China Begins Patrolling Boundary of its "Nine-Dash Line" Claim

 

For the first time, China's coast guard has begun patrolling a section of the country's "nine-dash line" - the loosely-defined boundary of Beijing's unilateral claim to the South China Sea, including international waters and other states' exclusive economic zones. 

Since the beginning of the new year, a group of large China Coast Guard cutters have been rotating through patrol duty in an area just off Zambales, Luzon. At closest approach, the patrols have come within about 55 nautical miles of Philippine shores. 

One of the deployed vessels is CCG 5901, the largest armed law enforcement vessel in the world at 12,000 tonnes displacement. Over VHF, its crew has informed the Philippine Coast Guard that the CCG is enforcing Chinese law in Chinese waters, even when 100 nautical miles inside the Philippine exclusive economic zone. 

The Philippine Coast Guard has dispatched the offshore patrol vessel BRP Teresa Magbanua to monitor the Chinese presence and push back on these sovereignty claims. Despite rough weather conditions, the crew of the Magbanua have kept watch and demonstrated continued Philippine presence. 

While monitoring the Chinese flotilla, the Philippine Coast Guard noticed a pattern that may explain the China Coast Guard's new behavior. The CCG cutters have been patrolling a north-south racetrack off Luzon's coast, and the tracklines align well with a segment of the "nine-dash line," which was invalidated by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague in 2016.

Courtesy PCG 

"Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo. This strategy of normalization, followed by altering the status quo and ultimately operationalizing their illegal narrative, has consistently been part of the Chinese playbook," said PCG spokesman Jay Tarriela. "This is why it is important for the Philippine Coast Guard to actively expose these unlawful deployments of Chinese vessels to the global community, ensuring that such actions are not normalized and that this bullying behavior does not succeed."

Tarriela warned that if China does not get pushed back, it could begin conducting the same patrols in other nations' exclusive economic zones, since the "nine-dash line" affects all of the coastal states of the South China Sea. This includes waters administered by Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and Indonesia.

To the north, South Korea's government is eyeing new Chinese activity in a contested part of the Yellow Sea. The so-called Provisional Measures Zone is claimed by both sides, and all activities within it are banned except for navigating and fishing. Construction is specifically disallowed - but China has been installing large metal structures in the zone, which it describes as "fishing support facilities." Another structure recently went in the water, South Korean officials reported January 9. 

East Asian defense analysts have noted that China pursued a similar incremental strategy with its island-building campaign in the South China Sea - creating nominally civilian structures, militarizing them over time, and then using them to support political claims of sovereignty.

“China is not only installing structures but also conducting military exercises in the region, signaling its ambitions to establish effective control over the West Sea,” Lee Dong-gyu, a research fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, told Chosun Daily. “These actions aim to gain leverage in future negotiations with South Korea.”