Washington and Beijing are using their militaries to signal that neither is letting down its guard on Taiwan and the South China Sea during the coronavirus pandemic.
Soon after Taiwan’s Vice President-elect William Lai Ching-te visited the United States in early February, People’s Republic of China (PRC) military aircraft crossed the dividing line in the Taiwan Strait into Taiwan’s airspace two days in a row. The incursions included Chinese H-6 bombers, J-11 fighter jets and KJ-500 early warning aircraft. Taiwan responded by scrambling F-16s to shadow the Chinese aircraft out of Taiwan’s airspace.
On March 19, both USS Barry (DDG 52) and USS Shiloh (CG 67) launched SM-2 missiles for a live-fire exercise in the Philippine Sea. Some Chinese military analysts deemed the exercise to be an uncommon warning to the People’s Liberation Army [PLA].
Then, on March 25, USS McCampbell (DDG 25) conducted a Taiwan Strait transitthe third such transit by a U.S. warship in 2020. In response to McCampbell’s transit, the spokesman for China’s Ministry of National Defense called U.S. actions a serious violation of international laws on freedom of navigation.
However, there is little legal grounding for this assertion. The narrowest portion of the Taiwan Strait is over 70 nautical miles wide, well beyond the 12-nautical-mile territorial sea of either coastal state.
The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea also allows for continuous and expeditious transit passage through international straits as well as innocent passage of warships through the territorial seas of coastal states.
The same week as McCampbell’s transit, Taiwan held large-scale military exercises to simulate repelling an all-out Chinese aerial invasion, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense.
Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen added on March 24 that the Taiwanese armed forces remain as vigilant as ever. Although the Chinese, U.S. and Taiwanese military actions are individually unremarkable, they collectively signal what one analyst called posturing to prove combat readiness remain[s] unaffected by the virus.
Beyond Taiwan, security analysts have argued that China may be seizing the COVID-19 advantage in the South China Sea. China has reportedly made gains in both new research facilities and resource extraction in the South China Sea since the start of the pandemic.
On March 20, Chinese media reported that China opened two new research facilities on its occupied features in the Spratlys. The Chinese Academy of Sciences will operate the two facilities on Fiery Cross (Tagalog: Kagitingan; Mandarin: Yongshu) and Subi (Tagalog: Zamora; Mandarin: Zhubi) Reefs for field studies on deep sea ecology, geology, environment, material sciences and marine energy. The International Business Times emphasized that China’s supposedly civilian scientific purposes come as the rest of the world is distracted by coronavirus.
Then, on March 26, China’s Ministry of Natural Resources announced that it extracted and produced a record amount of natural gas in a single day in the South China Sea. The production process ran from February 17 to March 18, as COVID-19 began its rapid spread around the world.
Around the South China Sea, rival Southeast Asian claimants Malaysia and the Philippines are preoccupied with enforcing mandatory quarantine measures.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte previously self-quarantined as a precaution, and the Philippine Armed Forces chief of staff recently recovered from a positive case of COVID-19. Vietnam and Indonesia are also enforcing measures to limit the spread of the virus.
2020 The Lawfare Institute