While territorial disputes have long played a role in Chinese economic and foreign policy, China’s growing resources have allowed it to adopt more ambitious and expansive tactics in asserting its territorial claims. However, as several recent news articles illustrate, China’s expansionist tactics have instrumentalized vulnerable citizens and inspired other countries to replicate some of its tactics. The end result is a greater risk of military conflict and exploitation of civilians.
This week, Muyi Xiao and Agnes Chang from The New York Times published a visual investigation documenting how the Chinese government has moved thousands of people to new settlements on its frontiers to serve as civilian outposts, or “border guardians.” Among the 50 villages that the government has built in recent years, 12 are in areas claimed by India or Bhutan. Xiao and Chang also described how CCP officials created misleading or harmful incentives to persuade residents to move to these remote villages:
A local government document reviewed by The Times indicated that some villagers may be receiving around 20,000 Chinese yuan a year for relocation, less than $3,000. One resident reached by phone said he earned an extra $250 a month by patrolling the border.
But it is unclear whether the villages make economic sense.
The residents become dependent on the subsidies because there are few other ways to make a living, according to [Matthew Akester, an independent researcher on Tibet].
[…] Residents are often not told about the challenges that moving can entail, said [Robert Barnett, a professor from SOAS University of London], including having to spend more to travel to towns and on electricity, water, food and other essentials.
“The major problem is they are moving them from one lifestyle to another,” he said. “They end up with no capital, no usable skills, no sellable skills and no cultural familiarity.”
When money isn’t enough, Chinese officials have applied pressure on residents to relocate, an approach that was evident even in state propaganda reports. [Source]
Between 2018 and 2022, the Chinese government reportedly built over 600 villages in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, many of which are located near the border with India in disputed territory and include military and dual-use infrastructure. After India announced plans in June to expedite the construction of 12 hydropower stations in Arunachal Pradesh, near the Chinese border, China’s foreign ministry claimed that these developments would be on Chinese territory and were therefore “illegal and invalid.” Border clashes between China and India have led to periodic clashes between their respective militaries; in 2020, skirmishes along the border resulted in dozens of deaths. An April CNN feature from Simone McCarthy and Aishwarya S Iyer described how China and India’s intensifying territorial dispute is also destroying the livelihoods of local herders in the contested border regions:
For years, Lopzang Dadul herded his yaks, sheep and goats across the vast, vertiginous landscape near India’s contested border with China, following the seasons to find grazing land.
But now, Dadul says, shepherds are being barred by the Indian military from lands that for generations sustained Ladakh’s nomadic way of life – a situation he and others say has worsened following a deadly 2020 border clash between Chinese and Indian soldiers.
“In India, the army is not letting us go to places which they call no-man’s land … civilians are not allowed to go there anymore,” says Dadul, 33, a father of two from the village of Phobrang.
“If we do not get enough land we will have to sell our livestock … and look for another option.”
[…] “A lot of these grazing lands are in contested areas between India and China, and (after the 2020 clash) these grazing lands have now been denied to the locals, because they have been brought as part of buffer zones between India and China,” according to Sushant Singh, a senior fellow at the Indian think tank Centre for Policy Research. [Source]
Similar dynamics are taking place in the South China Sea, where China has infamously pursued a decade-long island-building campaign in order to support its territorial claims. Now, other claimants are following suit. An investigative report published on Friday by Rebecca Tan and Laris Karklis from The Washington Post showed that Vietnam has accelerated its own efforts to expand islands and reclaim land in order to challenge Chinese assertiveness:
Not since China carried out its own island-building campaign there a decade ago, turning semi-submerged reefs into sophisticated military bases, has the landscape of the archipelago been so transformed. In just three years, Vietnam has increased its amount of land in the Spratlys tenfold.
Leaders of Vietnam’s communist government have traditionally been muted about its land reclamation drive in the South China Sea, often refusing to explain or acknowledge the effort even in private conversations, said security analysts and diplomats.
But in rare interviews in the capital, Hanoi, five former and current Vietnamese officials said the government has been “consolidating” outposts for the purpose of self-defense, part of a broader strategy to counter security threats “early and from afar.”
