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The reason they continue to do this is because they know without doubt other Countries will not treat their fishing vessels in the same way. There is zero conse

by bArray 6y ago

The reason they continue to do this is because they know without doubt other Countries will not treat their fishing vessels in the same way. There is zero consequences for their actions and they have zero reason to change their policy. You might say "the consequence is that they look bad", but they don't, at least not to the people they care about - mainlanders. They own and/or control the news media in mainland China. To produce an anti-CCP news piece in China is suicide for these companies. External "free" media have their own interests and biases, meaning they may or may not publish articles depending on whether they coincide with their goals. If a bad China news piece makes the current President they support look bad, do you really think it makes headline news? Honestly, I'm not really sure what to suggest here. Some HN users will post some ideas no doubt, but ultimately the most concerning thing is that none seem to have naturally emerged dominant so far.

jruthers 6y ago
Good analysis. Realistically, no entity, government or otherwise is taking any concrete steps to say no to China in the south China Sea. Doing "drive bys" is hardly actual action, like say dismantling a Chinese base made in international waters. THAT would be concrete action, and I bet they would get all upset but ultimately do nothing (unless it's too Australia, in which case they'll find some other product to ban). If nobody is going to stand up to them, it's all over already. In a generation, people will just say "oh isn't that all China's territory?"
- hvdfhbj 6y ago
  One very simple action that we should be doing is changing the name of the "South China Sea" to something else.
  - platinumrad 6y ago
    Who is "we" here?
    - hvdfhbj 6y ago
      The rest of the world... but since "South China Sea" is an English name I think a consensus among the English-speaking countries would suffice.
      - yorwba 6y ago
        A consensus to call it... what? Vietnamese East Sea? West Philippine Sea? North Natuna Sea (Indonesia)? While a consensus to take "China" out of the name seems possible, I don't think there'd ever be a consensus on what to call it instead.
        hvdfhbj 6y ago
        How about the Spratly Sea?
- platinumrad 6y ago
  Sad that yellow peril alarmism with no basis in reality is what counts as "good analysis" when the orange website talks about China.
  - yorwba 6y ago
    It's not the whole orange website, just two people who happen to agree in shared ignorance. You shouldn't take that to mean that everyone here thinks the same.
    - jruthers 6y ago
      It's not "yellow peril" or "Orientalism" to criticise China or its foreign policy. It is legitimate to criticise a nation state based on their behaviour, foreign policy, etc. I criticise the US or "western" countries plenty, just not on the top of expansionism in the south China Sea. My point above is that no power is doing anything of substance about China expanding and laying a tacit claim out to the nine dash line, and that in a generation, give or take, it will be taken for granted that the region is China's territory. Granted, this is beyond the scope of the article, namely fishing in that region, but the article suggested (though did not state, and may well have not intended) that some of the aggressive Chinese boats were military.
      - yorwba 6y ago
        > It's not "yellow peril" or "Orientalism" to criticise China or its foreign policy. I did not use "yellow peril" or "orientalism", I used "ignorance". I'm not opposed to criticism of China or it's foreign policy, I'm opposed to getting the facts wrong. You say that "no power is doing anything of substance about China expanding and laying a tacit claim out to the nine dash line", which I assume means you are ignorant of the many cases of other countries' coast guards attacking Chinese fishing boats (as linked in other comments), Vietnam subsidizing fishers specifically for fishing in Chinese-controlled but Vietnamese-claimed waters (as mentioned in the article) or the US Navy's "freedom of navigation" operations (also mentioned in the article). There's a narrative circulating in right-wing Chinese blogs that the US plans to use its network of military bases and client states across the western Pacific to neutralize the Chinese fleet