Do You Make More Money From Minnows Than Regular Sharks

A Game
of Shark
and Minnow

In a remote corner of the South Cathay Sea, 105 nautical miles from the Philippines, lies a submerged reef the Filipinos call Ayungin.

In nearly ways information technology resembles the hundreds of other reefs, islands, rock clusters and cays that collectively are called the Spratly Islands.

But Ayungin is different. In the reef's shallows there sits a forsaken ship, manned past eight Filipino troops whose job is to continue China in check.

A Game of Shark
And Minnow

Produced by Mike Bostock, Clinton Cargill, Shan Carter, Nancy Donaldson, Tom Giratikanon, Xaquín One thousand.V., Steve Maing and Derek Watkins

Ayungin Shoal lies 105 nautical miles from the Philippines. There's footling to commend the spot, apart from its plentiful fish and safe harbor — except that Ayungin sits at the southwestern edge of an surface area called Reed Bank, which is rumored to comprise vast reserves of oil and natural gas. And too that it is home to a World State of war Ii-era ship called the Sierra Madre, which the Philippine government ran ashore on the reef in 1999 and has since maintained as a kind of post-apocalyptic military garrison, the small detachment of Filipino troops stationed there struggling to survive extreme mental and concrete desolation. Of all places, the scorched vanquish of the Sierra Madre has get an unlikely battleground in a geopolitical struggle that will shape the hereafter of the South Red china Bounding main and, to some extent, the balance of the earth.

In early August, later an overnight journey in a fishing boat that had seen ameliorate days, we approached Ayungin from the south and came upon two Chinese Coast Guard cutters stationed at either side of the reef. We were a small group: ii Westerners and a few Filipinos, led by Mayor Eugenio Bito-onon Jr., whose territory includes most of the Philippine land claims in the S China Sea. The Chinese presence at Ayungin had spooked the Philippine Navy out of undertaking its regular run to resupply the troops there, merely the Chinese were still letting some line-fishing boats through. We were to behave as whatsoever regular fishing vessel with engine trouble or a demand for shelter in the shoal would, which meant no radio contact. As we throttled down a few miles out and waited to see what the Chinese Coast Guard might do, there was only an eerie tranquility.

Bito-onon stood at the prow, nervously eyeing the cutters. Visits to his constituents on the island of Pag-asa, further northwest, take him past Ayungin adequately frequently, and the mayor has had his share of run-ins. Last October, he said, a Chinese warship crossed through his convoy twice, at very loftier speed, nearly severing a towline connecting 2 boats. This past May, as the mayor'southward boat neared Ayungin in the eye of the night, a Chinese patrol trained its spotlight on the boat and tailed information technology for an hour, until information technology became articulate that it wasn't headed to Ayungin. "They are becoming more aggressive," the mayor said. "Nosotros didn't know if they would ram us."

We didn't know if they would ram u.s., either. As nosotros approached, we watched through binoculars and a camera viewfinder to run across if the Chinese boats would effort to head usa off. Afterward a few tense moments, it became clear that they were going to stay put and let us laissez passer. Presently we were inside the reef, the Sierra Madre straight in front of united states of america. Equally we chugged around to the starboard side, two marines peered down uncertainly from the meridian of the long boarding ladder. The send'south ancient communications and radar equipment loomed above them, looking equally if it could topple over at any time. Afterwards a serial of rapid exchanges with the mayor, the marines motioned for usa to throw up our boat's ropes. Within a minute or two the angling boat was moored and we were handing up our bags, along with cases of Coca-Cola and Dunkin' Donuts that naval command had sent along as pasalubong, gifts for the hungry men on lath.

From afar, the boat hadn't looked much dissimilar from the Chinese boats that surrounded it. But at shut range, water flowed freely through holes in the hull.

With the tropical sun blasting downward on information technology, the ship was ravaged past rust. Whole sections of the deck were riddled with holes.

Old doors and metallic sheets dotted paths where the men walked, to prevent them from plunging into the cavernous tank space beneath.

Information technology was hard to imagine how such a forsaken identify could go a wink betoken in a geopolitical power struggle.

But earlier we had much time to recall about that, someone pointed out that the Chinese boats had started to move. They left their positions to the due east and west of the reef and began to converge but off the starboard side, where the reef came closest to the transport.

Chinese Coast Guard cutters patrol within sight of the Sierra Madre.

The mayor and several others stood quietly on deck, watching them as they came. The bulletin from the Chinese was unmistakable: We see y'all, we've got our eye on you, nosotros are here.

As the Chinese boats made their half-circle in front of the Sierra Madre, the mayor mimed the act of them filming us. "Moving ridge," he said. "We're going to be big on YouTube."

Unsafe Ground

To understand how Ayungin (known to the Western world as 2d Thomas Shoal) could become contested basis is to face up, in miniature, both the ascension of China and the potential future of U.Due south. foreign policy. Information technology is too to enter into a morass of competing historical, territorial and even moral claims in an area where defining what is true or fair may be no easier than it has proved to be in the Eye East.

