On July 24, China Coast Guard 5202 sailed loops around Thitu, an island in the Spratlys held by the Philippines, while at least four other vessels loitered around reefs close to the Philippine coast.
Meanwhile, 700km to the south, a Chinese coastguard ship was conducting a weeks-long patrol at Luconia Shoals off the Malaysian coast, and 1,500km to the north, yet another sailed around the Senkaku Islands, capping a record 215-day presence in Japan’s territorial sea.
The breadth of operations — which also included patrols deep inside Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone and off the shore of the Taiwan-controlled islet of Kinmen a few days earlier — illustrates how the force has become central to China’s enforcement of its vast maritime claims while intimidating its neighbours.
“They are everywhere,” said Captain Kentaro Furuya, a professor at the Japan Coast Guard Academy and a former coastguard officer. “They are trying to occupy the ocean as if it were part of their own land territory.”
China’s coastguard has been the world’s largest for a decade. But Beijing’s increasing militarisation, its great power turn under President Xi Jinping and a legal framework authorising its ships to help realise those swelling ambitions are challenging the international maritime legal order and raising fears of armed conflict.
On Saturday, a Chinese coastguard ship rammed a Philippine coastguard vessel at Sabina Shoal near the Philippine coast. The incident came after China’s coastguard in June rammed, towed and hacked holes in Philippine naval vessels, boarded them and confiscated weapons at nearby Second Thomas Shoal — its highest level of violence yet.
The clashes exemplified what Beijing called “rights protection law enforcement”, a concept that frames the coastguard’s actions as policing the waters to guard against foreign intrusion.
Traditionally, the job of protecting sovereign rights against foreign infringement falls mainly to navies, while coastguards’ core task is law enforcement within clearly defined legal boundaries. But since China put its coastguard under military command in 2018, it has merged these duties. Beijing’s expansive and vague maritime claims make the coastguard’s role even more ambiguous.
“The definition of ‘rights protection law enforcement’ . . . used to just be about protecting China ‘rights’ against foreign infringement,” said Ryan Martinson, an expert on Chinese maritime forces at the US Naval War College. “Now it means much more, as defined by the [2021] China Coast Guard Law,” which empowered China’s coastguard to use force against foreign ships to enforce its maritime claims.
The Second Thomas and Sabina shoals, reefs less than 200 nautical miles from the Philippine coastline, are not any nation’s territory but part of the seabed over which Manila has exclusive economic rights under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). But China insists it has jurisdiction because it claims almost the entire South China Sea.
Two days before the June clash, a new regulation authorised Chinese coastguard officers to declare “temporary warning zones” in international waters off limits for foreign ships, use force against those seen in violation and detain their crews under Chinese policing laws.
The US, Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan objected to the rules, which apply in “waters under China’s jurisdiction” — an undefined term that demonstrates Beijing’s effort to enforce domestic law across territory defined by international law as the high seas.
“The new regulation is the first known [China coastguard] policy that explicitly authorises detention of foreign vessels and individuals for ‘trespass’ in ‘waters under China’s jurisdiction’,” the US military’s Indo-Pacific Command said in a legal advisory note.
Beijing has also published a catalogue of 518 offences where domestic police powers can be applied at sea. Many concern “public order” violations where the coastguard can fine or detain foreign ships for infractions such as “creating a disturbance” — a charge Chinese police frequently use to lock up protesters without court orders for extended periods.
“Concerns over Chinese efforts to apply their authoritarian powers extraterritorially are well known, for example through the establishment of police stations to go after their citizens abroad,” said a senior Taiwanese official. “Now they are trying the same on the sea.”
China also ignores immunity for government and military vessels under international law. The boarding and towing of Philippine military ships at the Second Thomas Shoal in June could qualify as an act of war, said Greg Poling, director of the Southeast Asia Program and the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at Washington think-tank CSIS.
Foreign military officials also note that China’s coastguard increasingly resembles a second navy, which could further risk sparking an armed conflict. Former naval officers have been put in charge of its three regional branch bureaus, which correspond to the People’s Liberation Army Navy.
With steel hulls and weapons, many Chinese coastguard ships are equivalent to military vessels, and it has dozens of former military vessels in service. Two years ago, the PLA Navy transferred 22 guided missile corvettes to the coastguard. While missiles and torpedoes were removed, the ships retained 76mm main guns and powerful radars.
“If you use that gun on a fishing vessel, the fishing boat will be gone,” said Yeh Yun-hu, a professor at Taiwan’s Central Police University.
While UNCLOS gives coastguards the right to use force, it has to be proportional. “It is to make a ship stop when you are in hot pursuit, not to destroy the enemy,” Yeh said. “China’s practices have nothing to do with the framework UNCLOS has established for peacetime, they resemble more low-level armed conflict than law enforcement.”
National security officials from two Asian countries said the Jiangnan military shipyard in Shanghai was building several vessels resembling Type 052 destroyers without missile bays, suggesting the ships were destined for the coastguard. “In the years ahead, we will see entire batches of military-grade vessels being put into coastguard service,” said one of the officials.
However, many experts within China doubt the coastguard’s ability to enforce its claims effectively, even with its sweeping powers and formidable, well-armed fleet.
Gu Kaihui, a researcher at the China People’s Armed Police Research Institute, lamented in a paper published last year that inter-agency rivalries were undermining coastguard powers and suggested strengthening its military element.
Kong Lingjie, a professor at Wuhan University’s China Institute of Boundary and Ocean Studies, warned that China’s maritime disputes were unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. “This poses difficulties for defining ‘waters under our jurisdiction’,” he wrote in March.
Kong highlighted that there was no basis in international law for closing parts of international waters to foreign ships. “Coast Guard authorities should apply caution in delineating ‘temporary warning zones’ to avoid unnecessary legal risks,” he wrote.
Still, foreign observers expect Beijing to push ahead. Western officials said China’s coastguard could use its growing powers to interfere with shipping traffic around Taiwan to enforce a “soft blockade” of its ports.
Observers also believe the coastguard will expand its range of operations. Ships capable of long-range offshore missions could eventually be dispatched as far afield as the Middle East or the Northern Sea Route through melting Arctic ice to accompany Chinese commercial vessels, said a foreign coastguard official.
Asian experts warned that trouble with China’s coastguard was therefore not its neighbours’ problem alone.
“Unless western countries and we, the regional coastal states, stand together and clearly tell China ‘No’, we will be on a path to a Chinese-style international legal order that brings conflict everywhere,” said Yeh. “The order that has been built over so many years will be replaced with one where those with the biggest fists win.”
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