while simultaneously launching a land-based invasion across the Korean peninsula and amphibious assaults all along the coast. Hopefully you realize that that's quite an absurd scenario and just a transparent excuse to call for greater military spending. Similarly, it's absurd to claim that there's no opposition to Chinese expansionism, while the overall media consensus is one of opposition and there are many instances where such opposition manifested as actual physical violence. Talking up how strong your enemies are and how no one can stop them is one of the oldest tricks in the military propaganda book. Julius Caesar wrote about how strong and dangerous the Gauls were before he went and conquered all of their territory.
- knolax 6y ago
  > say no to China in the south China Sea. > people will just say "oh isn't that all China's territory?" You're already doing that. I feel like I'm witnessing a bizzare form of doublethink seeing people refer to a body of water as the "South China Sea" and then becoming outraged that China would lay claim to said body of water named after them.
thelittleone 6y ago
Indonesia has sunk several Chinese fishing vessels[1][2]. [1] https://www.todayonline.com/world/asia/indonesia-sinks-41-illegal-fishing-boats-including-one-china https://www.todayonline.com/world/asia/indonesia-sinks-41-il... [2] https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/1672020/indonesia-sinks-51-fishing-boats https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/1672020/indonesia-sinks-51...
dirtyid 6y ago
>will not treat their fishing vessels in the same way. Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, South/North Korea have all seized Chinese fishing vessels before. Some recently. These countries also regularly seize each other's illegal fishing boats, the entire region is an overlapping web maritime disputes. The difference is China is a juggernaut, larger in population and economy than all other claimants combined. 14 Trillion GDP = capabilities to vastly out muscle everyone else. Same story with SCS islands, where China was _responding_ to other claimants reclamation and weaponization efforts. But Chinese reclaiming at Chinese scale will crush everyone else. The fishing parallel is growing Chinese coast guard and structuring of maritime militia means Chinese fishing vessels get better support and more lenient treatment from other coat guards as Chinese force balance grows. Recent Chinese SCS skirmishes are relatively peaceful compared to others, whose mutual clashes frequently escalate to bloodshed because small peer countries can escalate and be brutal to each other. Obviously such reports rarely gets attention in western reporting, nor that per capita China underfishes, or fishing fleets from other wealthier per capita countries is sustained through foreign slave labour, whereas China's is just... cheap Chinese labour. China SCS Monroe doctrine is balancing from this perspective. Philippines finally agreed to "cooperate" with China on SCS oil exploration, setting up frameworks for other members. RCEP this week without US or India. Short of war with USN, it's just a matter of time before China tames the SCS. For context, this is newly projected growth of PLA Navy 14th five-year plan for 2025. Only surface combatants. https://preview.redd.it/yxsbgotn6kz51.jpg?width=1024&auto=webp&s=d77865794cc0d78516de0113a58d556b48990101 https://preview.redd.it/yxsbgotn6kz51.jpg?width=1024&auto=we... In the next 5 years, China will build approximately entire Japanese Navy in tonnage. It will do so with ~2% of GDP in defense spending, basically what Trump wants NATO members to comit. And as Australia, Japan, Korea are setting record high defense budget growth, China will be increasing national defense by 6.6% this year, lowest in decades. This is the fundamental reality of disportionate Chinese scale and industrial capability, even modest spending means the kind of acquisitions that will make neighbours shit bricks and US worry over hegemony. The alternative is... China not spending money a reasonable amount on defense and modernization, not enforcing her claims, which is a ridiculous expectation.
- yorwba 6y ago
  > Chinese reclaiming at Chinese scale will crush everyone else. I wouldn't be so sure about that. The whole reason they have to resort to land reclamation to create artificial islands for their military bases is that they were late to the party and all the good spots on existing islands were already taken, mostly by Vietnamese bases: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Spratly_with_flags.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Spratly_... Now holding those islands doesn't help Vietnamese fishermen much when they encounter other countries' coast guards out in the open sea, but the bases still provide a convenient place to shelter if they happen to be close by.