The Spratly Islands sprawl over roughly 160,000 square miles in the waters of the coasts of the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Taiwan and China — all of whom claim office of the islands.

Since the 18th century, navigators have referred to the Spratlys every bit "Dangerous Ground" — a term that captures not only the treacherous nature of the surface area just also the mess that is the current political situation in the South China Body of water.

Sources: C.I.A.; Mayor Bito-onon

In addition to the Philippines, the governments of Mainland china, Taiwan and Vietnam also merits the Spratlys for themselves, and have occupied some of them as a way to stake that merits. Malaysia and Negara brunei darussalam make more modest partial claims.

The Chinese and Taiwanese base their claims on Xia and Han dynasty records and a 1947 map made by the Kuomintang. The nine-dash line derived from that map pushes up against the coastlines of all the other countries in the area.

The current Philippine claim is based mostly on the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea from 1982, which established an Exclusive Economical Zone of 200 nautical miles off the shore of sovereign states.

Source: National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis

Why the fuss over "Dangerous Ground"? Natural resources are a large piece of information technology. Co-ordinate to current U.Due south. estimates, the seabed beneath the Spratlys may agree up to 5.4 billion barrels of oil and 55.ane trillion cubic feet of natural gas. On peak of which, about half of the world'south merchant fleet tonnage and nearly i third of its crude oil pass through these waters each year. They also contain some of the richest fisheries in the world.

In 2022, China and the Philippines engaged in a standoff at Scarborough Shoal, later a Philippine warship attempted to miscarry Chinese fishing boats from the area, which they claimed had been harvesting endangered species inside the Philippine EEZ. Although the shoal lies well to the north of the Spratlys, it is in many ways Ayungin's direct precedent.

The Cabbage Strategy

China is currently in disputes with several of its neighbors, and the Chinese have become decidedly more willing to wield a heavy stick. There is a growing sense that they take been waiting a long time to flex their muscles and that that time has finally arrived. "Zippo in China happens overnight," Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt, the director of Asia-Pacific programs at the United States Institute of Peace, said. "Any motility you see was planned and prepared for years, if not more than. So obviously this maritime issue is very of import to Prc."

It is too very important to the United states of america, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made articulate at a gathering of the Clan of Southeast Nations (Asean) in Hanoi in July 2022. Clinton declared that freedom of navigation in the South China Sea was a "national involvement" of the United States, and that "legitimate claims to maritime space in the South China Sea should be derived solely from legitimate claims to land features," which could be taken to mean that Red china's nine-dash line was illegitimate. The Chinese foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, chafed visibly, left the meeting for an 60 minutes and returned only to launch into a long, vituperative oral communication about the danger of cooperation with outside powers.

President Obama and his representatives take reiterated America'southward interest in the region always since. The Americans pointedly refuse to take sides in the sovereignty disputes. But China's beliefs as it becomes more powerful, forth with freedom of navigation and control over South China Sea shipping lanes, will exist among the major global political bug of the 21st century. Co-ordinate to the Council on Foreign Relations, of the $5.3 trillion in global merchandise that transits the S China Ocean each yr, $1.2 trillion of it touches U.S. ports — and then American strange policy has begun to shift accordingly.

In a major speech in Singapore last year, Leon Panetta, then the secretary of defense force, described the coming pivot in U.S. strategy in precise terms: "While the U.S. will remain a global force for security and stability, we will of necessity rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region." He referred to the Us equally a "Pacific nation," with a capital "P" and no irony, and then announced a serial of changes — most notably that the roughly 50-l balance of U.S. naval forces between the Pacific and the Atlantic would become 60-40 Pacific by 2022. Given the size of the U.S. Navy, this is enormously significant.

In June of last year, the United States helped broker an agreement for both Cathay'southward and the Philippines's ships to leave Scarborough Shoal peacefully, merely China never left. They eventually blocked access to the shoal and filled in a nest of boats around it to ward off foreign fishermen.

"Since [the standoff], nosotros accept begun to take measures to seal and control the areas around the Huangyan Island," Maj. Gen. Zhang Zhaozhong, of China's People's Liberation Ground forces, said in a television interview in May, using the Chinese term for Scarborough. (That there are three different names for the same gear up of uninhabitable rocks tells you much of what y'all need to know about the region.) He described a "cabbage strategy," which entails surrounding a contested area with so many boats — fishermen, fishing administration ships, marine surveillance ships, navy warships — that "the island is thus wrapped layer by layer similar a cabbage."

