Asia's Cauldron (22 page)

With China finally emerging after nearly two centuries of domestic turmoil and pushing outward into maritime Asia, the Philippines needed to draw the Americans in once again, it seemed. There was a school of thought among local officials here—both civilian and military—that believed naval brinkmanship on the Philippines' part would force Washington into a more confrontational stance toward Beijing to the strategic benefit of Manila. But the Obama administration in 2012 warned Manila specifically against that approach. Certainly, it was not in the American interest for China to dominate the South China Sea. But neither was it in the American interest, given its many financial and other equities with Beijing, to be dragged into a conflict with China because of the hot-blooded, combustible nationalisms of countries like the Philippines and Vietnam. Former chief of staff General Benjamin Defensor, told me that for this very reason, “the United States would not come to our aid” beyond a certain point. The Philippines was better off employing restraint and an appeal to world opinion, he and others said, if only because the new threat from China did not erase the internal security challenges Manila continued to face, particularly in the Muslim south of the country.

It was clear to me that Philippine defense and security officials felt besieged: besieged by China; besieged by the various, low-level internal rebellions in the country; and in a larger, albeit vaguer sense, by the country's own cultural intractability.

In fact, such intractability extended to the highest political echelons. As Carolina G. Hernandez, a political scientist at the University of the Philippines, told me: “There have been very few leaders in the Philippines who have thought strategically. Democracy with its single, six-year presidential terms has not helped. Our leaders simply cannot think beyond that time frame. Colonialism [by the Americans],” she continued, “because it creates dependency, also inhibits strategic thinking. Frankly, we have no external defense capability.
Between the defeat of the [communist] Huk insurgents in the early 1950s and the rise of the [communist] New People's Army in the late 1960s, there was a space for us to build up a credible defense. But it was not done.”

So after 115 years, the American experience with the Philippines still encompassed the same dreary challenge: how to stabilize and prepare to defend a vast and teeming country that can barely look after itself.

That challenge presented itself to me in vivid terms during my visit to Puerto Princesa, the main city of Palawan: the long and thin, spear-shaped island in the western Philippines that juts out into the South China Sea, close to the Spratlys. The Spratlys were named in 1843, after Richard Spratly, the master of the British whaler,
Cyrus South Seaman
, between 1836 and 1844. But the Filipinos call the island group “Freedomland,” or Kalayaan, the name given to these atolls and other features by the Philippine adventurer and fishing magnate Tomás Cloma in 1956, after he and several dozen of his men took possession of them. Although Kalayaan is by and large uninhabitable and difficult to reach, there is a mayor of Kalayaan, Eugenio Bitoonon, whose office is in Puerto Princesa.

Puerto Princesa is an overgrown village: a winding rash of corrugated iron stalls offering everything from fruit to auto parts that constitutes a break in a thick pelt of broccoli-dark greenery—dominated by coconut palms, banana leaves, and flowering trees—soaked from heavy rains during many months of the year. The mayor's office lay behind one of the markets in a ratty building with an iron grille. His small office was full of flowcharts relating to provisions needed for the hundred or so inhabitants of Pagasa, or Thitu Island, the largest feature in the Spratlys. Pagasa boasts a runway just short of a mile in length that juts out beyond the island on land reclaimed by Japanese occupiers during World War II. The mayor resides in Puerto Princesa because Pagasa is cut off by monsoons and typhoons for periods of weeks and months. Moreover, as he told me, the runway is potholed
and it can take days in heavy seas in the small boats he had available to reach the island.

The mayor drove me through the forest on muddy roads to the headquarters of the Philippine military's Western Command, located by mangrove swamps at the edge of the Sulu Sea. Like military bases throughout the developing world, this one was far neater and cleaner than almost any other habitation in the area, with well-maintained, straight rows of palm trees, and spare offices filled, like the mayor's, with stacks of seemingly organized paperwork.

