China has deployed around 300 vessels loaded with maritime militia to patrol in the South China Sea to maintain hold of the country in the area.
About 300 vessels from China’s maritime militia patrolling the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea at any one time as Beijing continues to stake its controversial claim on the disputed waters.
The Centre for Strategic and International Studies in the United States that with the purpose-built militia vessels and commercial fishing fleets, China’s maritime militia has “exploded” in tandem with its increasingly assertive claim to almost the entire sea, CSIS said in the report, which was published on Thursday in Washington, DC.
Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also claim parts of the South China Sea where China has been building artificial islands with airstrips, sheltered ports and other military infrastructure.
China’s maritime militia dates back to coastal defence carried out during the 1950s. Since China seized the Paracel Islands from Vietnam in the 1970s, the militia, supported by government subsidies for fuel, construction and repairs, according to CSIS, has grown in size and scope and become instrumental in helping Beijing assert its territorial and maritime claims.
“Over the course of the 2000s, the militia shifted its focus toward surveilling and harassing foreign military activity to which Beijing objected,” the CSIS report said, citing cases of suspected militia ships ramming foreign boats, damaging their sonar array or exploration equipment, throwing debris in their path, firing water cannons, and engaging in other dangerous manoeuvrings.
Greg Poling, director of the Southeast Asia Program and the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at CSIS and one of the report’s authors, said there had been a clear effort to professionalise and build out the militia since president Xi Jinping came to power.
Fishing vessels of the ‘professional’ maritime militia (MMFV), operate from several ports in Hainan, an island off China’s southern coast, while the Spratlys backbone fleet (SBFV) are retrofitted fishing boats operating out of five ports in the southern province of Guangdong, he said.
“The value of the militia is because it has a degree of deniability,” Poling said. “Beijing can just claim that these are commercial actors, But remote sensing and photographic evidence can be combined to distinguish militia vessels from non-militia.”
Earlier this year, some 200 vessels were involved in a lengthy standoff with the Philippines at the previously unoccupied Whitsun Reef in the Spratlys. On Thursday, the Philippines accused China’s Coast Guard of blocking its supply vessels and using water cannons to force them to turn around near Second Thomas Shoal – also in the Spratlys.
