Joe Varner
Key Points and Summary – A recent collision between a Chinese Navy destroyer and its own Coast Guard vessel near Scarborough Shoal has publicly punctured Beijing’s narrative of seamless maritime dominance.
-This embarrassing “unforced error,” which occurred while intimidating a Philippine ship, has triggered a predictable and dangerous response from China.
-Beijing is now escalating its aggression with unsafe aerial intercepts and is expected to swarm the disputed shoal with its naval and militia forces.
-This desperate attempt to “save face” is dangerously raising the stakes in a region where the U.S. has firm security commitments with the Philippines.
When Saving Face Risks Losing the Sea: China’s Dangerous Scarborough Escalation
When a People’s Liberation Army (PLAN) Navy destroyer rammed and crushed the bow of its own China Coast Guard (CCG) earlier this month China’s bid to project seamless maritime dominance instead exposed its own seamanship as a liability.
In the contested waters near Scarborough Shoal, the Chinese navy managed to deliver a humiliation to itself that no rival could have engineered. In a dangerous manoeuvre intended to intimidate a smaller Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) ship, a Chinese Type 052D destroyer collided with and crushed the bow of a CCG vessel that had been closing in on the same target. The intended show of seamless naval–coast guard coordination became, instead, a public display of confusion, miscommunication, and poor seamanship.
For Beijing, this was not simply a tactical mishap. In Chinese political and military culture, such incidents eroded the perception of competence and control—two pillars of the Chinese Communist Party’s claim to legitimacy in the South China Sea. The Party has spent over a decade building the image of an unstoppable maritime presence in these disputed waters. That image cracked when the PLA Navy and CCG vessels collided.
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