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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   1167 thread views

Transnational Thursday for August 14, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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A U.S. destroyer illegally entered the territorial waters of China's Huangyan Island; the Southern Theater Command lawfully and according to regulations warned and expelled it.

This is the PRC government line.

Back in reality, this is one of the many islands in the South China Sea that the PRC claims but is not recognised as owning. A day prior, two Chinese ships had attempted to physically obstruct a Philippine Coast Guard ship from approaching the island. Fortunately, they only crashed into each other. Then, as often following these kinds of incidents, a US ship sailed into the waters that the PRC insistently claims belong to it (to demonstrate that the US disagrees, to show its support for others ignoring the claim, and to make the PRC look weak when they invariably do not, in fact, enforce their claimed territory).

I'm not going to follow a .cn link due to the Great Cannon, but I've heard that the Chinese media is censoring the fact that two PLAN ships crashed into each other, presumably because it's a massive pratfall. And, well, of course they're parroting the insistent PRC line that "this island belongs to China and how dare anyone else go near it". They're also falsely claiming they "expelled" the US destroyer, because they're trying to save face.

Here is an Australian article about the incident. Here is the Wikipedia article about it.

Yes, I'm quoting Chinese military news

My point is that uncritically quoting propaganda like this might mislead people.

This is a good point. I consider the above an early draft, with fewer signposts, mostly pointers to the primary sources I'm using, because The Motte can take it. Maybe you might derive other interpretations from the primary sources than what I am getting out of them. The final polished version, read by about 3K people, is here.

A Chinese navy ship collided with a Chinese coast guard vessel while pursuing a Philippines coast guard boat. Subsequently, China claimed to have expelled US warships from “Chinese territorial waters” in the South China Sea.

The link under "claimed" links to a more neutral source, because in this case it remarks:

Beijing has also pushed back what it calls infringement of its airspace and maritime waters by the US and its allies, while the latter claims it flies and sails its military assets in international airspace and waters.

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