ainiriand 6y ago
There are many examples of different countries shooting Chinese fishing boats. This is just the first example but you can find many more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3lkM4t8AaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3lkM4t8AaA
- GauntletWizard 6y ago
  They fired a series of warning shots. Had the put a dent in that hull, there would have been an immense amount of outrage from China.
  - ainiriand 6y ago
    Look at this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00rMVee0R4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00rMVee0R4c And there are examples from other countries too.
- ddeck 6y ago
  Certainly, but you'll find that in those cases, the Chinese boats were generally operating illegally in areas internationally recognized to belong to other countries. For example the video you linked is of a Chinese boat operating ~350km off the coast of Argentina, which is nearly the opposite side of the world from China. In contrast, the waters claimed by China in the South China Sea are just off the coast of Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and not in close proximity to China [1]. The Permanent Court of Arbitration has also ruled that there is "no legal basis for China to claim historic rights" over the nine-dash line.[2] They are however, very conveniently located over a large number of unexploited oil and gas deposits. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_South_China_Sea#/media/File:South_China_Sea_claims_map.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_So... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_China_Sea#2016_ruling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_China_Sea#2016_ruling
  - jhanschoo 6y ago
    Oil and gas is only a part of it. You also have at least 1) the desire to monopolize security over the sea lines of communication passing through the SCS, and 2) the huge threat to projecting its maritime power posed by the chain of islands from Japan through the Philippines to Indonesia
platinumrad 6y ago
You're delusional if you think that western media, which is presumably what you're referring to when you say "external "free" media" (your scare quotes, not mine), holds back when it comes to negative coverage of China. In reality, editorial standards go out the window when it comes to China and other adversary states like Russia and North Korea. How many times has Kim Jong-un supposedly died just this year? When was the last time a piece on Xinjiang cited a single "China watcher" who isn't Adrian Zenz?
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  What you wrote is simply nonsense. You can watch any of the Youtube NTD/Epoch media channels to see what's really going on in China. The CCP makes the WW2 Axis countries look like choir boys. Regarding Xinjiang, by moving people around like a shell game, their reproductive cycle can be disrupted. If you do that for 2 generations, you achieve ethnic cleansing without shooting anybody in the head. The involuntary organ harvesting stories are much worse in reality. It appears retired CCP members are using organs like new batteries to last to 150 years old. How would you like to make a donation for a double-lung transplant? Didn't think so.
throwaway445 6y ago
Stop giving any more of your money directly to Beijing (no more Thinkpads).
mytailorisrich 6y ago
It should be pointed out once again that the Chinese claims over the South China Sea are not the doing of the CCP. The issue predates them and the ROC (Taiwan) has virtually the same claims. In fact the "9-dash line" so strongly defended by the Chinese (Mainland) Government dates from WWII and the ROC claims over Japanese-occupied territory. There is no right and wrong here. For a long time the neighbouring countries, including China, did not pay much attention, then Europeans and Americans colonised the region, now everyone is fighting their corner to further their own interests. It so happens that China has regained strength and has adopted a "just do it" approach similar to the time-honoured one Western countries have historically taken. I.e. they've learned the game at their own expense.

