A Game of Shark And MinnowBy Jeff Himmelman
Photographs and video by Ashley Gilbertson
The New York Times Magazine
excerpt:
What China has done with Mischief, Scarborough and now with Ayungin is what the journalist Robert Haddick described, writing in Foreign Policy, as “salami slicing†or “the slow accumulation of actions, 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 — China insists on sending its civilian maritime force, which is theoretically unarmed. This has a powerful double significance: first, that the Chinese don’t want to start a war, even though in many ways they are playing the aggressor; and second, that they view any matter in the South China Sea as an internal affair. As Huang put it: “What China is doing is putting both hands behind its back and using its big belly to push you out, to dare you to hit first. And this has been quite effective.â€
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