Greg Poling
speaker
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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah.
The Philippine Coast Guard therefore feels compelled to go out and show the flag and protect its fishers.
And under the Marcos administration, since two thousand twenty two, we've seen Philippine pretty consistent Philippine efforts to patrol around the shoal and growing Chinese efforts to push that back.
And over the last year, that has meant dozens of Chinese vessels around the shoal at all times, to the point that this year our annual report on China Coast Guard patrol showed that for the first time
since we've started doing this.
China had to pull forces away from other patrol locations in the South China Sea in order to keep up the pressure at Scarborough.
Because even for China's Coast Guard, which is the largest in the world, keeping that many vessels at Scarborough, hundreds of miles from the Chinese coast or any Chinese base, year in or day in and day out, has a toll.
And and the other piece of this is that we're seeing an increasing
tolerance for risk when it comes to the tactics being employed.
China still refuses to escalate to military force.
But the quote non letals it's willing to use are getting pretty close to that.
The rammings, the water cannons, the dazzlers, the unsafe air intercepts, sometimes the acoustic devices.
We've seen numerous cases where the fact that nobody died i is luck more than anything else.
And I worry that eventually they will roll snake eyes and we'll have an escalation that neither side wanted.
So we've seen a couple incidents that have raised real concerns about increasing involvement of the PLA Navy in these disputes, which over the last decade the standard operating procedure has been for the China Coast Guard and the Chinese militia to be in the lead.
We've seen the Navy patrolling closer and closer to Scarborough and getting more involved in direct confrontations with the Philippines.
Most explosively that led last August to a Chinese Navy frigate colliding with the China Coast Guard cutter, resulting in the loss of life of at least two Chinese personnel, which was the first uniformed loss of life in the South China Sea in almost thirty five years.
I'm sorry, more than that, thirty, thirty seven years, I suppose.
After immediately after that you had Chinese Navy live fire exercises around Second Thomas Shoal done in the Spratleys, which had earlier been a site of contestation with the Philippines.
That's abated, but I do worry that we'll see more of that.
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