Greg Poling

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344 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Greg Poling’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Pekingology · Avoiding War in the South China Sea · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

So we're gonna set it aside.

But over the course of the 2000s, China became more and more capable, threw its weight around more.

You started to get a significant uptick in violence between mostly FLEC, the fisheries law enforcement, which was one of the five that went into the modern China Coast Guard, and fishers and oil and gas operators from Vietnam and the Philippines over the course of 2008, 9, 10.

That then led Southeast Asians to ask for more support from the national community.

That led directly to the famous or infamous 2010 moment where then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stood up at the ASEAN Regional Forum in Hanoi at the behest of the ASEAN and declared that freedom of navigation and peaceful resolution of disputes in the South Channel Sea was US national interest.

So this like increasing violence, increasing coercion, it was beginning in the late Hu Jintao era.

Xi Jinping takes over at the end of twenty twelve, in twenty thirteen, depending on

If you want to say present or ahead of CMC, and really hits the gas.

So we see an accelerating risk tolerance.

that is most evident both in the seizure of Scarborough Shoal in twenty twelve, in which she was reportedly involved as vice president, but then particularly in the launch of the island building campaign at the end of 2013, which had been kicked around in Chinese elite circles for a decade and had always been rejected by Xi's predecessors as too provocative and too risky.

Scarborough.

We've never seen, at least in the last couple of decades, we have not seen South Tennessee tension so narrowly focused on a single spot as we have over the last year.

The story that our team at AMTI was tracking for really the last decade was more pressure everywhere across the board.

And China had a lot of success because of its quantitative advantages in just like kind of pushing everywhere and the Southeast Asians couldn't be everywhere.

Well, Southeast Asian states have actually had a fair amount of success of their own over the last five years in stabilizing the situation, which I'm happy to talk about.

And I know that clashes with the conventional wisdom on where the South Tennessee stands, but the one place where we've seen China push back hardest has been Scarborough.

That's right, hundred plus miles off the coast of Luzon, well within the Philippine exclusive economic zone.

It is a high tide feature, meaning that the fact that it's in the Philippine EC doesn't legally matter.

It could still be claimed by either China or the Philippines.

But it was under Philippine administrative control for decades and is a traditional Philippine fishing ground, which is why there's always been this cycle of tension since China seized it, because Filipino fishers are going to keep

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