Naharika Mandana
Appearances
WSJ What’s News
China’s Power Tactics are Blurring the Lines Between War and Peace
So China escalates a little bit with every move, and no single move is so intolerable as to provoke conflict. But if you add them up over a period of time, the picture kind of changes bit by bit in China's favor.
WSJ What’s News
China’s Power Tactics are Blurring the Lines Between War and Peace
Yeah, so what caught my attention was that China is using the gray zone campaign across a number of different places and geographies and problem areas, if you will, you know, in the South China Sea, around Taiwan, along its Himalayan border, and really intensifying these gray zone activities in all of these places. So the crux of a gray zone campaign is that it's nonstop, right?
WSJ What’s News
China’s Power Tactics are Blurring the Lines Between War and Peace
So China escalates a little bit with every move, and no single move is so intolerable as to provoke conflict. But if you add them up over a period of time, the picture kind of changes bit by bit in China's favor. So if you look at the South China Sea, first over 10 years, first China turned reefs into islands, islands into military bases, then it used those bases to kind of
WSJ What’s News
China’s Power Tactics are Blurring the Lines Between War and Peace
send out Coast Guard fleets on patrol. Those fleets grew in size. They were then joined by the maritime militia. You saw sort of an intensification of those tactics of using ramming and water cannons to push others out. And then what we were able to see with ship tracking data over the last three years is that the presence of the Chinese Coast Guard and maritime militia
WSJ What’s News
China’s Power Tactics are Blurring the Lines Between War and Peace
is getting so much stronger near the Philippines, which means they're just covering a bigger area inside the Philippines' exclusive economic zone. And more and more of this activity has become normal over time as China pushes the boundaries. You'll see a similar pattern around Taiwan. Five years ago, it was rare to have Chinese military planes cross the median line, which is
WSJ What’s News
China’s Power Tactics are Blurring the Lines Between War and Peace
kind of a notional line that divides the Taiwan Straits. Now that's the new normal.
WSJ What’s News
China’s Power Tactics are Blurring the Lines Between War and Peace
So that's really interesting because, of course, on land, it's not ships or it's not aircraft, right? But what China's doing is building civilian settlements in areas that are considered to be disputed. So these areas are remote and mountainous and historically no one's really lived in these areas.
WSJ What’s News
China’s Power Tactics are Blurring the Lines Between War and Peace
But now you have little villages or settlements where China's built rows and rows of homes and administrative offices and kind of moved families into these areas. And once you've built this stuff, it's hard to reverse. So what it means is that China's effectively taken this land that it believes to be its own by building these civilian settlements little by little by little.
WSJ What’s News
China’s Power Tactics are Blurring the Lines Between War and Peace
The geopolitical significance is that some of these settlements are close to territory that's sensitive to India's interests. So India is another neighbor of China's and is also a neighbor of Bhutan's. And China's just managed to establish a stronger footprint, a stronger presence in those areas.
WSJ What’s News
China’s Power Tactics are Blurring the Lines Between War and Peace
So it's hard for countries to figure out how to respond because most countries don't want to be seen to be escalating. You don't want to make things worse, but you don't want to do nothing either. In the case of the Philippines, the rather than brushing them under the carpet.
WSJ What’s News
China’s Power Tactics are Blurring the Lines Between War and Peace
So they would release detailed accounts of these types of activities at sea, if there was a skirmish or a major incident in the waters, release video footage to show the world what kinds of tactics Chinese Coast Guard and militia were using against Philippine ships. And what that's done is, for the Philippines, it has cemented international support for the Philippines.
WSJ What’s News
China’s Power Tactics are Blurring the Lines Between War and Peace
But China has doubled down in response to that strategy. In the case of Taiwan, we've seen this intensification and neither Taiwan nor the U.S. have a really good strategy to halt or stop this kind of gray zone aggression. So the military exercises that China mounts around Taiwan have continued. The
WSJ What’s News
China’s Power Tactics are Blurring the Lines Between War and Peace
near daily presence has continued and there hasn't been a really good strategy from the other sides to get it to stop.