In that location can be no question that the cabbage strategy is in effect now at Ayungin and has been at least since May. General Zhang, in his interview several months ago, listed Ren'ai Shoal (the Chinese name for Ayungin) in the P.L.A.'s "series of achievements" in the South China Sea. He had already put it in the win cavalcade, even though eight Filipino marines even so live at that place. He also seemed to take some pleasure in the strategy. Of taking territory from the Philippines, he said: "We should exercise more such things in the future. For those small-scale islands, just a few troopers are able to station on each of them, but there is no nutrient or fifty-fifty drinking h2o there. If nosotros acquit out the cabbage strategy, you will not be able to transport food and drinking water onto the islands. Without the supply for one or two weeks, the troopers stationed there will leave the islands on their ain. In one case they have left, they volition never be able to come back."

'If You Want to Live, Eat'

On the deck of the Sierra Madre, with morning lord's day slanting off the bright bluish water and the crowing of a rooster for a soundtrack, Staff Sgt. Joey Loresto and Sgt. Roy Yanto were improvising. Yanto, a soft-spoken 31-yr-old, had lost an arrow spearfishing on the shoal the day earlier. At present he had pulled the handle off an old saucepan and was banging it straight with a rusty mallet in an try to make it into a spear. Everything on the Sierra Madre was this way — improvised, repurposed. "Others came prepared," Loresto said of previous detachments that had been briefed nigh life on the boat before they arrived and knew they would need to fish to supplement their diet. "But we were not prepared."

For the final touches to the arrowhead, Yanto used a hammer and a rusted, machete-similar blade.

They made spearfishing guns from a piece of wood, a bolt repurposed as a trigger and two pieces of condom for propulsion.

In the afternoons, if the weather was good and the tide was low, they would don snorkels and erstwhile goggles and swim effectually the boat.

A successful spearfishing session meant avoiding barracudas and sharks and gathering a basket total of Philippine grouper known every bit lapu-lapu.

Yanto lived alone at the stern of the gunkhole, in a room with a bed, a mosquito internet, an M-16 propped against the wall and cipher simply a tarp wrapped around a steel bar to divide him from the sea. He also took care of the three fighting cocks on the boat. They were lashed to various perches at the stern and took groovy pleasance in exultation at anybody who tried to apply the "toilet," a seatless ceramic bowl suspended over the water past iron pipes and plywood.

Yanto has a wife and a vi-yr-old son dorsum in Zamboanga Metropolis. Similar the others, he is able to talk to his family unit once a calendar week or so, when they call in to 1 of the two satellite phones that the men take intendance to keep dry and charged. "It's plenty for me," he said, of the 5 or 10 minutes he gets on the phone with his family unit. "What's important is that I heard their voice."

Like Yanto, Loresto was wearing a sleeveless jersey with "MARINES" printed beyond the front and a section of mesh betwixt the breast and waistline, uniforms for the world's most exotic basketball game squad. "Information technology's a lonely place," Loresto said. "But we make ourselves decorated, always busy."

When his pointer was complete, Yanto turned to two tubs covered in plastic, which were filled with fish that he had picked off his line the previous dark. Fishing lines descended at regular intervals from the port side of the boat, with each soldier responsible for his ain; they spend hours disposed to them. Yanto split the fish open, covered them with table salt, then laid them out to dry on a plank hanging to a higher place the deck. "Good for breakfast," he said, gesturing to the fish he was putting up.

The men depend on fish every bit their main ways of physical survival.

The men depend on fish — fresh, fried, dried — every bit their main means of concrete survival. They were all undernourished and losing weight, even though eating and meal prep were the main activities on board, after fishing. Asked what meal he missed most from the mainland, Yanto said, "Vegetables," without hesitation. "That's more of import than meat or any other kind of dish." The motto of the gunkhole, spray-painted on the wall near the kitchen, was "Kumain ang gustong mabuhay" — basically: "If you want to live, eat."

In the long hours between tiffin and dinner, most of the men would disappear into their quarters to pass the fourth dimension. Aside from Yanto and the ane Navy seaman on board, who occupied an aerie above everybody else, the marines lived in the former officer'south quarters and on the boat'due south bridge. When the Sierra Madre was first driven up on the shoal in 1999, information technology was obviously a desired posting: there was less rust, y'all could sleep wherever you wanted and people played basketball game in the vast tank infinite below deck. (Now that space was filled with standing water and whatever trash the men threw into it.) Aside from the quarters, which were themselves full of leaks and rust, there was inappreciably any place inside the boat to congregate that wasn't either a health hazard, full of water or open up to the elements. In bad weather, they gathered in the communications room on the 2d floor, where Loresto's DVD player and reckoner were kept, to watch movies or sing karaoke. (They were all pretty adept, merely Yanto stood out. He nailed George Michael's "Careless Whisper," downward to the vividly emotional hand gestures.) If they weren't at the computer, they were simply off to the side, in a small, dark workout area that held an practise bike (extra resistance supplied past pulling a strap with your hands), an ancient demote press and a bunch of Vietnam-era American communications equipment.

Servicemen Roel Sarucam, Joey Loresto, Charlie Claro, Lionel Pepito, Israel Briguera and Antonio Olayra on the deck of the Sierra Madre.

