THE LASER incident with the Chinese vessel is, to my mind, a self-defeating act by the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Bullying smaller nations (member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and forcing them into the arms of your biggest rival (the US) makes no sense.
The laser incident was, of course, nothing new. This is just the latest of a series of incidents between Chinese and Southeast Asian vessels, and I think it won’t be the last either.
The problem, though, is that none of this makes any sense. China has nothing to gain from these tactics. The only result of these incidents is the erosion of Chinese-ASEAN cooperation and the strengthening of US influence.
Even if we assume that the purpose of such acts is to assert dominance in the West Philippine Sea, acts like these undermine China’s long term-goal of controlling the Southeast Asian trade routes.
Trade only flourishes if the stakeholders feel safe about the situation, and a sense of tension does not do that. You don’t send out ships to regions where there are a lot of risks. Just ask shipping insurance companies.
So why is China doing this?
The best reason I can come up with is that the Chinese military is having coordination issues. The senior brass can’t control their officers in the field, leading to events such as this. If this is indeed the case, it would be humiliating for the China Communist Country (CCP) if they were to admit it, so they will just pretend it wasn’t an issue.
My second guess is that there’s infighting in the CCP, and someone at the top is trying to give Xi a headache.
If this is the case then China definitely wants to keep the real situation a secret.
Of course, it’s also possible that the CCP is just stupid, and don’t care about their behavior and what it’s leading to. In that situation, I would be scared.
Stupidity often leads to debacles, such as war or escalation that leads to war for example./PN
