Welcome to China Uncensored. I’m Chris Chappell.
It’s been said again and again. “US-China relations are at an all-time low”,
or “US- China relations are at their worst since….fill in the blank.”
Which makes sense. US relations with China are so low, they’ve dug a hole
through the Earth and wound up in China. China’s probably mad about that big hole.
Of course, China blames the US for everything that’s gone wrong in the relationship.
Things like the US doing freedom of navigation
patrols in the South China Sea are actually “navigation bullying”.
And how dare the US keep its technology from being sold to China’s military.
This is clearly the US trying to strangle China’s economy through containment!
Because as everyone knows, militaries are supposed to share their technology
with everyone around the world. So wars can be fair and fun, no hard feelings.
And remember, it was US leaders who started the downward spiral in the first place by
visiting China’s province of Taiwan, almost as if it were a *gasp* separate nation.
And then, the US made things worse by shooting down Beijing’s
definitely-not-a-spy-balloon spy balloon.
Even when China is clearly the provocateur, it finds a way to blame the US or its allies.
It’s like they saw that Eric Andre meme and thought, “What a perfect geopolitical strategy.”
Take the case of a Chinese warship plowing in front of a US warship a few weeks ago.
China accused the US of provoking the conflict because it was doing freedom
of navigation patrols in the Taiwan Strait.
Senior Chinese military officials have even suggested using violence against US forces.
One Chinese admiral said China should “attack” US supercarriers.
While a senior Chinese military official
urged the Chinese navy to attack US naval vessels in the South China Sea.
It’s like they saw Clint Eastwood yell at people to get off his lawn and thought, “What a perfect
geopolitical strategy.” They should really stop getting their ideas from TV and movies.
How can they justify suggesting violence? Well,
the thing is, China claims almost all of the South China Sea as its
own. It uses revisionary maps that claim that everything within this 9-dash line is theirs.
And yes, that’s what it’s called: the nine-dash line.
This is despite China being a signatory to theUN Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS.
According to article 17 of UNCLOS, “ships of all States . . . enjoy the right of innocent passage
through the territorial sea,” which it defines as up to 12 nautical miles from a country’s coast.
That even applies to warships,
as long as they remain peaceful and are not collecting intelligence.
In other words, according to UNCLOS, which China signed, all foreign ships
have a right to peacefully pass through the South China Sea.
UNCLOS also defines the limits of national waters and where international waters begin,
for the purposes of which laws apply or who owns seabed resources, for example.
So by the UNCLOS definition, the South China Sea should be divided up like this
Not like this. The problem is,
the Chinese Communist Party has never made an agreement it’s not willing to break,
so even though it has signed and ratified UNCLOS, it still plays by its own rules.
That’s why there’s so much tension in the South China Sea today.
And the reason there’s so much tension in the world
is because Chinese globes probably look like this.
China has been building up and militarizing islands and reefs
in the South China Sea for years, even ones that other countries claim are theirs.
Because, as the saying goes, possession is nine-tenths of the law. And because no one stopped
China from doing it. So China now thinks it can flout international laws and get away with it.
It’s like letting a dog up on the couch. Once you do it once, they think they’re allowed to
do it forever. Only in this case, the dog pees all over the couch and claims it as their territory.
And flouting international laws includes doing
things like harassing US ships and aircraft in the South China Sea.
It made headlines this month when a Chinese fighter jet buzzed a
US spy plane in the South China Sea. But intercepts like these have become
pretty common. And, according to US military officials, they’re becoming even more common.
I’ll tell you more, right after this quick commercial break.
Welcome back. Chinese warships
and military planes have been doing risky intercepts in the South China
Sea recently. And when I say risky, I mean coming as close as several dozen feet away.
An intercept is when an aircraft gets close to another aircraft to identify it,
establish communication, track it, divert it, etc.
It’s what didn’t happen on 9/11, even though it was supposed to.
For context, the US Federal Aviation Administration says
500 feet is about the closest a US plane should ever get when doing an intercept.
But here’s a Chinese military jet last December coming within just 20 feet of
a US Air Force plane, forcing the US plane to swerve to avoid a collision.
No wonder China was responsible for spreading Covid. They can’t
even socially distance in planes.
Now when I say they’ve been doing this recently, I don’t mean *only* recently.
Here’s one in the East China Sea in 2016. The Pentagon said a Chinese
fighter jet came within 100 feet of a US Air Force reconnaissance jet.
…and another in the South China Sea, also in 2016,
where two Chinese aircraft got within 50 feet of a US plane.
And I thought tailgating was annoying when driving. I bet those pilots also don’t
use their turn signals and blast crappy music through their oversized stereos.
