, which China has been attempting to besiege.

In support of this stance, the US could cite the 2016 ruling by an international arbitration tribunal that China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea have no legal basis and that Chinese actions within the Philippine exclusive economic zone violated the Philippines’ sovereignty. But China’s open contempt for that ruling should dispel any hope that the South China Sea’s future will be decided by international law, which is why the US must be prepared to back up such a statement with action.

If the US does stand up for its treaty ally, it can take advantage of the nine Philippine naval and air bases to which it has gained access within the last decade, two of which are located just across from Taiwan and southern China. If it does not, China will continue to solidify its dominance over the South China Sea, thereby cornering the region’s rich energy and fishery resources and gaining the ability to disrupt supply chains and punish countries for acts it deems unfriendly.

China will not stop at the South China Sea. Under Xi’s leadership, China has used a similar combination of deception, bullying, coercion and surprise to expand its territorial control elsewhere, from the East China Sea to the Himalayas, sparing not even the tiny country of Bhutan. As with any bully, the only way to stop China is to confront it with a credible challenger. The US must be that challenger, and it should start by defending the Philippines.

Trick or treat? China comes a-knocking at Indonesia’s front door

31 October 2024

China is testing Prabowo Subianto’s new administration, with three successive incursions by China Coast Guard vessels into Indonesia’s exclusive maritime jurisdiction—the first occurring on the new president’s inaugural day in office.

Jakarta urgently needs to recalibrate its South China Sea diplomacy and to revisit its basic assumptions about China. China’s move south should also be a wake-up call to Canberra that its pursuit of supposed bilateral ‘stabilisation’ with Beijing is irrelevant to China’s strategic intentions.

These incursions are more than a test of Prabowo’s mettle. They are hard evidence that the economics-first, neutrality-based approach of Prabowo’s predecessor, Joko Widodo, fundamentally failed to temper China’s maritime expansionism in the southernmost reaches of the South China Sea. China is making it crystal clear to Prabowo that it still claims ownership over all waters and seabed resources within the dashed-line claim, including part of Indonesia’s continental shelf and exclusive economic zone (EEZ) around the Natuna Islands.

This is despite Jakarta’s longstanding official position that it has no jurisdictional dispute with China, given the legally baseless nature of the Chinese ambit claim. However, under Prabowo, Indonesia’s maritime authorities appear to be implementing greater transparency about China’s activities near the Natuna Islands, quickly releasing video and audio of the Chinese Coast Guard’s challenges to Indonesian vessels in the area.

If Jakarta thought it had obtained a diplomatic modus vivendi with Beijing despite their differences in the South China Sea, China’s leadership clearly has other ideas. One prominent Indonesian analyst has argued that Philippines-China relations deteriorated because Manila’s diplomacy was out of kilter with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) holistic and non-confrontational approach towards Beijing. In fact, China’s incursions near the Natuna Islands should prompt Jakarta to question its own diplomatic settings towards China, ASEAN and the South China Sea. By failing to support the Philippines diplomatically, the previous Indonesian administration only emboldened China’s divide-and-conquer tactics, now seen on Indonesia’s maritime doorstep.

Under Widodo, Jakarta prioritised economic benefits in its relations with Beijing, contributing to China becoming Indonesia’s largest source of inward investment. Indonesia remained party to the intractable negotiations between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations for a code of conduct in the South China Sea. But it did not invest real energy behind the effort, with the result that the process has drifted aimlessly from one ASEAN chairmanship to another, weakening the organisation’s collective resolve.

Indonesia must now belatedly put its full weight behind those negotiations, either to secure a meaningful outcome or terminate the talks if Beijing continues to stall. Jakarta should meanwhile muster diplomatic support within Southeast Asia for the Philippines, a fellow ASEAN founder member facing a clear external threat, as Indonesia did for Thailand in the 1980s. Southeast Asia’s collective security must come ahead of any single member’s economic benefit, in conformity with ASEAN’s foundational spirit and diplomatic purpose.

China has unfortunately received the message that Southeast Asia can easily be splintered by working bilaterally and exploiting its greater leverage relative to any one of the countries. Malaysia’s supplicatory position towards China under Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has only fanned Beijing’s confidence that it can divide-and-rule ASEAN with ease.

One of China’s follow-up objectives is to persuade Indonesia that it should ‘properly handle maritime issues’, contingent on broader factors in their relationship. Jakarta should be alert to China’s bad-faith intentions, including offers of dialogue, and double down instead on the code-of-conduct negotiations. In doing so, it would return to its traditional leading-from-behind role within ASEAN.