“We need all-weather aircraft from the States,” a Filipino officer remarked as soon as I entered one office. He was talking to an American naval lieutenant junior grade from Gulfport, Mississippi, who was there helping to arrange a marine exercise between the two countries a few months hence. I was immediately brought in to see Philippine Marine Lieutenant General Juancho Sabban, the commander of Western Command. He told me that not only were communications difficult with the very island group his forces had to defend, but the surrounding seas were in many areas uncharted, which meant captains were essentially sailing blind. This may have led to a Chinese navy frigate running aground on Hasa-Hasa Shoal only sixty miles west of southern Palawan just before my visit. “The bad weather, the primitive conditions, give us a comparative advantage over the Chinese, who in these waters cannot use their superior naval assets effectively.” In a subsequent brief, he and other officers ticked a long list of Chinese territorial violations “on Kalayaan in the West Philippine Sea”: three fighter jets crossing into Philippine airspace here, a navy ship illegally spotted there. The pattern, they told me, was of an increasing frequency of violations closer and closer to Palawan itself. Again the refrains:

“We need more planes and ships.”

“We need more airstrips.”

“We need more cyber capabilities.”

One young officer: “The most important thing for us to do as a nation is to explore for oil and gas in the West Philippine Sea, because we are the poorest country in the Western Pacific.”

Another young officer: “China is building en masse medium-sized tanks for deployment on ships in order to invade Palawan [the Philippines proper].”

Here was paranoia mixed with humiliation helped by the fact that the Chinese had just placed the Spratlys, along with the Paracels and Macclesfield Bank, under a new civilian jurisdiction, called Sansha, with its own mayor. So now there were two mayors for the Spratlys, or Kalayaan, and the Chinese one had many more resources.

An hour's drive through mountainous jungle brought me from the Sulu Sea coast of Palawan to the South China Sea coast. I beheld Ulugan Bay: a billowing, ashen blue veil bordered by virginal forests and some of the worst roads I had experienced anywhere in the developing world. The only sound was of leaves swooning in the wind. The naval station was just a few whitewashed buildings in a clearing. Philippine Naval Forces West had moved here the year before and was still landscaping. According to one vision, this was an eco-traveler's paradise. According to another it was a parking place for U.S. warships. “Ulugan Bay: that's the future,” I had heard one senior American official say matter-of-factly. Here was a massive and sheltered body of water on the South China Sea within thirty-six hours sail to the Spratlys, almost half the distance as Subic Bay. This was already the home port of the
Gregorio del Pilar
, the 1960s cutter that was the flagship of the Philippine navy. For environmental reasons dredging was not allowed: dredging that would be necessary were, say, American destroyers or aircraft carriers to crowd and deface the pristine picture before me. It might be that Ulugan Bay constituted an opportunity for military planners just too strategic to leave it in the hands of environmentalists. War and military competition were not only unfortunate, but unaesthetic.

The only thing that could save Ulugan Bay was lack of money, I realized. Dredging and port development were frightfully expensive. The Philippines certainly lacked the funds. But so did the Pentagon given the current budget crisis in Washington.

Every human instinct made me hope that this magnificent coast would remain exactly as it was. But so much depended on China. For
the moment, China's continued prosperity was leading, as was normal, to military expansion. But would the Chinese economy continue to grow? For Chinese military expansion was leading the United States Navy, in particular, into a closer embrace of the Philippines. Colonial-like dependency lived on.

“The China seas north and south are narrow seas,” writes Joseph Conrad. “They are seas full of everyday, eloquent facts, such as islands, sand banks, reefs, swift and changeable currents—tangled facts that nevertheless speak to a seaman in clear and definite language.”
¹

The Pratas Islands, an atoll formed by three islands, only one of which is above water, are such eloquent facts. Called Dongsha, the “East Sand” Islands, by the Chinese, the lone habitable island is a pincer-shaped spit of land well under two miles long and a half mile wide—and that's including the lagoon. Actually, it is little more than a five-thousand-foot runway, just slightly above water, guarding the northern entrance to the South China Sea, nearly equidistant between Taiwan and mainland China: and yet it is still the South China Sea's largest island. The runway and two piers are serviced by the Taiwanese coast guard and assorted technicians, totaling about two hundred personnel. There are also a few ecologists. The hibiscus, screw pines,
low coconut palms, silk trees, and seagrass—measured against the limitless ocean—express the moral clarity that is the register of extreme natural beauty. If only men lacked the instinct to fight over every scrap of ground.

