“The underlying logic is: ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but they’re unlikely to lead to war,'” said Daniel Mattingly, a Yale political science professor who studies the Chinese military.
China is a vast country that shares land borders with 14 countries and six at sea, and is engaged in unstable territorial disputes with many of its neighbors. But in recent years, Chinese forces have often used simple weapons in border fighting, even though the technology used by the Chinese military has improved significantly over this period.
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The tactic is particularly used on the China-India border, according to unconfirmed videos of clashes shared on social media.
In 2022, Chinese and Indian troops fought hand-to-hand, appearing to use stones and makeshift clubs as weapons, during clashes with Indian troops over parts of India’s northeast that China claims. In 2017, Chinese and Indian troops on the front line fought unarmed, chest-to-chest “pushing” matches as China sought to seize territory from tiny Bhutan, a close Indian ally.
China’s use of unconventional weapons may be a strategic move to avoid escalating tensions and deflect international attention, especially from the U.S. But experts warned that while it may have worked this time, it comes with risks.
“perhaps [China] In this case, we can point to the idea that these are tools, not weapons. [in the South China Sea]”But we’re getting pretty close to that line,” said Harrison Preta, vice president and research fellow at the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
In one incident in the South China Sea this week, Chinese coast guard officers boarded a Philippine navy vessel and damaged and seized equipment, Philippine officials said, and China said it aimed to prevent the Philippine vessel from resupplying the Sierra Madre warship at Second Thomas Shoal, a coral reef that has become a focal point of the maritime dispute.
A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington disputed this, saying the Philippines had illegally entered China’s territorial waters without China’s permission and “violated international law”.
“The Chinese side [the] “We abide by the law to safeguard China’s sovereignty, which is legal and legitimate, and was conducted in a professional and restrained manner,” Liu Pengyu said in an email to The Washington Post.
U.S. officials have repeatedly said that a 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty, which obligates the United States and the Philippines to defend each other in the Pacific, would be invoked if Philippine government ships came under attack in the South China Sea.
“Not using guns makes it unclear whether the United States has an obligation to step in and help the Philippines,” Mattingly said. “If they had used guns, the case for the United States to step in would be much stronger.”
The Philippines said Friday morning that it would not invoke the treaty in response to this week’s clashes, and Secretary-General Lucas Bersamin told reporters that the government did not consider this week’s clash with the Chinese Coast Guard to be an armed attack.
“I saw only a rag and an axe, nothing more,” Bersamin said, according to the Associated Press.
While the use of sharp objects can reduce the risk of escalating tensions, they are still dangerous and potentially deadly: A Philippine sailor lost a finger in the South China Sea this week, and 20 Indian and at least four Chinese soldiers were killed in June 2020, according to official reports from both countries.
China and India have been fighting for decades over their 2,100-mile border in the Himalayas, including fierce fighting in the 1970s when troops from both sides traded fists and threw stones. A 1996 bilateral agreement bans border guards from using firearms within two kilometers of the border, known as the Line of Actual Control.
Recent border conflicts between China and India have been centered around the Tawang area in the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, and around Ladakh and the Galwan Valley in the far northeastern Indian region. In 2022, clashes over the Tawang area took the form of non-gun confrontations, leading to hand-to-hand combat and injuries to soldiers. The clashes were the most serious incidents between India and China since 2020.
On another border in the Himalayas, Chinese and Indian troops faced off in Bhutan in 2017 over an area that China claims as its own but that India and Bhutan claim as Bhutanese. Again, no firing of guns or weapons was reported in this skirmish. Instead, the fighting was a “shoving match,” with Indian and Chinese People’s Liberation Army soldiers chest-bumping and shoving each other around, but not punching or kicking. No shots were fired.
Sushant Singh, a senior fellow at the India Center for Policy Research and a lecturer at Yale University, said gun battles are common on India’s borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh. “The People’s Liberation Army culture is very different from the military culture of Western countries, where the use of weapons is much more frequent,” he said.
But September 2020 saw a departure from this example, when firing broke out on the border for the first time in decades amid growing public pressure following clashes several months earlier that had killed an Indian soldier, with both sides accusing the other of firing warning shots.
“If either side decides the norms no longer exist, they no longer exist for both sides,” Singh said. “Think of the norms as very weak guardrails that can be torn down and then put back up.”