Indonesia must vocally support the Philippines and Vietnam whenever they face Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. Jakarta should prioritise efforts to reach an EEZ boundary agreement with Vietnam, building on Indonesia’s successful maritime boundary delimitation with the Philippines. This will make it harder for Beijing to exploit differences among the Southeast Asian littoral states. Prabowo’s decision to send military assets to assist the Philippines as part of a four-nation ASEAN disaster relief mission was a commendable signal of solidarity and good will.

China may justifiably feel that Southeast Asia is tipping its way overall, and that the Philippines appears isolated within ASEAN. But poking Indonesia is never an advisable strategy. By overbearingly doing so, China reveals its hubris.

Prabowo may be a mercurial figure, but he’s unlikely to be a pushover. An axis of cooperation among Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam could still obstruct Beijing’s path towards dominance in the South China Sea. But Jakarta must draw its own clear-eyed conclusions about China’s strategic intent from first principles.

Australia should take note. Beijing’s direct challenge to Indonesia’s maritime sovereign rights, despite years of favourable treatment by Widodo, calls into question the meaning of what Canberra is calling ‘stabilisation’ with China.

Beijing’s strategic behaviour continues to be deeply inimical to Australia’s security within the immediate region. China is steadily marching south, while Australia’s government seemingly obsesses over lobsters and wine exports.

Editors’ picks for 2023: ‘Australia’s deterrence strategy and the question of targeting China’

4 January 2024

Originally published on 24 August 2023.

Paul Dibb’s Strategist post, in response to Sam Roggeveen’s recent Australian Foreign Affairs article, was on target. But I must quibble specifically with his assertion that no commentator in their right mind would recommend a deterrence posture for Australia that includes targeting the Chinese mainland.

Dibb argues that setting such a course for Australia’s defence would be ‘extremely provocative and dangerous’ given China’s military capabilities. This echoes Dibb’s influential 2021 ASPI report, co-authored with Richard Brabin-Smith, which asserted that ‘the idea of Australia being able to inflict unacceptable punishment on a big power such as China would be ridiculous’. While their position is admirably clear, I’m not convinced that Australia should adopt such a proscriptive approach towards deterrence. The pros and cons of targeting China in a major conflict are worth debating.

Dibb’s concept of deterrence by denial drawing from the 2020 defence strategic update ‘requires Australia to hold potential adversaries’ forces and forward-based military structure at risk from a greater distance’. He argues that if Australia faces a direct military threat from China, the Australian Defence Force should certainly include ‘attacking China’s military bases in the South China Sea and contingently in the South Pacific in its future targeting doctrine’.

Acquiring long-range missiles to strike targets on land therefore falls within Dibb’s concept of deterrence by denial. But he firmly excludes attacking ‘mainland China’ as a ‘dangerous gamble’ for Australia. In other words, Canberra should steer clear of deterrence by punishment against China because it’s too risky.

Dibb and Brabin-Smith’s recommendation that Australia adopt a strategy of deterrence by denial by augmenting the ADF with long-range anti-ship missiles, cyber capabilities and area-denial systems helped to lay the conceptual foundations for the 2023 defence strategic review. In The Strategist, Dibb correctly observes that nothing in the DSR suggests Australia should aim to hold at risk potential targets in mainland China. Neither does the document rule that out, however.

Australia’s basic challenge in seeking to deter a major power such as China is scale. Asymmetry in military capabilities is no barrier for smaller powers seeking to deter bigger adversaries, provided the latter believe that the costs of operations exceed the value to be gained by prosecuting them. With a small military, Australia must work hard to achieve any kind of deterrent effect. It should therefore be willing to accept greater strategic risk. Strikes (both kinetic and non-kinetic) that create a disproportionate response can be effective.

China’s power asymmetry vis-à-vis Australia is magnified by the People’s Liberation Army’s possession of nuclear weapons. Canberra can only offset China’s escalation dominance through its extended nuclear alliance guarantee from Washington. But in almost any foreseeable scenario involving ADF operations against the PLA, Australia would be fighting in a coalition, not independently (it never has). Any strikes conducted by the ADF would need to add to, and be a part of, an overall coalition military strategy. That strategy should aim to win the war, not merely to deter conflict.