[…] The most dramatic transformation in recent months has occurred at Barque Canada Reef, a narrow, 18-mile atoll on the southern end of the Spratlys that Vietnam has doubled in size to 492 acres since November. The reef, which once hosted six pillbox-like structures, is now Vietnam’s largest outpost in the Spratlys, wide and long enough to potentially accommodate a 3,000-meter airstrip for large military and transport aircraft, according to an analysis of satellite imagery by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI) at the D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
[…] The steps that Vietnam takes to “secure itself” in the South China Sea, including its island building, should not be regarded as escalatory, said Nguyen Hong Quan, a Vietnamese major general and retired official at the Ministry of Defense. “After all,” he said, “it’s China that started this.” [Source]
The greatest tensions in the South China Sea recently have been between China and the Philippines, whose competing territorial claims have created low-level confrontation between their respective militaries. Escalatory measures by both countries have endangered local residents caught in the middle. In June, the Chinese government issued rules allowing its coastguard to detain foreigners for trespassing in the South China Sea. On Tuesday, Camille Elemia and Jes Aznar from The New York Times reported on some of these “foreigners,” Filipino civilians on the contested island of Thitu—occupied by the Philippines for nearly half a century—who were encouraged to settle there by the Filipino government in order to bolster its territorial claims:
[The Philippines] is encouraging more Filipinos to move in, betting more residents will strengthen its claim to Thitu, which it calls Pag-asa, or hope, and reduce hostilities with China.
[…] Marjorie Ganizo and her husband, Junie Antonio Ganizo, moved here with their eight children in November despite what they saw as the risk of a Chinese invasion.
“In the end, we had to ask ourselves: hunger or fear?” Ms. Ganizo, 36, said. “No matter where you are, if it’s your time to die, it’s your time to die.”
[…] For the residents of Thitu, a stretch of roughly 90 acres of land, the Chinese blockade has narrowed their area for fishing, shrinking a key source of food.
[…] Sometimes it takes a certain kind of desperation to move to Thitu. Emmanuel Greganda came from Luzon, the country’s main island, in 2016, he said, to escape former President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal war on drugs, which killed tens of thousands of people.
[…] Like other male residents of Thitu, Mr. Greganda has been taught how to fire guns, to prepare for a Chinese incursion. [Source]
Two weeks ago, Xi Jinping called for the deployment of a high-tech “smart system” for border defense to protect China’s air, sea, and land territories in the context of “new opportunities and challenges.” He also called for strengthened “overall coordination” and “combined” efforts by the military, police, civilians, and local governments to meet this goal.
One role played by civilian groups involves expanding China’s maritime territorial reach via fishing fleets hidden under local countries’ flags, thereby granting China access to the fishing waters of various countries in the Global South. (CDT has previously reported on environmental and human rights abuses in China’s global fishing practices.) Ian Urbina, Pete McKenzie, and Milko Schvartzman from The Outlaw Ocean Project published a major investigation on this topic last week, titled “Taking Over From The Inside: China’s Growing Reach Into Local Waters”:
In recent years, from South America to Africa to the far Pacific, China has been buying its way into restricted national fishing grounds, primarily using a process known as “flagging in.” This method typically involves the use of business partnerships to register foreign ships under the flag of another country, thereby allowing those vessels to fish in that country’s territorial waters.
Chinese companies now control at least 62 industrial fishing vessels that fly the Argentine flag, including the majority of Argentina’s squid fleet. Many of these companies have been tied to a variety of crimes, including dumping fish at sea, turning off their transponders, and engaging in tax evasion and fraud. Trade records show that much of what is caught by these vessels is sent back to China, but some of the seafood is also exported to countries including the United States, Canada, Italy, and Spain.
China now operates almost 250 of these flagged-in vessels in the waters of countries including Micronesia, Kenya, Ghana, Senegal, Morocco, and Iran.
[…] Over the past three decades, China has gained supremacy over global fishing by dominating the high seas with more than 6,000 distant-water ships, a fleet that is more than triple the size of the next largest national fleet. When it came to targeting other countries’ waters, Chinese fishing ships typically sat “on the outside,” parking in international waters along sea borders, then running incursions across the line into domestic waters. In recent years, China has increasingly taken a “softer” approach, gaining control from the inside by paying to flag in their ships so they can fish in domestic waters. Subtler than simply entering foreign coastal areas to fish illegally, the tactic—which is often legal—is less likely to result in political clashes, bad press, or sunken vessels.
China has not hidden how this approach factors into larger ambitions. In an academic paper published in 2023, Chinese fishery officials explained how they have relied extensively on Chinese companies, for example, to penetrate Argentina’s territorial waters through “leasing and transfer methods,” and how this is part of a global policy. [Source]
