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

But I think that the overall pattern remains that most of this is on autopilot, meaning that Xi Jinping sits atop the world's arguably largest and most complicated bureaucracy.

And

the more people that get purged and the more he collects power into his own hands

KISS has a rule of nature, a rule of dictatorial regimes.

He is less and less able to micromanage i issues on the ground.

He's getting bad news, I assume, with a greater and greater delay.

So when people ask why did X happen in the South China Sea when there was just a summit with Trump or this happened with the Philippines, my answer is usually because Xi Jinping probably found out about the same time you and I did.

He has put in place an enormous kind of clockwork mechanism of incentives to get the bureaucracy to pursue the rights protection mission in the South China Sea, and they are doing that, often with increasing brazenness.

But I don't think that he is keeping an

eye on the biweekly interactions with the Philippine Coast Guard around Scarborough.

Yeah, and multiple times over the last few years we have seen that when things almost get out of hand in the South Tennessee, the June 2024 incident around Second Thomas, where a Filipino sailor was maimed by China Coast Guard personnel wielding axes, or earlier in incidents with Indonesia, where then President Chakoi had to go out and make a big stink about it.

When it hits a certain threshold.

of risk.

Then Beijing, presumably she himself, does get personally involved, and things can then de-escalate quite quickly.

But they really have to spin up before you get to that point in the South China Sea.

And that's what worries me, that we could wake up tomorrow and find out that there was a collision, Filipino sailors overboard, shots fired, and by the time anybody gets the courage to go into the boss's office and say something's wrong in the South China Sea, it's gotten so much worse than it needs to, and the de escalation becomes so much harder, particularly com compounded by all of the

longstanding issues around the inability to get hotlines to work and get Chinese interlocutors on the phone, and are there even Chinese interlocutors that matter anymore, particularly in the PLA Navy?

That's right.

That's right, yeah.

And there are political pressures in all the other capitals too that would make de-escalation difficult, I think, in particular in Manila, but also in Vietnam in certain contexts.

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