Australia’s acquisition of long-range strike capabilities is not an isolated phenomenon but part of a broader regional trend. Other US allies including Japan and South Korea are strengthening their own strike and area-denial capabilities. Among the partners and non-allies, Taiwan has invested heavily in a missile counter-strike capability that is aimed squarely at China. Vietnam has acquired a modest land-attack missile capability via its Russian-made Kilo submarines and Kalibr missiles. These would be unlikely do decisive damage against China. But they do raise the punitive costs of an armed encounter, demonstrating that Vietnam has options to escalate and punish the PLA—even if it doesn’t win.

While scenarios for war with China remain hypothetical, in the real-world crucible of the Russia–Ukraine war, Ukraine’s armed forces have overturned conventional wisdom about escalation risks by striking targets deep inside Russia, including Moscow and airbases used to mount missile strikes against Ukrainian cities. Before 2022, few would have foreseen any country being willing to strike deep inside Russian territory, short of nuclear conflict. Ukraine doesn’t view these attacks as provocative or disproportionate; it sees them as part of a viable war-winning strategy.

Of course, Australia’s circumstances differ significantly from Ukraine’s. Distance is the major strategic variable for Australia—something Dibb and Roggeveen both believe it should exploit to the full. Yet it’s not clear why Australia should tread so carefully around targeting China’s territory when several Asian countries have already crossed that capability threshold.

If, as Dibb assumes, Beijing already has the joint defence facility at Pine Gap on its nuclear target sheet and is likely to contemplate strikes on bases in northern Australia, what does Canberra gain by treating China’s homeland as off limits? Australia wouldn’t need to declare any expansion of its doctrine to include targets inside China. It could, like others in the region, let the capabilities speak for themselves. Roggeveen is right on one point: don’t count on Beijing treating strikes against its manmade bases in the South China Sea any differently to those on real islands like Hainan. Chinese territory is whatever Beijing defines it to be.

Fundamentally, punishment is integral to the concept of deterrence. Because deterrence ultimately targets an adversary’s psychology, in practice doctrinal distinctions between denial and punishment are less than watertight. In brute terms, you’re more likely to give an aggressor pause for thought by being able to rip off his nose as well as his arm. That is not to say that denial is not a viable basis for Australia’s defence strategy; it has long been so. But against China, in particular, it’s necessary to include a punitive element to optimise the deterrent effects that Australia can muster, and to demonstrate Australia’s strategic independence to Beijing.

Australia would need to choose targets for kinetic strikes in China of high value and have high confidence in their destruction. That may require a deeper missile magazine than currently planned for given the ADF’s limited weight of fire. Which brings us to Australia’s future nuclear-powered submarines. A tension exists between the DSR’s emphasis on deterrence by denial and its focus on Australia’s immediate region, on one hand, versus the capability leap that the AUKUS submarines are likely to bring on the other.

Dibb argues that in a conflict over Taiwan, Australia should use its SSNs to ‘deny the narrow straits of Southeast Asia to China’s overseas trade’. He assesses this to be a more risk-worthy concept of operations than deploying such high-value platforms closer to the action in Taiwan. However, SSNs are designed to patrol at long range, where they can neutralise threats closer to their source. It seems counterintuitive that the Royal Australian Navy would shun the opportunity to engage a naval adversary where its forces are most concentrated and vulnerable, at or close to their bases.

The South China Sea would likely be a focal point for coordinated US and Australian submarine operations, pinning down China’s navy within the first island chain. That would carry some risk of escalation because China’s nuclear ballistic-missile submarines are likely to be operating there. But if there’s a clear and present military threat to Australia and its interests, the ADF’s most potent platform should be used to maximum effect, including mounting missile strikes on PLA bases and infrastructure within China if necessary.

While Dibb and Brabin-Smith define deterrence in terms of denial and punishment, the DSR allows for a third element: dissuasion. Whereas the former aim to deter existing capabilities, a dissuasion strategy usually means convincing a potential adversary that it’s not worth developing them in the first place. This appears less relevant for Australia given the PLA’s already advanced capabilities.

But what if Beijing perceives Australia’s plans to acquire SSNs, with the capability to launch missile strikes deep inside China, as a potential nuclear-deterrent ‘breakout’ capability? Australia’s declaratory policy firmly abjures the acquisition of nuclear weapons. But how much faith does the Chinese leadership place in declaratory policy, including its own? Even if the prospect of Australia’s SSNs lobbing a few dozen cruise missiles into the heartland does little to alter China’s strategic calculus, the prospect of what might follow that capability could be dissuasive. A flotilla of stealthy SSNs with land-attack capability can be interpreted as a powerful precursor signal of recessed nuclear ambitions—even if that is not Canberra’s intention.

