South China Sea: how well do China and the US really know each other’s intentions?

The visit by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last month to Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia signals a new era of competition between the United States and China in Southeast Asia and the South China Sea.

China critics in the US frequently warn of what they assume are China’s dangerous intentions regarding the South China Sea – and what it may do to achieve its goals. They say it wants to dominate the sea militarily as part of its ambitious and aggressive expansionism and that, therefore, it will continue to militarise the features it occupies and undertake major naval exercises there.

They say China may interfere with freedom of commercial navigation and essentially control all activities there, including fishing, and oil and gas exploration and development. To accomplish this, it will continue to intimidate rival claimants, coerce them via economic aid and “debt traps” and defy – and change – the existing applicable intentional rules.

Reinforcing these warnings, the US has officially declared China a “strategic competitor” and a “revisionist nation”. It has thus made clear it considers China a potential enemy, and it is presumed that “the gnomes in the basement” of the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the State Department are constructing and planning for worst-case scenarios – including war.

More specifically, the US has repeatedly criticised China’s claims, actions and policies in the South China Sea and has even publicly embarrassed it by barring it from the Rim of the Pacific naval exercises until it has “ceased all land reclamation activities in the South China Sea” and “removed all weapons from its land reclamation sites”.