by bArray 6y ago

jruthers 6y ago

Good analysis. Realistically, no entity, government or otherwise is taking any concrete steps to say no to China in the south China Sea. Doing "drive bys" is hardly actual action, like say dismantling a Chinese base made in international waters. THAT would be concrete action, and I bet they would get all upset but ultimately do nothing (unless it's too Australia, in which case they'll find some other product to ban). If nobody is going to stand up to them, it's all over already. In a generation, people will just say "oh isn't that all China's territory?"

hvdfhbj 6y ago
One very simple action that we should be doing is changing the name of the "South China Sea" to something else.
- platinumrad 6y ago
  Who is "we" here?
  - hvdfhbj 6y ago
    The rest of the world... but since "South China Sea" is an English name I think a consensus among the English-speaking countries would suffice.
    - yorwba 6y ago
      A consensus to call it... what? Vietnamese East Sea? West Philippine Sea? North Natuna Sea (Indonesia)? While a consensus to take "China" out of the name seems possible, I don't think there'd ever be a consensus on what to call it instead.
      - hvdfhbj 6y ago
        How about the Spratly Sea?
platinumrad 6y ago
Sad that yellow peril alarmism with no basis in reality is what counts as "good analysis" when the orange website talks about China.
- yorwba 6y ago
  It's not the whole orange website, just two people who happen to agree in shared ignorance. You shouldn't take that to mean that everyone here thinks the same.
  - jruthers 6y ago
    It's not "yellow peril" or "Orientalism" to criticise China or its foreign policy. It is legitimate to criticise a nation state based on their behaviour, foreign policy, etc. I criticise the US or "western" countries plenty, just not on the top of expansionism in the south China Sea. My point above is that no power is doing anything of substance about China expanding and laying a tacit claim out to the nine dash line, and that in a generation, give or take, it will be taken for granted that the region is China's territory. Granted, this is beyond the scope of the article, namely fishing in that region, but the article suggested (though did not state, and may well have not intended) that some of the aggressive Chinese boats were military.
    - yorwba 6y ago
      > It's not "yellow peril" or "Orientalism" to criticise China or its foreign policy. I did not use "yellow peril" or "orientalism", I used "ignorance". I'm not opposed to criticism of China or it's foreign policy, I'm opposed to getting the facts wrong. You say that "no power is doing anything of substance about China expanding and laying a tacit claim out to the nine dash line", which I assume means you are ignorant of the many cases of other countries' coast guards attacking Chinese fishing boats (as linked in other comments), Vietnam subsidizing fishers specifically for fishing in Chinese-controlled but Vietnamese-claimed waters (as mentioned in the article) or the US Navy's "freedom of navigation" operations (also mentioned in the article). There's a narrative circulating in right-wing Chinese blogs that the US plans to use its network of military bases and client states across the western Pacific to neutralize the Chinese fleet while simultaneously launching a land-based invasion across the Korean peninsula and amphibious assaults all along the coast. Hopefully you realize that that's quite an absurd scenario and just a transparent excuse to call for greater military spending. Similarly, it's absurd to claim that there's no opposition to Chinese expansionism, while the overall media consensus is one of opposition and there are many instances where such opposition manifested as actual physical violence. Talking up how strong your enemies are and how no one can stop them is one of the oldest tricks in the military propaganda book. Julius Caesar wrote about how strong and dangerous the Gauls were before he went and conquered all of their territory.
knolax 6y ago
> say no to China in the south China Sea. > people will just say "oh isn't that all China's territory?" You're already doing that. I feel like I'm witnessing a bizzare form of doublethink seeing people refer to a body of water as the "South China Sea" and then becoming outraged that China would lay claim to said body of water named after them.

thelittleone 6y ago

Indonesia has sunk several Chinese fishing vessels[1][2]. [1] https://www.todayonline.com/world/asia/indonesia-sinks-41-illegal-fishing-boats-including-one-china https://www.todayonline.com/world/asia/indonesia-sinks-41-il... [2] https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/1672020/indonesia-sinks-51-fishing-boats https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/1672020/indonesia-sinks-51...

dirtyid 6y ago

>will not treat their fishing vessels in the same way. Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, South/North Korea have all seized Chinese fishing vessels before. Some recently. These countries also regularly seize each other's illegal fishing boats, the entire region is an overlapping web maritime disputes. The difference is China is a juggernaut, larger in population and economy than all other claimants combined. 14 Trillion GDP = capabilities to vastly out muscle everyone else. Same story with SCS islands, where China was _responding_ to other claimants reclamation and weaponization efforts. But Chinese reclaiming at Chinese scale will crush everyone else. The fishing parallel is growing Chinese coast guard and structuring of maritime militia means Chinese fishing vessels get better support and more lenient treatment from other coat guards as Chinese force balance grows. Recent Chinese SCS skirmishes are relatively peaceful compared to others, whose mutual clashes frequently escalate to bloodshed because small peer countries can escalate and be brutal to each other. Obviously such reports rarely gets attention in western reporting, nor that per capita China underfishes, or fishing fleets from other wealthier per capita countries is sustained through foreign slave labour, whereas China's is just... cheap Chinese labour. China SCS Monroe doctrine is balancing from this perspective. Philippines finally agreed to "cooperate" with China on SCS oil exploration, setting up frameworks for other members. RCEP this week without US or India. Short of war with USN, it's just a matter of time before China tames the SCS. For context, this is newly projected growth of PLA Navy 14th five-year plan for 2025. Only surface combatants. https://preview.redd.it/yxsbgotn6kz51.jpg?width=1024&auto=webp&s=d77865794cc0d78516de0113a58d556b48990101 https://preview.redd.it/yxsbgotn6kz51.jpg?width=1024&auto=we... In the next 5 years, China will build approximately entire Japanese Navy in tonnage. It will do so with ~2% of GDP in defense spending, basically what Trump wants NATO members to comit. And as Australia, Japan, Korea are setting record high defense budget growth, China will be increasing national defense by 6.6% this year, lowest in decades. This is the fundamental reality of disportionate Chinese scale and industrial capability, even modest spending means the kind of acquisitions that will make neighbours shit bricks and US worry over hegemony. The alternative is... China not spending money a reasonable amount on defense and modernization, not enforcing her claims, which is a ridiculous expectation.