If Australia was to involve itself in any conflict with China, it would need to be all in, not just a little bit. I would simply argue that it pays to keep an open mind on the kind of deterrence that Australia is likely to need, and to keep all options on the table—or under it.

From the bookshelf: ‘Overreach: how China derailed its peaceful rise’

2 October 2023

How did Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping in just a decade manage to dismantle the collective leadership system carefully crafted by Deng Xiaoping, sour China’s relations with most of its neighbours and set China on a collision course with the United States? Western analysts generally focus on the authoritarian policies put in place by Xi since his rise to power in 2012, while Chinese scholars blame Western overreaction, starting in 2017 with US President Donald Trump, who made it clear that he wanted to prevent China from replacing the US as the global hegemon.

In Overreach: how China derailed its peaceful rise, Susan Shirk seeks explanations more widely. She focuses in particular on the era of Xi’s predecessor, CCP General Secretary Hu Jintao, who in her view set the stage for much of what has happened under Xi. Shirk has been following Chinese politics for decades, has published extensively on China and currently chairs the 21st Century China Center of the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. She has also served as US deputy assistant secretary of state responsible for East Asia and the Pacific.

Hu Jintao is generally seen as a weak leader who failed to build on the reforms initiated by his predecessor, Jiang Zemin. His term in office (2002–2012) is usually considered a ‘lost decade’. However, Shirk reminds us that much of China’s current overreach started under Hu. China’s fortification of rocks and shoals in the South China Sea gained pace in the early 2000s, its coastguard began to harass other countries’ ships in 2006, and the global financial crisis of 2008–09 boosted Beijing’s confidence and marked the start of a more openly assertive foreign policy.

Shirk ascribes this early overreach to Hu’s inability to manage the politburo standing committee, China’s top decision-making body. When Hu took over from Jiang, he increased the size of the standing committee from seven to nine, elevating the bosses responsible for internal security and propaganda to the committee.

However, in contrast to his strong-willed predecessors, the low-key Hu viewed himself simply as the first among equals. This left the expanded standing committee unwieldy and rudderless. As a result, the committee’s powerful members, often referred to as the ‘nine dragons’, each acted independently to expand their fiefdoms and resources, with Hu unable to control them. Instead of the collective leadership intended by Deng, the standing committee was sometimes referred to as simply a collection of leaders.

Shirk cites numerous examples of poor coordination. In 2007, the People’s Liberation Army tested an anti-satellite weapon by shooting down one of its own satellites, in the process spreading debris and endangering the satellites of other countries. When questioned by the US, China’s Foreign Ministry said it was unaware of the test. Coordination was particularly weak in the South China Sea, with the Foreign Ministry, navy, coastguard and fishing groups led by provincial governments all independently stirring up disputes in the name of the national interest.

As Deng’s policy of ‘hiding one’s strength and biding one’s time’ started to unravel, Hu ‘sent the pendulum swinging back to Xi’s Mao-style overconcentration of power’, Shirk writes. Xi inherited a governance system that was poorly coordinated and deeply corrupt, but with the foundations for overreach already firmly in place. As one Chinese entrepreneur described it, ‘Deng Xiaoping unplugged the Party’s Leninist machine, but Xi just put in the plug and it started up right away.’

Overreach is thoroughly researched and brims with information on events during the Hu and Xi eras obtained from interviews with well-informed insiders. A particularly useful chapter titled ‘Inside the black box’ outlines the workings of a political system ‘almost as opaque as North Korea’s’.

Under Xi, foreign policy went to extremes, security and anti-corruption measures were tightened and paranoia grew, with cadres at all levels scrambling to please the leader. As Xi continued to rein in the private sector and the economy faltered, dissatisfaction within the CCP also deepened. This reportedly came to a head at the party’s informal gathering in Beidahe last August.

Shirk’s book is a pleasure to read, but would have benefited from a final round of fact-checking. Her assertion that ‘Chinese diplomats now lead more than fifteen UN agencies’ is an exaggeration. And Shirk claims that APEC was ‘founded by the United States’, without any reference to the pivotal role played by Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke.

These minor errors notwithstanding, Shirk makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of how relations between China and the West have deteriorated, noting that China went into overdrive well before Xi came to power.

Shirk concludes with recommendations for China and the US to bring their relationship onto a more even keel. Some are practical, while others, in the current inflamed environment, are unrealistic. But it’s hard to disagree with Shirk that re-establishing consultations and getting the two countries’ leaders to meet regularly would be a good place to start.

Australia’s deterrence strategy and the question of targeting China

24 August 2023