>will not treat their fishing vessels in the same way.
Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, South/North Korea have all seized Chinese fishing vessels before. Some recently. These countries also regularly seize each other's illegal fishing boats, the entire region is an overlapping web maritime disputes. The difference is China is a juggernaut, larger in population and economy than all other claimants combined. 14 Trillion GDP = capabilities to vastly out muscle everyone else. Same story with SCS islands, where China was _responding_ to other claimants reclamation and weaponization efforts. But Chinese reclaiming at Chinese scale will crush everyone else.
The fishing parallel is growing Chinese coast guard and structuring of maritime militia means Chinese fishing vessels get better support and more lenient treatment from other coat guards as Chinese force balance grows. Recent Chinese SCS skirmishes are relatively peaceful compared to others, whose mutual clashes frequently escalate to bloodshed because small peer countries can escalate and be brutal to each other. Obviously such reports rarely gets attention in western reporting, nor that per capita China underfishes, or fishing fleets from other wealthier per capita countries is sustained through foreign slave labour, whereas China's is just... cheap Chinese labour.
China SCS Monroe doctrine is balancing from this perspective. Philippines finally agreed to "cooperate" with China on SCS oil exploration, setting up frameworks for other members. RCEP this week without US or India. Short of war with USN, it's just a matter of time before China tames the SCS. For context, this is newly projected growth of PLA Navy 14th five-year plan for 2025. Only surface combatants.
https://preview.redd.it/yxsbgotn6kz51.jpg?width=1024&auto=we...
In the next 5 years, China will build approximately entire Japanese Navy in tonnage. It will do so with ~2% of GDP in defense spending, basically what Trump wants NATO members to comit. And as Australia, Japan, Korea are setting record high defense budget growth, China will be increasing national defense by 6.6% this year, lowest in decades. This is the fundamental reality of disportionate Chinese scale and industrial capability, even modest spending means the kind of acquisitions that will make neighbours shit bricks and US worry over hegemony. The alternative is... China not spending money a reasonable amount on defense and modernization, not enforcing her claims, which is a ridiculous expectation.