The Sierra Madre at one time was the U.s.Southward. Harnett Canton, built as a tank-landing ship for Globe War II and and then repurposed as a floating helicopter and speedboat hub in the rivers of Vietnam. In 1970 the U.S. gave the transport to the South Vietnamese, and in 1976 it was passed on to the Philippines. Simply nobody had ever taken the time to strip all of the communications gear or even old U.S. logbooks and a fleet guide from 1970.

In proficient weather, the men socialized exterior, under the corrugated-tin roof that sheltered the boat'southward small kitchen and living surface area. The "walls" were tarps, repurposed doors, old metal sheets and the backs of storage lockers. The "floor" consisted of two large canted metal plates that met in the heart of the boat, suspended above a big void in the deck. The plates popped and echoed with deep thuds whenever anybody walked over them. Everything was on an incline, and then the legs of the peeling-leather couches and tables were sawed to various lengths to square their surfaces. A locker at the eye, the driest spot on deck, held mostly inoperable electronic equipment and a pocket-size television receiver that had a satellite connexion merely stayed on for only v minutes at a time. The men got together in the evenings to watch the Philippine squad brand a surprising run in the FIBA Asia basketball game tournament, simply to be interrupted as the television repeatedly went dark. To set it they had to insert a thin metal wire into a hole in the fix and and then power the motorcar off and dorsum on again. "Defective," i of marines said, past manner of explanation. Loresto smiled and shook his head. "Overuse," he said.

Loresto was the life of the boat. When the men played pusoy dos, a variation of poker, he displayed an impressive and sustained level of exuberance, oftentimes plastering the winning card to his forehead, face out, and shouting with laughter. He comes from Ipilan, on the island of Palawan. He's 35, with a wife and three children, ages 2, x and 12. Before this posting, he spent 10 years fighting Islamic extremists in Mindanao, the southernmost island grouping in the Philippine archipelago. Asked whether he preferred combat or the Sierra Madre, Loresto thought for a 2d so said, "Gainsay."

He likewise had one of the only existent military jobs on the boat, manning the radio and reporting the number and behavior of the boats outside the shoal. He was besides the one to notation and tape that a U.South. intelligence plane, a P-3C Orion, tended to fly over the shoal whenever the Chinese made a significant tactical shift.

Loresto regularly updated his "sightings" — a Hainanese line-fishing vessel at that place, a Vietnamese i here.

When the Chinese swapped their maritime surveillance boats out for Declension Guard cutters, Loresto took note.

Every four hours, he radioed his reports. He didn't beloved being there, but he knew why information technology was necessary. "It'south our job to defend our sovereignty," he said.

One morning, as a Chinese boat circled slowly off the Sierra Madre's starboard side, Mayor Bito-onon pulled out his figurer to deliver a PowerPoint presentation most the various Philippine-held islands in the Spratlys. Most of the men had never seen anything like it before, and they gathered eagerly backside the mayor as he sat on a bench and walked them through it. Bito-onon was surprised at how picayune they knew about the struggle that was playing out around them. "They are bare, bare," he told me after the presentation. "They don't even know what'southward on the nightly news."

Other than a couple of jokes nigh "visiting Communist china without a passport" (i.e., being captured), life at the tip of the gun didn't experience much like life at the tip of a gun. It felt more than like the world'south most surreal fishing camp. The Chinese boats were always at that place, but they were a source more of mystery than fright. "Nosotros don't know why they're out there," Yanto said at one point. "Are they looking for united states of america? What is their intention?"

To Bito-onon, the Chinese intentions were clear. At breakfast he had said, "They could come take this at whatever fourth dimension, and everybody knows it." What would these guys do if that happened? He raised both hands, smiled and said, "Surrender."

Mayor Eugenio Bito-onon Jr. has 288 voting constituents across a domain chosen the Kalayaan Island Grouping.

After, as he saturday on the bamboo bench that was his workplace, television-viewing station and bed for five days and nights on the deck of the Sierra Madre, he talked virtually Ayungin as the staging footing for Red china's domination of the Pacific. "The Chinese want both the fisheries and the gas. They're using their fisheries to dominate the area, simply the oil is the target." About equally if on cue, 1 of the Chinese Coast Guard cutters chased off a fishing gunkhole north of the shoal. Equally the mayor watched, he said that he hoped they wouldn't do the aforementioned to our gunkhole when we tried to leave. "What does that mean for me if they exercise?" he asked. "I tin can't even come here or to Pag-asa?" Before he joked near the headline if the Chinese stopped him: "A Mayor Was Defenseless in His Own Territory!"

Threadbare Settlements

The official proper name of the mayor'due south domain is the Kalayaan Isle Group, which technically encompasses most of the Spratlys but in reality amounts to 5 islands, two sandbars and two reefs that the Philippines currently controls. He has 288 voting constituents, of which about 120 live at any one time on Pag-asa, the simply island with a noncombatant population.

