According to an article in Chinese state-run Global Times, the US is using the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) with the Philippines to destabilize the South China Sea region. It cites a communist-controlled think tank in Beijing, the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative (SCSPI), as the source for that claim.
As usual with CCP propaganda media, the facts are otherwise — in this case, the reality is a projection of China’s sins onto the US and her allies.
WHAT THE GT ARTICLE ACTUALLY CLAIMS — AND DOESN’T
Stripped of the propagandistic framing, the SCSPI report’s factual content is: the US has grown from five to nine EDCA sites in the Philippines since 2016/2023, spent roughly $125 million on base infrastructure and $7.3 million on life-support contracts, increased rotational deployments and live-fire exercises, and deployed systems like HIMARS and the Typhon missile system during exercises. That’s it. This is US forces operating on Philippine sovereign territory, at Philippine invitation, under a treaty (EDCA, 2014) negotiated and ratified by a democratically elected Philippine government reacting to Chinese pressure that predates the agreement.
The word “destabilize” is never operationalized in the piece — no body count, no seized territory, no coerced neighbor is named as a victim of US action. The word is doing the paper’s argumentative work without the paper ever cashing it out. The closest the SCSPI researchers come to a mechanism is “restraints and attrition… during peacetime” — i.e., the complaint is that the US presence makes it harder for China to coerce the Philippines.
That is a tell, not a rebuttal.
THE ACTUAL CHRONOLOGY OF WHO MOVED FIRST
2012 — Scarborough Shoal. China seized de facto control of Scarborough Shoal, roughly 120 nautical miles from Luzon and well within the Philippines’ EEZ, after a standoff, and has denied Filipino fishermen access ever since. Scarborough Shoal fell under China’s control after a 10-week standoff with the Philippines in 2012, and the China Coast Guard has maintained a permanent presence there ever since. This predates EDCA implementation by four years and is the proximate cause of the arbitration case the Philippines filed in January 2013.
2013–2016 — the “Great Wall of Sand.” China dredged roughly 3,200 acres of new land onto seven Spratly features — Fiery Cross, Subi, Mischief, and others — a series of land reclamation projects between late 2013 and late 2016 then militarized what it built: new radar and communications arrays, airstrips and hangars for combat aircraft, and surface-to-air and anti-ship cruise missile systems across the Spratly and Paracel chains. This is part of a decade of unilateral fait accompli by China before the current EDCA expansion.
2016 — PCA arbitration. The tribunal at The Hague ruled that China’s historic-rights claims over maritime areas within the nine-dash line have no lawful effect unless entitled to under UNCLOS, held that China’s EEZ did not extend to the Spratly chain, and found China had infringed the Philippines’ EEZ rights by constructing an artificial island on Mischief Reef. China’s response was a categorical rejection of a body it agreed to be bound by via UNCLOS ratification.
Nine years later, Beijing continues to describe the award as “a piece of waste paper that is illegal, null and void, and non-binding.” The Chinese subsequently enacted the 2021 Maritime Police Law and Maritime Traffic Safety Law using vague jurisdictional language not found in UNCLOS as direct responses to the arbitration. This amounts to a false claim of sovereignty that has been codified into Chinese domestic law specifically to route around a ruling China lost.
GREY-ZONE COERCION
Here is what is actually destabilizing the region, almost all of which post-dates the 2016 arbitration ruling:
- Second Thomas Shoal (Ayungin), 2021–2025. Between October 2023 and June 2024 alone there were seven documented uses of force — water cannons, ramming, blinding lasers. The June 17, 2024 incident escalated to a violent CCG boarding of a Philippine Navy boat that injured its personnel.
- Scarborough Shoal, 2024–2025. Water-cannon attacks recurred repeatedly — a April 2024 incident damaged a Philippine vessel’s electrical, navigation, and radio systems — and China installed a 380-meter floating barrier across the shoal’s entrance to block Filipino access entirely. This was a direct thumbing of the CCP’s nose at the 2016 ruling.
- Sabina Shoal, December 2025. CCG cutters surrounded 20 Filipino fishing boats, cut their anchor lines with RHIBs, and injured three Filipino nationals with water cannons.
None of this is “response to US destabilization.” It’s China unilaterally escalating coercion against a much smaller neighbor’s fishermen and coast guard, inside that neighbor’s own EEZ, using a maritime militia specifically because it affords deniability — grey-zone activities using non-military vessels to assert territorial claims while avoiding the accountability of overt military force.
MULTILATERAL TRACKS CHINA WORKS TO BLOCK OR PUNISH
China’s default response to other countries settling their disputes with each other, without China, is condemnation, which is itself revealing:
- Japan–Philippines maritime delimitation talks. When Tokyo and Manila opened bilateral talks to delimit their own overlapping claims, Beijing’s Foreign Ministry called the talks “illegal, null and void”, despite China being party to neither. Typical CCP bluster.
- ASEAN–China Code of Conduct. Negotiations, ongoing in some form since a 2002 Declaration of Conduct, remain unconcluded after two decades precisely because China has resisted binding, enforceable language and geographic scope. China has no interest in compromising!
- Philippines–Vietnam EEZ efforts and Vietnam’s own island building. Notably, as Vietnam has ramped up its own reclamation since 2023, Chinese commentary — including from the SCSPI, the same think tank behind this GT article — has pivoted to complaining that Western coverage “deliberately downplay[s] or ignore[s]… the aggressive actions of Vietnam and the Philippines.” Riiiight!
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
The Global Times/SCSPI piece inverts cause and effect: it catalogues US basing and exercise activity in the Philippines as “destabilization” while never naming what that activity is responding to.
The actual Chinese record — Scarborough Shoal’s seizure in 2012, roughly 3,200 acres of militarized artificial islands built unilaterally between 2013 and 2016, a 2016 arbitral tribunal ruling that stripped China’s nine-dash line of legal basis (a ruling Beijing still calls “waste paper” nine years on), and an escalating campaign of water-cannon attacks, ramming, and blockades against Philippine vessels inside the Philippines’ own EEZ through 2024–2025 — shows the causal arrow running the other way.
EDCA expansion, Exercise Balikatan’s growth, and Japan-Philippines defense cooperation are downstream reactions by treaty allies to a documented, decade-plus pattern of Chinese coercion, not an unprompted American initiative that provoked Chinese “self-defense.”
The Global Times piece is best read not as analysis but as an attempt to relitigate, in the court of international opinion, a strategic and legal position China has already lost — by recasting the neighbors’ and allies’ defensive adjustments as the original sin.
The end.
StuinSD is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support his work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This article originally appeared in Stu Cvrk’s Substack. Reprinted here with permission
If you enjoyed this article, then please REPOST or SHARE with others; encourage them to follow AFNN. If you’d like to become a citizen contributor for AFNN, contact us at managingeditor@afnn.us Help keep us ad-free by donating here.
Substack: American Free News Network Substack
Truth Social: @AFNN_USA
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA