OPEN LETTER: Beijing at Scarborough Shoal — stop playing with fire in the South China Sea

Introduction: One provocation too many in already boiling waters

June 30, 2026: the PLA steps in at Scarborough

On June 30, 2026, the Southern Theater Command of the People's Liberation Army officially announced combat-readiness patrols in the waters and airspace of Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea. Simultaneously, the Chinese Coast Guard intensified its rounds in this disputed zone, less than 240 kilometers from the Philippine coastline. This coordinated deployment is not a routine exercise: it is a political message addressed to Manila, to Washington, and to the rest of the free world.

Beijing justifies this show of force by pointing to joint American-Philippine patrols conducted in the area the previous weekend. The Philippines had exercised their sovereign right by inviting their allies to navigate waters that the Permanent Court of Arbitration had recognized as falling within their exclusive economic zone in 2016. Beijing, which has never recognized that international ruling, continues to act as if the South China Sea belongs to it in its entirety.

The floating platform removed: a victory for the international community

In this same context, Manila had lodged a formal diplomatic protest after a Chinese floating platform, installed in late May in the contested zone, had finally been withdrawn under combined international pressure. This Beijing retreat — tactical though it was — showed that the international community could still influence the behavior of the People's Republic of China when it spoke with one voice.

But the new PLA patrols of June 30, 2026 erase that provisional hope. Beijing now accuses the Philippines of having invited external powers — a coded phrase targeting the United States — to destabilize what it calls its territorial integrity. This rhetoric is a cynical manipulation: casting the victim as the aggressor.

Mr. Xi Jinping, the facts condemn you

An international ruling your government refuses to hear

Allow me to be direct, Mr. President. In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled definitively: China's historical claims over virtually the entire South China Sea have no legal basis recognized under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). This is not a Western opinion — it is the result of an international legal process to which your government was invited to participate and which it deliberately ignored.

Since that ruling, your government has not only maintained its illegitimate claims but has accelerated the militarization of artificial islands built on coral reefs, deployed warships and coast guard vessels to block Philippine fishermen's access to their traditional fishing grounds, and used water cannons against civilian vessels. These facts are documented, photographed, and videotaped. They are undeniable.

The salami strategy and its limits

Beijing has for years practiced what geopolitical analysts call the salami strategy: slicing neighbors' sovereignty in thin rounds, each slice appearing insufficient to justify a firm response, until the entire sausage has disappeared. The floating platform installed in late May is the most recent demonstration: occupy, provoke, wait for the reaction, withdraw if pressure becomes too great, start again further along or later.

But this strategy has structural limits. The Philippines, under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., has hardened its posture since 2022. The United States reaffirmed that the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States and the Philippines applies to attacks against Philippine armed forces in the South China Sea. Japan, Australia, and several European partners have reinforced their naval presence in the region. Beijing's isolation on this file has never been so visible.

To Manila: you are right, hold firm

Philippine resistance: a model for threatened small states

This open letter also addresses Manila. The Philippine government, despite considerable diplomatic and economic pressure from Beijing, has maintained a posture of firmness that deserves to be highlighted and encouraged. Lodging a formal diplomatic protest, continuing to exercise its rights within its own exclusive economic zone, maintaining joint patrols with allies: these are acts of sovereignty, not provocations.

Scarborough Shoal, whose Philippine name is Bajo de Masinloc, is located only 240 kilometers from the coast of Luzon. Philippine fishermen have accessed these waters for generations to make a living. Every time a Chinese Coast Guard vessel drives them away from these waters, it is an act of intimidation against civilians. This is not a geopolitical abstraction — it is a daily reality for thousands of families.

The importance of the allied framework

Manila's decision to maintain and deepen its security partnerships — notably with the United States, but also with Japan and Australia — is strategically sound. The American-Philippine joint patrols that triggered Beijing's reaction were not aimed at provocation: they were aimed at establishing a legal and legitimate presence in a zone that international law recognizes as Philippine. Faced with a state that refuses the rules of the multilateral game, the only viable response is allied cohesion.

Chinese accusations that the Philippines is allowing external powers to interfere reveal a fundamentally hegemonic conception of the regional order: Beijing would prefer its neighbors to manage their disputes directly with it, without witnesses, without allies, without international law — a negotiation between the elephant and the mouse.