About 120 people alive at whatever one time on Pag-asa, including civilians.

He is a slender, spry homo of 57, with a quirky sense of humor that enables him to leaven his criticisms of graft and abuse at the higher levels of the Philippine government with friendly jokes and oblique asides. Merely his frustration with the lack of resource and the lack of political will is obvious. The Philippines, he says, has washed very petty to develop the islands they hold, while Vietnam and Malaysia have turned some of the reefs and islands they occupy into resorts that the Chinese would find much more difficult to justify taking equally their own. Except for Pag-asa, the Philippines has mustered merely the most threadbare of settlements, some even more desolate than Ayungin.

3 days afterwards, we would ride in a small dinghy over the break and up onto the sloped beach of Lawak, 60 nautical miles to the north of the Sierra Madre. Like Ayungin, Lawak serves as a strategic gateway to the rich oil and gas reserves of the Reed Bank. Unlike Ayungin, Lawak also happens to look like a postcard picture of a deserted-island paradise — a circle of crushed-coral beach enclosing virtually 20 acres of scrub grass, palm trees, a bird sanctuary and a sea-turtle nesting ground.

Second Lt. Robinson Retoriano runs the disengagement of xi worn Filipino troops there. Virtually of the men under his command vesture shorts, flip-flops and tank tops, but he led us on a bout of the island in full cover-up, pointing out with pride their recently constructed barracks and a basketball court with a spectator swing fabricated of "drifted things."

Lawak is a circle of crushed-coral beach enclosing scrub grass, palm trees, xi worn Filipino troops and 1 basketball court.

As nosotros sat downwards in the courtyard, Pfc. Juan Colot, an Thou-16 slung low off his bony shoulders, whistled to the camp's domesticated dupe, which flew directly into his hands and chirped complacently. Retoriano is from Manila, and when we asked what a metropolis boy like him was doing on an isle in the middle of the South China Sea, he said, "I'chiliad however wondering myself."

In some ways, the guys on Lawak were even more than isolated than Loresto and Yanto and the others on Ayungin. They were not allowed any use of the satellite phones whatsoever, not even for calls from loved ones. "Information technology doubles the altitude," Retoriano said. To gainsay the loneliness, Retoriano sometimes gave the marines jobs to do, just to keep them busy. In the mornings they got up at half-dozen to sweep the camp. In the afternoons they stock-still their hammocks outside, to sleep in the fresh air.

Over the course of a few hours, Retoriano referred to the island every bit "paradise" several times — which it was, if you lot focused on its physical beauty and didn't remember of how hard it would be to actually live at that place. And in truth these guys had information technology better than some of the other detachments — Kota, Parola, Likas, Rizal Reef, Patag — because at least they had basis to alive and sleep on.

Panata

Ayungin

Lawak

Rizal Reef

Patag

Likas

Parola

Kota

Subi Reef

50 MILES

Palawan Island

Pag-asa

The settlements on Rizal Reef, Patag and Panata are mostly rough stilted structures over shallow water or modest sandbars, with very fiddling room to maneuver and fishing every bit the sole activity and consolation. Co-ordinate to Bito-onon, the troops on Rizal Reef used to necktie themselves to empty oil drums when there was particularly bad weather at night, so that if a high sea or an errant piece of ocean debris wiped out the stilts, they'd at least be able to float.

"A lot of Filipino people might not know why we're fighting for these islands," Retoriano said as we prepared to leave Lawak. "Just one time you see it, and you lot've stepped on it, y'all understand. Information technology's ours." He accompanied u.s.a. into the water and out to our launch boat, notwithstanding in full fatigues and large black combat boots, getting drenched upwards to his chest. As he helped me swing up and over the lip of our boat, he said, "I'yard glad we didn't talk much about the sensitive political situation. But if y'all enquire me, I think China is just a big neat."

'I've Never Seen More White Knuckles'

The Philippines' best promise for resisting Red china currently resides within a fix of glassy offices in the center of the 1000 Street ability corridor in Washington. There, Paul Reichler, a lawyer at Foley Hoag who specializes in international territorial disputes, serves equally the lead attorney for the Philippines in its arbitration case over their claims in the South Communist china Sea. Initiated in Jan, the case seeks to invalidate Prc'southward nine-dash line and establish that the territorial rights exist governed by the Un Convention on the Constabulary of the Ocean, which both China and the Philippines take signed and ratified. The subtleties of the example revolve around E.E.Z.'s and continental shelves, without expressly resolving sovereignty issues. China has refused to participate, but the Philippines has proceeded anyway.

The key chemical element, as far as the Sierra Madre is concerned, is that the case is growing to reverberate the new reality on the water. "Ayungin will exist function of the example now, at present that the Chinese take virtually occupied it," Reichler told me. He was hoping that the tribunal would define Ayungin equally a "submerged feature." A submerged characteristic, he explained, is considered function of the seabed and belongs to whoever owns the continental shelf underneath information technology, not to whoever happens to be occupying it. "The fact that somebody physically occupies it doesn't requite them any rights," he said.