It is said that the emperor Wu during the Han dynasty two thousand years ago established sovereignty over features in the South China Sea. The Pratas were specifically written about during the Jin dynasty over a thousand years ago, and consequently we have the Chinese claim. Because Taiwan and the mainland are still in dispute over who represents the real China, the Pratas as well as all the other island groups in the South China Sea (in addition to Macclesfield Bank and Scarborough Shoal) are issues of contention between them. The cow's tongue or U-shaped line was a Guomindang concept, and thus is adhered to by Chiang Kai-shek's successors in Taiwan.
²
It originally had eleven dashes. Later when the mainland Chinese signed an agreement with the Vietnamese over the Gulf of Tonkin, the two dashes by the Gulf were removed and it became a nine-dashed line. Each of the dashes, according to both the Chinese and the Taiwanese, represents the median line between the islands within the South China Sea and the large landmasses comprising the sea's littorals.
³
The purpose of the dashes, says Professor Kuan-Hsiung Wang of the National Taiwan Normal University, is to claim ownership of the islands and their offshore waters within the cow's tongue, rather than ownership of the whole South China Sea itself. The Pratas are a perfect example of a claim by both the Chinese on the mainland and on Taiwan.

The Japanese occupied the Pratas during World War II. In 1946, Chiang Kai-shek's naval forces as representatives of the Republic of China—this was before the victory of Mao Zedong's communists on the mainland—landed on the Pratas and legally claimed them the following year. Taiwan has administered the one island above water during high tide ever since, and in the 1980s built the current facilities—thereby putting facts on the ground.

I arrived in the Pratas on one of the periodic Taiwanese military flights. I stepped out of the deafening noise and dingy darkness of an old camouflaged C-130 Hercules after sixty-five minutes in the air
and encountered the intense, oppressive sunlight and religious quiet that are the signature elements of the features of the South China Sea. The tropical abundance stunned me: there are 211 species of plants, 231 species of birds, as well as 577 species of fish. It was flowers, greenery, and a vast panel of ocean in every direction.

The local coast guard commander gave me a tour. I saw the radar and weather stations, the two piers with their twenty-ton coast guard patrol boats, the four desalination units, and the four rumbling generators equipped with diesel fuel that arrives every twenty-five days by naval supply ship from Taiwan. A statue of Chiang Kai-shek with a walking stick and broad-brimmed hat stands sentinel over the flora. The Taiwanese built the Da Wang temple here in 1948, with all of the gaudy deep red colors for which Chinese temples are famous. It was dedicated to a general from the Han dynasty of middle antiquity known for his determination and fighting skills. Finally, I was taken to a large pillar with Chinese characters, meaning “Defense of the South China Sea.” I had seen everything on the island in under an hour.

The Taiwanese occupation was concentrated on the runway, around which everything else on the island was jammed. This runway gave Taiwan some strategic depth against the mainland. It is unclear just how much oil and natural gas may be located under the seabed in this particular northern region of the South China Sea, so the Taiwanese occupation was for the time being in defense of nearby abundant fish stocks. Could wars start over this? I doubted it. The future of war, at least from the vantage point of the South China Sea, so far had more to do with nationalistic posturing in a noisy global meeting hall than with actual fighting—with spectators throughout the planet in attendance thanks to electronic media. Every nation in the region wanted new warships, but no one really wanted to escalate the conflict into actual fighting beyond occasonal skirmishes.