Ramming and sideswiping, blasting with water cannons, blinding with lasers—and what else are Chinese vessels doing to Philippine vessels and their crews in the South China Sea?
One of the latest stories is about the China Coast Guard sonically harassing the Philippine Coast Guard (“China uses acoustic weapon on Philippines ships,” The Philippine Star, January 27, 2025).
The China Coast Guard (CCG) used a long-range acoustic device (LRAD) to harass Philippine vessels in the West Philippine Sea, the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) reported on Saturday.
“For the first time, CCG-3103 deployed an LRAD to harass the Philippine Coast Guard vessel, attempting to deter proximity,” PCG spokesman for the West Philippine Sea Commodore Jay Tarriela said in a statement on X (formerly Twitter).
Crewmembers described the LRAD as producing high-decibel sound levels that can be painful and potentially damaging to hearing.
The incident followed a separate Chinese interference on Friday when the CCG and the People’s Liberation Army-Navy harassed Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources vessels near Sandy Cay in the West Philippine Sea.
Despite the harassment and the presence of the larger Chinese vessel, PCG’s BRP Cabra remains committed to its mission, according to Tarriela.
He said Cabra has been vigilantly patrolling the Zambales coastline, preventing Chinese vessels from inching closer to Philippine waters.
As of the latest operations, the CCG has been pushed back to a position between 90 and 95 nautical miles from the shore.
These actions by China are assaults. We can call them “gray-zone,” but this term seems to imply ambiguity about the kind of thing they are.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines “gray zone” activities as “activities by a state that are harmful to another state and are sometimes considered to be acts of war, but are not legally acts of war.” Cambridge’s examples of usage: “Conflict in the gray zone has no single agreed-upon definition” and “The gray zone between war and peace has grown considerably.”
By trying to see how much encroachment it can get away with, China has been one of the entities most responsible for expanding the zone. It cannot be expanded indefinitely.
PRC assaults on Philippine vessels are not virtual assaults or semi-assaults. They are plain assaults, the kind of thing that in a different context gets people locked up. They are not accidental; they are frequent and deliberate, matters of policy. They are acts of war, even if the war has not been declared. What they are not (yet) is a full-scale invasion, in part because the Philippines resists and has allies.