This took a second to sink in. Historically, the physical presence of troops on the Sierra Madre had been a vital part of the Filipino strategy; currently their presence was the only thing stopping a consummate Chinese takeover there. Wasn't that against the Philippines' own interests? "No," Reichler said. "Non if we're not occupying it." What he meant was that the Philippines wants to nullify any claim to a submerged feature based on who has control higher up the water — which applies beyond Ayungin to Mischief Reef and others, which the Chinese currently occupy. Surely this is a strong legal strategy, calibrated for an international tribunal. But if this is the strategy, you couldn't help wondering what those guys were still doing out in that location, getting high-strung off a little bit more each day, while the legal process sought to make them irrelevant.

Mischief, a submerged reef similar to Ayungin and roughly xx miles to its w, makes for an instructive example. It used to belong to the Philippines, just in 1994 the Chinese took reward of a lull in Filipino maritime patrols caused by a passing draft and apace erected a stilted construction that they then made clear they were not going to leave. Slowly they turned it into a armed services outpost, over the repeated protests of the Filipinos, and now information technology serves equally a safe harbor for the Chinese ships that patrol Ayungin and other areas.

What Mainland china has done with Mischief, Scarborough and at present with Ayungin is what the journalist Robert Haddick described, writing in Foreign Policy, as "salami slicing" or "the slow accumulation of deportment, none of which is a casus belli, but which add up over time to a major strategic change." Huang Jing, the director of the Center on Asia and Globalization at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, noted that in all of these conflicts — Scarborough, Ayungin — Cathay insists on sending its noncombatant maritime forcefulness, which is theoretically unarmed. This has a powerful double significance: first, that the Chinese don't want to beginning a war, even though in many ways they are playing the aggressor; and second, that they view any matter in the South Mainland china Sea equally an internal affair. Equally Huang put it: "What Prc is doing is putting both hands behind its back and using its big belly to push button y'all out, to cartel you to hitting starting time. And this has been quite effective."

Ayungin

Mischief Reef

CHINA

PHILIPPINES

Subi Reef

Palawan Island

Pag-asa

Expanse of item

Satellite imagery: NASA; DigitalGlobe via Google Earth

In bringing their complaints to mediation, the Philippines has used the only real lever it has: to try to occupy the moral high ground and focus international attention on the issue. In response, China has tried to isolate the Philippines — discouraging President Benigno S. Aquino III from attending the China-Association of southeast asian nations Expo in Nanning last month and continuing to steer the Association of southeast asian nations agenda away from a terminal understanding on a legally binding code of conduct in the South China Ocean. (One erstwhile U.S. official told me, "So far, China has been able to split up Association of southeast asian nations the style y'all would split a string of wood.") Mainland china has stated that they view the overlapping claims every bit bilateral issues, to exist negotiated between Red china and each private claimant one at a time, a strategy that maximizes what Red china can extract from each party.

While an arbitration outcome unfavorable to the Chinese — which could be decided as early equally March 2022 — would create some public-perception problems for them, Communist china is unlikely to be deterred, in role because there is no enforcement machinery. "Let's be honest," Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt says, "Red china has essentially studied how the U.S. has conducted its hegemony, and they're saying, 'We have to respect some court case?' They say that the United States blatantly violates international law when it's in its interest. Cathay sees this equally what beginning-grade powers do." (Multiple requests for comment from the Chinese regime went unanswered.)

The official U.S. position, articulated by Secretaries Clinton and Kerry, has been that the U.S. volition not take sides in disputes over sovereignty. As the assistant secretarial assistant of state for Due east Asian and Pacific Diplomacy, Daniel R. Russel, told me, "Our main involvement is in maintaining peace, security and stability that allows for economic growth and avoids tension or conflict." Basically, nosotros're staying out of it. Just the U.S. has stepped up its joint operations with the Philippines, including a recent mock amphibious landing not far from Scarborough Shoal. There has also been talk of increasing U.S. troop rotations into some of its old bases.

"I think we want to find a way to restrain Red china and reassure the Philippines without getting ourselves into a shooting state of war," James Steinberg, the erstwhile deputy secretary of state under Hillary Clinton, told me. "Nosotros take a broad interest in China behaving responsibly. Only sovereignty over the Spratly Islands is not our dispute. We need to find a way to be engaged without being in the heart." Kurt Campbell, a old assistant secretary of land with the Obama administration, put it more bluntly: "Maritime territorial disputes are the hardest trouble, bar none, that diplomats are currently facing in Asia. On all of these problems, no state has any flexibility. I've never seen more white knuckles."

According to Huang Jing: "Everyone in this region is playing a double game. Ten years ago, the U.s. was absolutely dominant in the region — economically, politically, militarily. People only had one yardstick to measure out their national interest and their strange policy, and the name of that yardstick was U.Due south.A. Now in that location are two yardsticks. On the political one, it'southward still the U.S., but on the economic one, information technology is China."