yorwba 6y ago
> Chinese reclaiming at Chinese scale will crush everyone else. I wouldn't be so sure about that. The whole reason they have to resort to land reclamation to create artificial islands for their military bases is that they were late to the party and all the good spots on existing islands were already taken, mostly by Vietnamese bases: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Spratly_with_flags.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Spratly_... Now holding those islands doesn't help Vietnamese fishermen much when they encounter other countries' coast guards out in the open sea, but the bases still provide a convenient place to shelter if they happen to be close by.

ainiriand 6y ago

There are many examples of different countries shooting Chinese fishing boats. This is just the first example but you can find many more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3lkM4t8AaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3lkM4t8AaA

GauntletWizard 6y ago
They fired a series of warning shots. Had the put a dent in that hull, there would have been an immense amount of outrage from China.
- ainiriand 6y ago
  Look at this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00rMVee0R4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00rMVee0R4c And there are examples from other countries too.
ddeck 6y ago
Certainly, but you'll find that in those cases, the Chinese boats were generally operating illegally in areas internationally recognized to belong to other countries. For example the video you linked is of a Chinese boat operating ~350km off the coast of Argentina, which is nearly the opposite side of the world from China. In contrast, the waters claimed by China in the South China Sea are just off the coast of Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and not in close proximity to China [1]. The Permanent Court of Arbitration has also ruled that there is "no legal basis for China to claim historic rights" over the nine-dash line.[2] They are however, very conveniently located over a large number of unexploited oil and gas deposits. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_South_China_Sea#/media/File:South_China_Sea_claims_map.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_So... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_China_Sea#2016_ruling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_China_Sea#2016_ruling
- jhanschoo 6y ago
  Oil and gas is only a part of it. You also have at least 1) the desire to monopolize security over the sea lines of communication passing through the SCS, and 2) the huge threat to projecting its maritime power posed by the chain of islands from Japan through the Philippines to Indonesia

platinumrad 6y ago

You're delusional if you think that western media, which is presumably what you're referring to when you say "external "free" media" (your scare quotes, not mine), holds back when it comes to negative coverage of China. In reality, editorial standards go out the window when it comes to China and other adversary states like Russia and North Korea. How many times has Kim Jong-un supposedly died just this year? When was the last time a piece on Xinjiang cited a single "China watcher" who isn't Adrian Zenz?

redis_mlc 6y ago
What you wrote is simply nonsense. You can watch any of the Youtube NTD/Epoch media channels to see what's really going on in China. The CCP makes the WW2 Axis countries look like choir boys. Regarding Xinjiang, by moving people around like a shell game, their reproductive cycle can be disrupted. If you do that for 2 generations, you achieve ethnic cleansing without shooting anybody in the head. The involuntary organ harvesting stories are much worse in reality. It appears retired CCP members are using organs like new batteries to last to 150 years old. How would you like to make a donation for a double-lung transplant? Didn't think so.

throwaway445 6y ago

Stop giving any more of your money directly to Beijing (no more Thinkpads).

mytailorisrich 6y ago

It should be pointed out once again that the Chinese claims over the South China Sea are not the doing of the CCP. The issue predates them and the ROC (Taiwan) has virtually the same claims. In fact the "9-dash line" so strongly defended by the Chinese (Mainland) Government dates from WWII and the ROC claims over Japanese-occupied territory. There is no right and wrong here. For a long time the neighbouring countries, including China, did not pay much attention, then Europeans and Americans colonised the region, now everyone is fighting their corner to further their own interests. It so happens that China has regained strength and has adopted a "just do it" approach similar to the time-honoured one Western countries have historically taken. I.e. they've learned the game at their own expense.