Analysis: China and Philippines Reach Deal Over Disputed Shoal
China and the Philippines have increasingly clashed over a shoal in the South China Sea. But they may have now reached an agreement. Reporter Rik Glauert speaks to Ray Powell of Stanford University about what the deal could mean.
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00:00So what exactly do we know about the agreement that China and the Philippines have supposedly
00:04made about the Second Thomas Shoal? What are they trying to solve and what progress have they made?
00:09So what they've been trying to solve is the question of how much freedom does the Philippines
00:15have to resupply its outpost at the Second Thomas Shoal in the manner it chooses to do so. And for
00:22the Philippines it's a matter of principle, it's a matter of sovereign rights, it's a matter of
00:28freedom of navigation, it's a matter of not surrendering jurisdiction over its own outpost.
00:35For China, which of course claims the outpost is illegal because China claims almost the entirety
00:41of the South China Sea, it is trying to strong arm the Philippines into essentially abandoning
00:48its rights. So China seems to have been willing to allow a certain amount of resupply as long
00:58as it was able to inspect any resupplies and not allow any quote construction materials out to
01:05the Sierra Madre. Why has China, Beijing come to the table to discuss this with the Philippines?
01:13Well I do think that China has suffered very great reputational harm on the international
01:18stage through its visible aggression and of course the Philippines has played its part in that by
01:24by generating and releasing all of these extremely evocative photos and video that have shown its own
01:32country people and the world how aggressive China has been. So China, this is a kind of a bleeding
01:39wound that China would like to stop and you know I mean look at what harm China has faced. It has
01:46essentially succeeded through its aggression in uniting its potential adversaries against it.
01:52You've seen all of these new agreements between the Philippines, the United States and Japan with
01:57some participation from Australia. Why would it be in the Philippines and China and perhaps even
02:04the region's best interest for a de-escalation in this area? Sometimes it's in a nation's national
02:10interest to go ahead and escalate or to allow escalation. In China's sense or China's view on
02:16things, escalation often works in order to sort of normalize a new aggression. So for example
02:24off of Jinmen Island in Taiwan you had the escalation after the death of the two fishermen
02:29in February that has you know since the China has tried to exploit that to normalize increasingly
02:35aggressive patrols around Jinmen under the pretext of protecting its fishermen. So escalation is a
02:40tactic of China but it tends to escalate in ways that it thinks that it can sort of win the victory
02:47by normalizing a new aggression. In this case the Philippines has been unwilling to sort of allow
02:53the normalization by capitulating and allowing China to sort of win the argument.