“The underlying logic is something like, ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but they’re probably less likely to lead to war,'” says Daniel Mattingly, a political scientist at Yale University and a researcher on the Chinese military.
China, a sprawling country that shares land borders with 14 countries and maritime borders with another six, is embroiled in volatile territorial disputes with several of its neighbors. But in recent years, its troops have often used primitive weapons in battles along those borders, despite the considerable technological advances the Chinese military has made.
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According to unconfirmed videos of clashes circulating on social media, this tactic was used particularly on the China-India border.
In a 2022 clash with the Indian military over a part of northeast India that China claims, Chinese and Indian forces appeared to have engaged in hand-to-hand combat, using stones and improvised clubs as weapons. In 2017, Chinese and Indian frontline troops carried no weapons and instead fought by “bumping” – or bumping chests – as China tried to take land from tiny Bhutan, a close ally of India.
China’s use of non-conventional weapons could be a strategic move to avoid escalation and ward off international attention, especially from the United States. But experts warned that while the deployment could work this time, it was risky.
“Perhaps (China) could point out that in this case (in the South China Sea) these were tools and not weapons,” said Harrison Prétat, deputy director and fellow of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But we are getting pretty close to the limit.”
In this week’s incident in the South China Sea, the Chinese coast guard boarded Philippine naval vessels to damage and seize their equipment, according to Philippine officials. They said China was trying to prevent Philippine ships from resupplying the warship Sierra Madre at Second Thomas Shoal, a reef that has become a flashpoint in the maritime dispute.
A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington denied this, claiming that the Philippines had illegally entered the waters without China’s permission and had “violated international law”.
“The Chinese side took necessary measures to protect its sovereignty in accordance with the law. These were legal and justified and were carried out in a professional and restrained manner,” Liu Pengyu wrote in an email to The Washington Post.
U.S. officials have repeatedly stated that an armed attack on a Philippine government ship in the South China Sea would trigger the 1951 mutual treaty that requires the United States and the Philippines to defend each other in the Pacific.
“The omission of the use of weapons makes it unclear whether the United States has an obligation to intervene and potentially help the Philippines,” Mattingly said. “If they used weapons, then there is a stronger argument that the United States should do so.”
The Philippines said Friday morning that it had no intention of invoking that treaty in response to this week’s confrontation. Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin told reporters that the government does not view this week’s confrontation with the Chinese coast guard as an armed attack.
“We saw bolo and axe, nothing more,” Bersamin said, according to the Associated Press.
While the use of sharp objects could limit the risk of escalation, it can still prove dangerous and even deadly. A Filipino sailor lost a finger in the South China Sea this week. In June 2020, 20 Indian and at least four Chinese soldiers died, according to official figures from both countries.
China and India have been fighting over the 3,300-kilometer-long border in the Himalayas for decades. There were brutal fights as early as the 1970s, when the two armies engaged in fistfights and stone-throwing. According to a 1996 bilateral agreement, border troops are prohibited from using firearms within two kilometers of the border, the so-called Line of Actual Control.
Recent Sino-Indian border disputes have centered on the Tawang sector, a sector in the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, as well as around Ladakh – at the northeasternmost tip of India – and the Galwan Valley. A 2022 clash over the Tawang sector took the form of a non-gun confrontation that resulted in hand-to-hand fighting and soldier injuries. This clash was the most serious incident between India and China since 2020.
On another Himalayan border, Chinese and Indian troops fought in Bhutan in 2017 over territory that China claimed but India and Bhutan claimed was Bhutanese. There were no reports of firearms or weapons being used in that skirmish, either. Instead, there were “shoving matches” in which soldiers from India and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army bumped chests without punching or kicking to push the other side back, but did not open fire.
Sushant Singh, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in India and a lecturer at Yale, said shooting is common along India’s borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh. “The PLA culture is very different from Western military culture, where guns are used much more frequently,” he said.
But in September 2020, there was a departure from this norm: under public pressure following the deaths of Indian soldiers in a clash months earlier, shots were fired at the border for the first time in decades, with both sides accusing each other of firing warning shots.
“If one side decides the norm no longer exists, it no longer exists on either side,” Singh said. “You can think of them as very weak guardrails that can be torn down and then rebuilt.”
