An innocent fleet of fishing boats or a bold demonstration of China’s willingness to deploy its growing maritime militia? Samir Puri and Greg Austin explore what an incident at Whitsun Reef in the South China Sea tells us about China’s ability to engage in future maritime hybrid warfare.
China has sparked fresh controversy in the Spratly Islands with the appearance of some 200 fishing boats at Whitsun Reef for several weeks in March. The vessels were clearly inside the limits of the Philippines’ Exclusive Economic Zone and very close to a Vietnam-occupied reef. Media coverage of the incident outside China has focused on the relationship between the fleet and the country’s maritime militia, while China denies that the fleet ‘belongs’ to the militia and says that these are fishing vessels seeking shelter from the weather. Less attention has been paid to what the incident conveys about the potential of the militia for involvement in hybrid warfare in the future.
Unprecedented in scale and scope
The Philippines called attention to the presence of boats at Whitsun Reef on 7 March 2021. This led to a terse exchange of statements involving the Philippines, China and the United States. On 21 March, Philippines Secretary of National Defense Delfin Lorenzana expressed ‘grave concern’ and called for the Chinese to ‘stop this incursion’. The Chinese embassy in the Philippines responded by claiming that ‘due to rough sea conditions … it has been normal practice for Chinese fishing vessels to take shelter’ in the Chinese-claimed reef and that ‘there is no Chinese Maritime Militia as alleged’. On 4 April, Lorenzana added that the ‘continued presence of Chinese maritime militias in the area reveals their intent to further occupy features in the West Philippine Sea’. The White House expressed support for Manila by criticising the ‘massing of People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia vessels at Whitsun Reef’.
The Whitsun Reef incident is unprecedented in scale and notable for its duration: the largest numbers of Chinese fishing vessels gathered at any time at one Spratly reef, and staying there for several weeks. The event was interpreted by several governments as a geopolitical gambit of some kind, though just what exactly is unclear.
Fishing boats or military assets?
The militia has come under increasing attention as part of China’s ‘grey-zone’ strategy. It is an irregular or part-time force, often complemented by serving or retired People’s Liberation Army Navy personnel. The militia is a third tier of military force (after regulars and reserves), with localised organisations that can be used in auxiliary roles to support military operations, and only as combatants in extreme or urgent situations. Individuals who are designated as reservists, often retired PLA officers, can be assigned to militia units, but the majority of militia personnel are not reservists. Boats used in auxiliary operations are called up on a needs basis and not maintained as ‘militia ships’. It is likely that the PLA Navy operates an undetermined number of boats designed for fishing, which are mostly or fully manned by regular naval personnel and used for covert operations. While the US Coast Guard estimates the militia has a fleet of 3,000 vessels, the precise number of boats that can be called upon at any moment with reasonable levels of readiness would be hard to assess.
The militia falls under local and provincial leadership structures, but it is unlikely that the fishing vessels used by the militia would conduct confrontations at sea without orders from the PLA Navy or the Theatre Command. It would be incorrect on many levels to describe the gathering of 200 vessels and their sailing into contested waters as a ‘militia’ operation. If it was a geopolitical gambit of any kind, it must have been an approved PLA Navy operation perhaps undertaken to benefit from some plausible deniability.
There is evidence of the galvanising impact of President Xi Jinping’s leadership on the maritime militia’s evolution. In April 2013, just after assuming the presidency, Xi visited the Tanmen Company of the maritime militia in Hainan Island, which was set up in 1985. Xi’s 2013 visit was documented by China’s Defence Ministry, and he is reported to have told the militiamen to ‘build big ships, go into the deep sea, and catch big fish’. Xi has been credited in Chinese media with the rejuvenation of the maritime militia as part of the national effort for defence of China’s ‘ancestral seas’.
Parts of the maritime militia are now well prepared for ‘sovereignty defence’ operations in the South China Sea, not least through the Tanmen Company. Other militia units may be less well trained than others and overall, the maritime militia has been a developing capability over the last decade.
In 2012, the Tanmen Company participated in an unspecified ‘confrontation with foreign ships’, but this was from a low level of preparedness in the South China Sea coastal areas. In 2013, it was reported that there were only 200 sea-based primary militia compared with 10,000 ground forces militia at Beihai City, a large port on the mainland, north of Hainan Island. While in 2014, stimulated by Xi’s visit to the Tanmen Company, the Hainan provincial authorities passed legislation to fund an expansion of maritime militia. Local party leaders discussed the process of strengthening the maritime militia. By 2021, the transformation had been substantial, resulting in the greater availability to naval commanders of large steel-hulled fishing boats and smaller boats for use in ‘non-military’ defensive operations.
The utility of China’s maritime militia
Long-term watchers of China’s maritime grey-zone operations interpret the Whitsun Reef incident as evidence that the country’s maritime militias are starting to realise their potential. Their very utility lies in the ambiguous provenance of vessels and the challenge of determining their degree of separation with the PLA Navy. These activities may not be limited to the South China Sea – incidents involving 100 to 200 Chinese fishing vessels loitering have also been reported near the Galapagos Islands and in North Korean waters.
There are at least three general categories of mission that the maritime militia could be used for. First, to surround a foreign ship in peacetime to express China’s opposition to its presence. In March 2009, the USS Impeccable, a US Navy-owned oceanographic surveillance ship, was approached while in the South China Sea by a mixture of PLA Navy vessels and civilian fishing trawlers believed by the US to be maritime militia ships.
The second type of mission involves the maritime militia staking ‘grey-zone’ claims over contested features, like the Whitsun Reef incident, with China deploying ostensibly civilian ships that are hard to attribute to the state. There are escalatory risks in both types of operation if, for instance, these ships are confronted by the vessels of another country.
Recent changes to the China Coast Guard (CCG) are significant, with the January 2021 decision at China’s 13th National People’s Congress to authorise CCG vessels to fire on foreign vessels if a threat is perceived from them. It remains to be seen whether CCG or PLA Navy vessels would actively defend vessels being used by the maritime militia in the event of a clash.
This leads to a third category of mission, in which the use of maritime militias moves from grey-zone operations that occur below the threshold of war, to being part of a hypothetical hybrid warfare scenario. If the PLA Navy tried to occupy contested islands, or to launch probing attacks on specific maritime defences, militia vessels could be used as a form of distraction by operating in one area while military action took place elsewhere. And with the vastness of the Indo-Pacific in mind, China could feasibly deploy militia fleets in several stretches of water separated by hundreds or even thousands of nautical miles in the event of a flashpoint scenario escalating into armed conflict, for instance involving China and Taiwan, forcing its rivals to look in several directions at once.
In 2019, outgoing US Secretary of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson said that he had told Admiral Shen Jinlong, Commander of the PLA Navy, that in the event of a confrontation the US would consider maritime militia vessels to be part of the PLA Navy. The Whitsun Reef incident is a powerful demonstration of China’s willingness to run risks by assembling such a large concentration of vessels in a highly contested area. If these analytic assumptions are accurate, China’s military leadership will be evaluating the performance of its most recent maritime militia foray and the responses it has elicited from others.
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