Here’s another one in 2014,
where a Chinese fighter jet came within 20 feet of a US reconnaissance plane.
I bet that pilot thought they were as cool as Maverick in Top GunAnd we
know how much China likes to pretend its military is as cool as Top Gun.
Now, so far I’ve talked about risky stunts that didn’t result in any serious consequences,
but in 2001, a Chinese pilot did *die* after hitting a US plane over the South China Sea.
According to the US, pilot Wang Wei hit the nose of a US spy plane when it was in international
airspace. The US plane made an emergency landing on Hainan Island, which is part of China.
Wang Wei managed to eject from his plane but landed in the water and was never found.
He killed himself to own the capitalists. Big brain move right there.
While his risky stunt could have made him famous for starting WWIII,
cooler heads prevailed, but China now considers him a national hero.
The bar for heroes is that low, huh? That’s even lower than US-China relations .
Unfortunately, stunts like these have become more common in recent years,
according to US military officials.
“And just for folks who may not be tracking this as closely, over the past 18 months or so,
we have seen a steep rise in the region of PLA aerial intercepts in particular, but obviously as
well in the Philippines context and others and more, and the United States most recently
as last week, more assertive, more aggressive, unprofessional risky, unsafe behavior by the PLA.”
It’s like the Fast and Furious of the skies up there!
Ratner says only *some* of these Chinese military intercepts have been declassified,
so there are a lot more we’re probably not aware of.
So far, the US military has said it’s not planning to back down, saying the “United States will
continue to fly, sail and operate – safely and responsibly – wherever international law allows.”
But these brazen attacks are increasing at a time
when the US and Chinese militaries aren’t talking to each other.
So if there is a miscalculation, the US can’t just pick up the phone and sort things out verbally.
The Pentagon says it tried to call the PLA during the Chinese spy balloon incident,
but China didn’t pick up the phone. And China refused a meeting this month between
the US and Chinese defense chiefs when they were both in Singapore for a security summit.
One of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s goals for his China trip this month was to restore
military-to-military communication. Spoiler alert: that didn’t happen.
China wants the US to lift sanctions on Defense Chief Li Shangfu before they’re
willing to talk. The US put those on in 2018 before he was defense minister for
buying Russian military aircraft and equipment.
So far, the US has said it’s not going to lift sanctions just to get a meeting.
Which is progress, I have to say. The Biden administration
has been signaling so hard that they want talks with Beijing,
I almost expected Xi Jinping to say “Biden needs to jump” and Biden to reply “OK, how high?”
So yeah, it doesn’t seem like these risky intercepts are going
to stop happening anytime soon. And it’s not just China, either.
Just before the war in Ukraine, on three separate occasions, Russian fighter jets
came within a few feet of US aircraft in what the US said was international airspace.
A former US Navy pilot told Business Insider, "Russia has had a history over decades of
performing incredibly aggressive intercepts as a way of intimidating the aircrews or
trying to get those aircrews to leave the area." Which is exactly what China is signaling here.
China has made it *very clear* it thinks the US is responsible for the tension in the region.
It says the US sailing its warships and flying
its reconnaissance planes in the area forces China into a defensive position.
So they’re saying they had to stand their ground? There’s a lot of flaws in that logic,
the most obvious being you’re flying and literally incapable of standing on ground.
And just to follow up on the parallel with Russia, China definitely also has a neighbor that it wants
to invade. And the only country really standing in its way is, yes, you guessed it, the US.
Although there are definitely some mixed messages coming out of the US on that one.
One China studies professor at John Hopkins University says the South
China Sea is China’s testing ground for challenging international rules globally.
She says “The South China Sea is . . .where [China] is experimenting with
reshaping the rules of the road—and those include
the way that the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea is interpreted."
And as we’ve all seen, experiments in China tend to have disastrous
consequences for the rest of the world.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin seems to agree. He said earlier this
month that these intercepts are about undermining the US-led world order.
“This is a consequential time for our alliance. We are deeply concerned by
the PRC's coercive behavior and its attempts to undermine the rules-based international order.”
China isn’t just trying to challenge the rules, though. It’s also signaling to its neighbors that
the US is weak and won’t be able to protect them in the event of a conflict with China.
If China can take the US out of the picture, there’s a real possibility that US allies
would fall in line behind China. And if China can take full control of the South China Sea,
there’s no telling what it might take next. Or maybe more accurately
what they *won’t* take next.
So what do you think of China’s military intercepts? Let us know in the comments below.
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Once again, I’m Chris Chappell. See you next time.