On 22 October, two separate collisions took place near Second Thomas Shoal, an underwater feature that an international tribunal in 2016 ruled is part of the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone and continental shelf. A China Coast Guard ship rammed a much smaller civilian vessel contracted by the Philippine Navy to resupply troops stationed aboard BRP Sierra Madre.

In videos released by both sides, the coastguard vessel can be seen blocking the path of the resupply ship, which attempted to evade it by crossing its bow and was struck. Separate videos show the second collision. The Qiong Sansha Yu 00003, a professional maritime militia vessel operated by China’s state-owned Sansha Fisheries Development Company, pulled alongside and then collided with a stationary Philippine Coast Guard ship. The incident appeared to involve no serious damage, and a second Philippine resupply vessel managed to reach the Sierra Madre. But these were just the most dangerous interactions in a pattern of unsafe conduct that recurs monthly around Second Thomas Shoal.

The situation around Second Thomas highlights a key feature of China’s foreign policy—its refusal to acknowledge that the Philippines and other small states have their own agency in disputes with Beijing. This worldview was aptly summed up in a piece by the nationalist Global Times, which concludes: ‘By escalating the tensions, the Philippines likely wants to draw support from the US, or the entire farce was staged by the US in the first place.’

When Chinese leaders confront a middle or small power that challenges or offends Beijing, they often accuse the smaller power of working in tandem with or being used by the US to drive an ‘anti-China’ strategy. This is the same sentiment with which Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi infamously shouted down Singaporean counterpart George Yeo at the 2010 ASEAN Regional Forum. ‘China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact,’ he said.

This sentiment is also the reason that Beijing sought to undermine the arbitration case brought by the Philippines in 2013 by insisting that it was engineered by the US and Japan. And it’s why after every Philippine diplomatic objection over the violence at Second Thomas, Chinese officials ignore the substance of the complaints and lecture their Filipino counterparts about being pawns in a US plot.

When another China Coast Guard vessel nearly collided with a Philippine ship in September, Beijing read from this familiar script. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr aired his frustrations at the annual ASEAN summit that same week, saying that the Philippines rejected narratives of the South China Sea disputes that revolved around US–China competition. Marcos asserted, ‘This not only denies us our independence and our agency, but it also disregards our own legitimate interests.’

A month later, after the Philippines complained about another violent incident between itself and China, the Global Times ran an editorial cartoon showing the Philippines as a stick being used by the US to stir up the South China Sea.

Beijing isn’t ready to acknowledge that Manila, or any other Southeast Asian claimant, has legitimate grievances that must be addressed to peacefully manage disputes. Beijing seems to believe that other states are less committed to their sovereignty and rights, defy China only because of American interference and will eventually buckle in the face of sustained pressure. Running the same coercive play over and over at Second Thomas Shoal seems unlikely to change Philippine policy and will only lead to further collisions and risk escalation.

There are two driving forces behind this aspect of China’s regional foreign policy: Beijing’s vision of regional hierarchy and its fear of US containment. In China’s long-embedded view of regional hierarchy, smaller states are historically and necessarily subservient to Beijing in the Asian pecking order. Long legacies of traditional tributary state relations with China, as well as the historical dominance of Chinese culture, language and economic power in the region, still linger in the minds of Beijing’s decision-makers.

Chinese leaders also genuinely see the US as an architect of a long-term containment strategy that seeks to undermine China’s regional influence—or worse, to bring about the collapse of the Chinese Communist Party. This view, which dates to the years just after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, now colours much of Beijing’s thinking about its external environment. As Chinese President Xi Jinping stated in March, ‘Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-around containment, encirclement and suppression of China, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to our country’s development.’

Beijing’s unwillingness to treat the concerns and grievances of its regional neighbours as legitimate has now become one of the most prominent challenges to its management of external relations. As US officials admit privately, the Biden administration’s progress in strengthening relations with countries across the region, from Australia to India to the Philippines, is less a story of diplomatic acumen and more one of Chinese truculence. Should Beijing adjust course and begin treating regional actors as partners, not irritants, the Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy may face its greatest challenge yet.

As China’s national and international economic interests have steadily grown, so has the People’s Liberation Army’s ability to protect them. China’s expanding, social-media-savvy middle class now expects the military to protect the country’s citizens overseas. That expectation has been reinforced formally by the strategic direction for the PLA to ‘protect the security of strategic SLOCs [sea lines of communication] and overseas interests’.

From a Chinese perspective, the increasing number of Chinese citizens living, working and travelling abroad has imposed an obligation on the state to protect them.

The Chinese leadership used to assume that, in most cases, other foreign powers would evacuate Chinese citizens along with their own from situations of unrest abroad. But things have changed over the past decade, and Beijing has introduced new policies and capabilities that have in turn generated new expectations among the Chinese population. More recently, President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative has generated a further imperative to provide security abroad.

China’s approach to overseas citizen protection can be explained as the response of a rising power to the need to protect its people and interests overseas as its influence expands and its capability develops, acting as a responsible global power. Alternatively, the policy could be seen as a justification for the projection of power to underwrite China’s growing competitive stake in world affairs.