The U.s.a. does not have the unlimited leverage that it once did, and so for the fourth dimension being information technology is allowing the Chinese to slice their salami all the way up onto the shallows of Ayungin.

Beneath a Ceiling of Clouds

The first rains of the typhoon came after nighttime, howling sideways across the deck of the Sierra Madre. We'd been hearing almost the storm for a couple of days over the radio, tracking its course equally it made landfall on Luzon and then turned w toward the S China Sea.

Under the supervision of Second Lt. Charlie Claro, the 29-twelvemonth-erstwhile commander of the outpost, the men drilled holes in the boards with manus-cranks and pulled one-time, bent, rusted nails out of stray pieces of wood, hammered them directly, then reused them.

A couple of wooden doors were added to the walls of the living area, and additional tarps went into place.

A ceiling of clouds had lowered and blackened, and the wind began battering parts of the send'southward deck.

Rain poured into the laundry room through the ceiling, drenching everything. A rooster took shelter in a dry out corner.

Past nightfall, the wind had intensified into a gale. We gathered in the living area to listen to it, more awed than scared. Lieutenant Claro surfaced every so often to brand sure that his improvements were belongings. The remainder of the marines stayed inside, singing karaoke. Later, they watched the FIBA Asia finals, the Philippines vs. Iran. Miraculously, the satellite held for near of the game. It felt as if the wind might rip the roof off from in a higher place our heads, but the marines were in good cheer. A victory for the underdog Philippine squad would have made for a overnice David and Goliath moment in a David and Goliath kind of story, simply the Iranians appeared to be about nine inches taller at every position and were just too much for the Filipinos. At halftime the marines went out to check on whether their fishing lines were surviving the storm, and then straggled off to bed.

The next two days passed with wind and pelting and long hours with nothing to do. Yanto and Loresto led a tour of the cavernous, foul tank space below decks, where old fluorescent lite bays hung overhead on dangerously rusted cables.

We started to be able to identify individual marines past their footfalls. Jokes that weren't funny doubled us over. At one indicate, Pfc. Michael Navata walked in from checking his angling line and said: "Cards. To pass the time." We played hours of pusoy dos, making fun of one another, book levels ascension every time Loresto stuck the two of diamonds on his brow. The slow, steady backbeat of bad atmospheric condition and desolation brutal away for a while, and it felt as if nosotros could take been in Loresto'due south living room in Ipilan. Yanto saturday to my left, coaching me out of charity, his nonverbal teaching registering levels of depth and intelligence that linguistic communication hadn't made bachelor to us. For a moment nosotros could see them as they really were, these marines: men who were serving their country in an extreme and unrelenting and even somewhat humiliating situation and trying bravely to make the best of it.

On the afternoon of the second bad day, the sun came out. Yanto promptly went spearfishing. One by one, the other marines stripped down and jumped in. This turned into virtually of usa taking turns leaping off the high starboard side of the Sierra Madre, near halfway up the deck, downwards into the low-cal blue h2o beneath. You had to choice your fashion barefoot up to the rusted lip and then, with everybody watching, try to forget that you were on a devastated ancient gunkhole run aground on a reef in the shark-infested Southward Communist china Sea and just jump. It was mayhap a xxx-foot driblet, which took a half-second longer than you lot expected it to, but the water was warm and clear. We splashed around on our backs similar otters. The storm had passed, and nosotros were safe. Lieutenant Claro led a small group in a swim around our fishing gunkhole, which he pronounced seaworthy, but then proceeded to chuckle about for several minutes. Information technology was so woeful looking. After five days on the Sierra Madre, it was also a reminder of the real globe, of how nosotros had gotten in that location, and of the fact that we'd be leaving shortly while these guys had to stay backside and eat to live.

Flying Past the Death Star

A calendar month or and so after, I spoke with a U.Due south. airplane pilot with extensive gainsay experience and cognition of Special Forces operations. I wanted to know what the American foreign-policy pivot looked like from the inside, and he was willing to tell me merely if I didn't name him. "The Chinese are more aggressive because we're not around," he said. His most recent grooming would seem to reflect the American rebalancing to the Pacific theater: more counter-Chinese-technology operations, more than appointment over h2o, isle-hopping campaigns. He said that the articulation operations with the Philippines were "a bear witness of presence: Hey, we're [curse] sailing through the South China Sea, wait at us. And you tin't practice a thing about information technology." But then he paused. "It's funny, because Cathay'southward non that far from doing that off the California coast."