To Washington: the Pacific alliance is your most precious asset

The 1951 treaty must be believed at its word

Article IV of the Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States and the Philippines stipulates that both parties will defend each other mutually in the event of an armed attack in the Pacific area. Successive American administrations have confirmed that this guarantee extends to Philippine armed forces and government vessels in the South China Sea. But words must be backed by visible and credible acts to have a real deterrent effect on Beijing.

American presence in the Asia-Pacific is a common good for the region's democracies. American military bases in the Philippines, whose access was expanded through the EDCA (Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement), constitute a security net for all the regional partners resisting Chinese pressure. Maintaining them, reinforcing them, and demonstrating their operational utility is not one option among others — it is a strategic necessity.

Trump, China, and allied coherence

The Trump administration maintains an ambivalent relationship with its Asian allies — based sometimes on transactions rather than shared values. But even from a purely transactional standpoint, maintaining American credibility in the Asia-Pacific is in Washington's direct interest. If regional allies doubt American commitment, they seek accommodations with Beijing — which is precisely what Xi Jinping aims for.

The joint patrols with the Philippines that Beijing denounced on June 30, 2026 are exactly the type of concrete engagement the region needs to calibrate deterrence. This is not provocation: it is allied coherence. Coherence is the only language that Beijing's strategists truly understand.

The global maritime stakes at play at Scarborough

A third of world trade passes through these waters

The South China Sea is not merely a zone of bilateral tensions between China and the Philippines. Approximately one-third of global maritime trade — representing more than 3.5 trillion dollars in goods annually — transits through these waters. Freedom of navigation in the region is therefore a global good, not a regional concern. When Beijing threatens to undermine it, all the world's economies are potentially affected.

The precedent Beijing is attempting to establish is particularly dangerous: if a sufficiently powerful state can claim and militarize maritime zones without regard for international tribunal decisions, the multilateral maritime law system built since 1982 with UNCLOS collapses. And if UNCLOS collapses in the South China Sea, it weakens everywhere else in the world.

AI waters and submarine cables

The strategic dimension of this zone goes beyond fishing resources or hydrocarbon reserves. Critical submarine cables for global digital communications — including financial traffic and data transfers related to artificial intelligence — pass through these waters. Control or disruption of this infrastructure would constitute a lever of extraordinary power for whoever dominated the region militarily. This is a strategic reality that democracies cannot afford to ignore.

This is not paranoia: it is a documented assessment that Western intelligence agencies, notably linked to the Five Eyes, have brought to the attention of allied governments. The South China Sea is a first-order geopolitical nexus, and Scarborough Shoal is one of its most contested strategic access points.

To the international community: silence is not an option

The European Union must take a clear position

The European Union has direct interests in freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, but its voice on this file remains too timid. European naval missions in the region — as Operation Atalanta did for piracy in the Gulf of Aden — would demonstrate concrete commitment to defending the rules of international law, well beyond diplomatic declarations.

Several EU member states, notably France, the United Kingdom (post-Brexit) and Germany, have conducted naval transits through the region in recent years. These concrete acts deserve to be amplified and coordinated. A formal European framework for freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific would send an unambiguous signal to Beijing: the rules are not negotiable.

The United Nations and the limits of multilateralism

Knowing that China is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council — with veto power — the hope for a binding UN resolution on this file is practically nil. Traditional multilateralism has structural limits when one of the permanent members is itself the source of the problem. This is an uncomfortable but necessary reality to acknowledge.

The response must therefore pass through alternative mechanisms: coalitions of democracies like the Quad (United States, Japan, Australia, India), AUKUS, and enhanced bilateral partnerships. These structures, more agile and less vulnerable to the Chinese veto, constitute the real security architecture of the region for the decades to come.

China on the world stage: credibility versus coercion

When diplomacy masks military pressure

Beijing seeks to present itself simultaneously as a responsible power on the international stage and as a dominant force in its immediate neighborhood. This dual posture creates a structural tension that the rest of the world is beginning to document with precision. On one hand, China sits on the UN Security Council, signs climate agreements, and champions a multipolar world based on peaceful coexistence. On the other, it deploys the PLA to Scarborough Shoal on June 30, 2026 to intimidate a neighbor that won its case before international tribunals.

This contradiction is not a diplomatic accident — it is a deliberate strategy. Beijing plays on two different registers for different audiences. For the West, it presents the face of negotiation and economic partnership. For its neighbors in Southeast Asia, it displays military superiority and determination to impose its claims. This dual-language strategy demands from democracies a precise reading — do not be taken in by the first discourse, do not overreact to the second.