It’s important to note that Beijing uses the term ‘overseas Chinese’ to describe ‘Chinese citizens residing abroad and foreign citizens of Chinese descent’. That includes Han Chinese and any of the other ethnic groups from China, as well as people in other countries whose families haven’t been citizens of China for several generations. For example, 1.2 million Australian citizens identified themselves as having Chinese ancestry in the 2016 census, and only 41% of them were born in China. The use of ‘overseas Chinese’ as an official term, particularly in relation to China’s obligations to protect, clearly raises questions of sovereignty.

China’s 1982 constitution expresses the state’s intention to protect its people and interests abroad. But the Chinese Communist Party didn’t have the capacity to enforce its policy of ‘overseas citizen protection’ (海外公民保护) until recently. The catalyst for change occurred in 2004 when 14 Chinese workers were killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The domestic uproar compelled the CCP to acknowledge that large numbers of Chinese were living in high-risk environments overseas.

As a study by the Stockholm Peace Research Institute reveals, China conducted small-scale non-military operations to extract citizens in times of crisis or disaster from Solomon Islands, East Timor, Tonga and Lebanon in 2006, Chad and Thailand in 2008, and Haiti and Kyrgyzstan in 2010. Before that, the only evacuations of note had been from Indonesia in the mid-1960s and Kuwait in 1990.

In 2011 came the largest Chinese evacuations to date. During the Arab Spring uprisings, China repatriated 1,800 citizens from Egypt, 2,000 from Syria and 35,860 from Libya, along with 9,000 from Japan after the Tohoku earthquake.

The evacuation from Libya was the first to significantly involve the PLA, mainly in a coordination role. The operation took 12 days and involved 74 civilian aircraft, 14 ships, and around 100 buses.

After that experience, China’s military purchased more airlift and amphibious capability for situations in which civilian charters wouldn’t be available, such as in remote locations or high-threat environments. While that equipment can be required for evacuation operations, it is also fundamental to force projection.

The evacuation from Yemen in 2015, carried out exclusively by the military, was the first time the Chinese navy evacuated citizens of other countries as well. Between 30 March and 2 April, the naval command diverted a flotilla of three PLA Navy vessels from a counter-piracy mission in the Gulf of Aden to the port of Aden.

They evacuated 629 Chinese nationals and 279 citizens from 15 other countries (including Germany, India and the UK) to Djibouti. Chinese observers viewed the operation as a successful demonstration of the navy’s new rapid-reaction capabilities, developed through missions in the Gulf of Aden and off the Somali coast.

Beijing continues to face a rising expectation to protect its people overseas, as shown by the public reaction to the killing of Chinese citizens by militants in Syria, Mali and Pakistan. Other evacuations have included the extraction of Chinese workers from Samarra in Iraq in 2014, Chinese embassy and medical staff from Sudan (after two Chinese peacekeepers were killed) in 2016, and Chinese citizens from Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda in the Caribbean after a hurricane. Last year, China evacuated more than 2,700 tourists from Bali after a volcanic eruption.

The Central Military Commission decided in 2018 to expand the PLA Marine Corps from 20,000 to 100,000, with some units to be stationed overseas. One source claims 10,000 of these marines will be based at China’s first declared overseas military base, in the port of Obock in Djibouti, and more are likely to be based at Gwadar in Pakistan. They will protect Chinese oil imports from the Middle East at strategic nodes along the ‘belt and road’.

The new marines and bases are part of China’s strategy of ‘far seas protection’ (远海护卫), which requires the navy to safeguard overseas interests, including resources, strategic sea lanes, overseas citizens, investments and commercial entities. It has led to the development of a blue-water navy capable of operating globally with aircraft carriers and amphibious capabilities.

As the PLA’s capability to project force and protect Chinese citizens overseas continues to grow, so does the CCP’s readiness to implement the policy of overseas citizen protection, and the Chinese people’s expectation that it will do so.

As China’s global influence expands, unexpected friction could arise when the policy of overseas citizen protection is applied to situations outside China’s traditional core interests. Such actions are at odds with Beijing’s frequently enunciated foreign policy principle of ‘non-interference’.

One hypothetical example would be a recurrence of the anti-Chinese riots experienced in Tonga and Solomon Islands in 2006 and Papua New Guinea in 2009. Significant numbers of Chinese citizens could be at risk in Melanesia, where traditional partners (such as Australia, New Zealand and the United States) expect to provide the forces for evacuation and, if necessary, stabilisation operations.

Without adequate preparation, clear communication and shared understanding, an evacuation operation by the PLA in the South Pacific could lead to unintended consequences, raising questions of sovereignty, citizenship and jurisdiction. Such a development could be disadvantageous to the host nation, its traditional partners and China. This concept has been described elsewhere as ‘accidental friction’.

In part 2, I will explore recent trends in Chinese filmmaking that aim to generate patriotic pride in domestic audiences, while also attempting to normalise the perception of Chinese power projection within the international community.