Whatever America'due south pivot might exist, there's no denying that Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific, is historically where United States foreign policy — and as well many immature men sent out to enforce it — has gone to dice. For now, the course is a diplomatic one: the Philippines pursues its arbitration, the Association of southeast asian nations states use pressure for a binding lawmaking of conduct in the South People's republic of china Ocean, and the United states counsels patience (within reason) and the peaceful resolution of disputes. As it turns out, this somewhat scattershot approach may actually be starting to piece of work. The Chinese leadership has undertaken a new charm offensive of belatedly, visiting the capitals of some Association of southeast asian nations countries (notably not the Philippines) and signaling that information technology might be willing to soften its positions on adopting a lawmaking of carry and multilateral negotiations.

At the E Asia Pinnacle meetings in Brunei two weeks ago (which John Kerry attended in place of President Obama because of the government shutdown), Kerry pushed for a quick implementation of a binding code of conduct. "That'southward sort of a new thing," Ricky Carandang, the secretary of communications for the Philippines, told me when we spoke after the meetings. "He said, 'We welcome a code of deport, we welcome legal processes and nosotros recollect these things should happen faster.' That's different from saying, 'Hey, let's do what nosotros tin can to avoid tension, and nosotros're non picking sides here.' " But Carandang besides noted that Obama's absence in Brunei had allowed the Chinese to loom larger. If he fails to show up to the next meeting, or the assistants fails to follow up on some of its promises, the Southeast Asian nations will have cause to wonder most our resolve. (Obama is said to be mulling a trip to Asia in the spring.)

Nobody is questioning China's resolve. The day after we left Ayungin, we arrived at the island of Pag-asa, the mayor'due south home base and the identify for which he has the grandest plans — a resort, a commercial fishery, a sheltered port. Every bit we pulled in, we saw several large Chinese fishing boats a couple of miles off the island. Aerial photos would later confirm that they were cutting coral from the reef, which is oft done to harvest giant clams and other rare species. Nobody on Pag-asa, with its cleaved boats, low-slung civilian buildings and quiet Air Force base, could exercise anything about it. In that location was recently a food shortage because the last 2 Filipino naval resupply vessels haven't been able to make the trip because of inclement weather condition. After a dark there, rather than getting dorsum on our angling boat for a xxx-hour journey, we were happy to board a Philippine naval plane and begin the trip domicile.

We sped down the bumpy, grass-covered rails and lifted off, looking down on the ragtag isle.

Satellite imagery: NASA, DigitalGlobe via Google Earth

Just 12 nautical miles from Pag-asa and its airstrip lies Subi Reef, one of the more developed Chinese settlements in the S China Sea.

Anchored just exterior the reef were about 20 enormous Chinese fishing boats, forth with 50 or so smaller sampans busily working.

At the southwest corner sat a complex of concrete multistory structures, including a large-domed radar station, a helipad and a dormitory.

Information technology's easy to make China out as the villain in all of this. Near Western narratives practise, fifty-fifty though several U.Due south. government officials assured me that there weren't truly any "practiced guys" in these territorial disputes. Ane do good of China's political system, whatever its bug, is its farsightedness, its power to tum intense upheaval in the present in order to reach a long-term goal.

Subi was a outcome of this commitment. Subsequently spending a few days on Pag-asa, where everything is gratis but nada works quite like it's supposed to, it was hard not to run across Subi reef as the Death Star.

An hour later, nosotros flew over Lawak, where we'd met Lieutenant Retoriano. Soon after, the pilot asked Ashley Gilbertson, the photographer on our trip, to put his headset on. We were due northward of Ayungin, and our airplane pilot had radioed the guys on the Sierra Madre to run into how they were doing. Loresto answered the call, and when he heard that we were on the plane, he asked to speak with u.s.. Gilbertson put on the headset and smiled as broadly as he'd smiled since the dark Loresto fleeced us at pusoy dos during the typhoon. The conditions was good, Loresto said; they were going spearfishing that afternoon. Didn't we want to come up downwardly and join them? There was animated talk about karaoke, and then Loresto signed off. It was evidently the terminal time that we would e'er talk to him, or maybe that whatsoever Filipino would ever be at that radio postal service to talk to anybody like us.

The entire globe has an interest in the S China Body of water, merely China has nearly one.4 billion mouths and a growing appetite for nationalism to feed, which is a kind of pressure level that no other state can empathize. What will happen will happen, any the letter of the Asean lawmaking of acquit or all the same the arbitration turns out. Loresto and Yanto, meanwhile, still abide on the Sierra Madre, fishing for their subsistence and watching the surf to see what wave the Chinese will choose to ride in on.

"You've got the wrong science-fiction motion-picture show," one former highly placed U.S. official afterwards told me, when I described what we saw at Subi, and what information technology might mean for the guys on Ayungin. "It's non the Death Star. It'southward actually the Borg from 'Star Trek': 'You lot volition be assimilated. Resistance is futile.' " The scholar Huang Jing put it another, more organic way. "The Chinese expand like a forest, very slowly," he said. "Only once they get there, they never exit."

Editor: Joel Lovell

Jeff Himmelman is a contributing author for the magazine and the author of "Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee." He last wrote for the mag well-nigh Frank Bounding main.