The erosion of regional trust toward Beijing

Surveys regularly published by the Pew Research Center and the Asian Barometer Survey reveal a consistent trend over several years: distrust of China is growing in virtually all democracies in the Asia-Pacific. In Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Taiwan, populations perceive Beijing as a greater threat than in the past. This shift in public opinion is directly correlated with the aggressive behaviors documented in the South China Sea.

This decline in trust has concrete strategic consequences: it fuels regional rearmament, consolidates defensive alliances, and politically justifies military spending that would have been difficult to defend ten years ago. By choosing intimidation over cooperation, Beijing is itself manufacturing the coalitions that will encircle it tomorrow.

What history teaches us about maritime aggressors

The precedents that should worry us

The history of maritime conflicts teaches a simple but painful lesson: powers that seek to dominate strategic waters only back down when faced with credible and coordinated resistance. The precedent of the South China Sea presents troubling analogies with other forms of gradual territorial expansion that the Western world tolerated for too long before reacting.

The construction of militarized artificial islands on reefs in the South China Sea — documented since 2014 — continued without the international community managing to stop it. These islands now host military airstrips, radar installations, and missile systems. What was presented as civilian infrastructure proved to be a permanent military establishment.

Beijing's rhetoric and its internal contradictions

Beijing systematically presents its claims as defensive — a response to foreign interference, protection of its historical sovereignty. But this rhetoric runs into a fundamental contradiction: China's neighbors that draw closer to Western alliances do so precisely in reaction to Chinese pressure, not the reverse. It is Beijing's escalation that creates defensive alliances, not defensive alliances that provoke Beijing.

This logic of causal inversion — blaming the victim for its own aggression — echoes other forms of rhetoric we have learned to recognize in other geopolitical contexts. The factual truth remains accessible to anyone who consults the decisions of international courts, satellite imagery, and the testimonies of Philippine fishermen expelled from their fishing zones.

Conclusion: the rules must apply to everyone

A letter that calls for action, not merely outrage

This open letter is not a call to war. It is a call for consistency. The rules of international maritime law that the West invokes to defend freedom of navigation cannot apply only when convenient. They must be defended with the same energy in the South China Sea, at Scarborough, in the Yellow Sea, and in the Taiwan Strait as in any other maritime space in the world.

The allied democracies — the United States, the European Union, Japan, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and their Indo-Pacific partners — all have a stake in keeping the rules of the maritime game valid. Weakness in the face of Beijing's provocations does not lead to peace: it invites the next slice of the salami.

History will judge the choices we make today

June 30, 2026 may remain a minor event in the archives of world diplomacy — one more patrol in a zone that sees dozens every year. Or it could mark the point at which the international community decided to no longer tolerate repeated provocations, closed ranks, and responded with the clarity the situation demands. We still have a choice.

The Philippines is doing its part. Washington sends signals, sometimes contradictory. Europe is slowly waking up. And all the while, the PLA makes its rounds 240 kilometers from the coast of Luzon. Time is not neutral in this file — every inaction by the international community is a silent concession to Beijing.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

Who I am and my acknowledged biases

I am a columnist and analyst specializing in international geopolitics, with particular attention to power dynamics in the Indo-Pacific and conflicts between liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes. I am resolutely pro-democracy, pro-international law, and skeptical of the expansionist claims of authoritarian regimes like that of Beijing. This bias is acknowledged and transparent.

I have no financial interests in the region, no government mandate, and no diplomatic affiliation. My analysis is based exclusively on publicly accessible sources, dispatches from recognized press agencies, and geopolitical assessments from independent research institutes. I was not on the ground, I have no confidential source in the relevant ministries.

What I do not know and my limitations

I do not have access to confidential communications between Manila and Washington, nor to the precise intentions of PLA military planners. The internal dynamics of decision-making in Beijing remain largely opaque, even for the best experts in Chinese studies. My analysis is therefore a reading of publicly available signals, not firsthand knowledge of Chinese strategic intentions.

This open letter is a journalistic and editorial act, not a foreign policy document. It aims to inform public francophone debate, not to dictate government decisions. I acknowledge that geopolitical reality is more complex than any single article can capture.

Sources

Primary sources

Reuters — China conducts patrols around Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea — June 30, 2026

South China Morning Post — South China Sea file — 2026

People's Daily (EN) — Official Chinese position on maritime sovereignty — June 25, 2026

Secondary sources

Global Times — Coverage of Chinese maritime affairs — June 2026

Hutchin Song — Fault Lines Daily Summary — June 28, 2026

Video documentation — South China Sea patrols — 2026