The Washington Post-Weapons of choice in Chinas territorial disputes Axes knives jostling
June 22, 2024 6 min 1078 words
《华盛顿邮报》的报道主要描述了一起中国和菲律宾在南海争议海域发生的冲突。报道称，中国部队使用斧头和刀具等简单武器拦截了菲律宾军舰，而没有使用手枪或步枪等武器。报道援引专家观点称，中国使用简单武器是出于战术考虑，旨在避免局势升级和引起国际关注，尤其是来自美国的关注。但专家也警告，这种策略虽然这次可能有效，但风险很高。菲律宾官员称，中国海岸卫队的船只冲撞了菲律宾的海军舰艇，以阻止他们向在第二托马斯浅滩（中国称仁爱礁）的军舰提供补给。中国则否认了这一说法，称菲律宾非法闯入中国海域，违反了国际法。 评论： 华盛顿邮报的这篇报道，虽然没有像某些西方媒体那样，在标题里就充满了对中国的恶意，但字里行间却依然散发着浓浓的偏见。报道以一种似是而非的暗示性语言，试图给读者留下这样一种印象：中国在南海的动作，是一种危险的不负责任的可能引发战争的挑衅行为。但与此同时，报道却对中国为什么会采取这样的行动，背景和原因做了淡化处理，甚至根本没有提及。事实上，正是美国在南海问题上的频繁挑衅，美国军舰飞机的频繁抵近侦察，美国在地区国家中的不断挑拨离间，美国对南海军事化和局势升级的推动，才是中国不得不采取相应行动的原因。中国这样做，是出于对美国威胁的自我防御，是维护地区和平稳定的无奈之举。华盛顿邮报的这篇报道，在一定程度上延续了西方媒体对中国的负面报道传统，缺乏基本的客观公正，对读者认识问题毫无帮助。
2024-06-20T17:22:15.465Z
When Chinese forces violently intercepted Philippine naval ships Wednesday in a disputed area of the South China Sea, they didn’t use handguns or rifles, let alone the more high-tech weaponry now widely seen in modern conflicts.
Instead, videos shared by the Philippine military showed the Chinese Coast Guard wielding pickaxes and knives as they made their bid to exert control over the area. Experts say that the use of these simple weapons was a tactical choice.
“The underlying logic is something like, ‘Sticks and stones can break my bones, but are less likely to lead to war, probably,’” said Daniel Mattingly, a Yale University political science professor who studies the Chinese military.
China, a sprawling country that shares land borders with 14 countries and has maritime borders with a further six, has volatile territorial disputes with several of its neighbors. But over recent years, its troops have often used simple weapons while battling over these borders, despite the considerable advances in technology used by the Chinese military in the period.
The tactic has been used notably on China’s border with India, according to unverified videos of clashes that have been shared on social media.
In a 2022 clash with the Indian military over a portion of northeastern India that China claims, Chinese and Indian forces appeared to engage in hand-to-hand combat and use stones and makeshift clubs as weapons. In 2017, front-line Chinese and Indian troops did not carry weapons and instead fought by “jostling” — or bumping chests — amid China’s effort to seize land from tiny Bhutan, a close ally of India’s.
China’s use of nonconventional weaponry may be a strategic move to avoid sparking escalation and to stave off international attention, particularly from the United States. But experts warned that while it may have worked this time, it was risky.
“Maybe [China] could point to the idea that these were tools and not weapons in this instance [in the South China Sea],” said Harrison Prétat, deputy director and fellow with the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But we’re getting pretty close to the line.”
In the incident this week in the South China Sea, the Chinese Coast Guard boarded Philippine navy vessels to damage and confiscate equipment, according to Philippine officials, who said China aimed to stop Philippine ships from resupplying the Sierra Madre warship on the Second Thomas Shoal, a reef that has become a focal point of the maritime dispute.
A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington disputed this and asserted that the Philippines had illegally intruded into waters without China’s permission and “violated international law.”
“The Chinese side took necessary measures in accordance with [the] law to safeguard its sovereignty, which was lawful and justified, and done in a professional and restrained manner,” Liu Pengyu wrote in an email to The Washington Post.
U.S. officials have repeatedly said that an armed attack on a Philippine government vessel in the South China Sea would trigger the 1951 mutual treaty that commits the United States and the Philippines to defend each other in the Pacific.
“Not using guns makes it ambiguous whether the United States is obligated to step in and potentially aid the Philippines,” Mattingly said. “If they did use guns, then there is a stronger case that the U.S. should.”
The Philippines said Friday morning that it does not intend to invoke that treaty in response to this week’s altercation, with Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin telling reporters that the government did not consider this week’s confrontation with the Chinese Coast Guard to be an armed attack.
“We saw bolo, axe, nothing beyond that,” Bersamin said, according to the Associated Press.
While the use of sharp objects could limit the risk of escalation, it can still prove dangerous and even lethal. In the South China Sea this week, a Philippine sailor lost a finger. In June 2020, 20 Indian soldiers — and at least four Chinese soldiers — died, according to official accounts from both nations.
China and India have disputed the 2,100-mile Himalayan border for decades. Crude battles date as far back as the 1970s, when the armies confronted each other via fistfights and stone pelting. Under the terms of a 1996 bilateral agreement, border troops are barred from using firearms within two kilometers of the border, called the Line of Actual Control.
Recent Sino-Indian border disputes have centered on the Tawang sector, a sector that lies within the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, as well as around Ladakh — at India’s far northeastern tip — and the Galwan Valley. A clash in 2022 over the Tawang sector took the shape of a gun-free faceoff, leading to hand-to-hand combat and troop injuries. This clash marked the most serious incident between India and China since 2020.
On another Himalayan border, in 2017, Chinese and Indian troops squared off in Bhutan over an area that China claimed belonged to them but that India and Bhutan maintained to be Bhutanese. In that skirmish, too, there were no reports of gun use or weaponry. Instead, the fighting involved “jostling,” in which soldiers from India and soldiers of China’s People’s Liberation Army bumped chests, without punching or kicking, to push the other side backward but did not open fire.
Sushant Singh, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in India and a lecturer at Yale, said there was often gunfire on India’s borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh. “The PLA’s culture is very different from what a Western military culture would be, where use of weaponry is far more frequent,” he said.
But September 2020 brought a deviation from this norm, when — amid public pressure following the deaths of Indian soldiers in a clash months before — shots were fired at the border for the first time in decades, with both sides accusing the other of firing warning shots.
“Once either side decides that the norm no longer exists, it doesn’t exist on both sides,” Singh said. “Think of them as very weak guardrails, which can be broken off and then restarted.”