Weapons of choice in China's territorial conflicts? Axes, knives, “shoving”.

“The underlying logic is something like, 'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but are probably less likely to lead to war,'” said Daniel Mattingly, a political science professor at the University of Yale studying the Chinese military.

China, a sprawling country that shares land borders with 14 countries and maritime borders with six others, faces volatile territorial disputes with several of its neighbors. But in recent years, its troops have often used simple weapons in battles to cross these borders, despite the considerable technological advances used by the Chinese military at the time.

This tactic was used in particular on the Sino-Indian border, according to unverified videos of clashes shared on social networks.

In a 2022 clash with the Indian army over a part of northeastern India claimed by China, Chinese and Indian forces appeared to engage in hand-to-hand combat and use stones and makeshift clubs as weapons. In 2017, frontline Chinese and Indian troops carried no weapons and fought by “bumping” – or chest-bumping – as part of China's efforts to seize land from tiny Bhutan, a close ally of India.

China's use of unconventional weapons could be a strategic move aimed at avoiding triggering an escalation and diverting international attention, particularly from the United States. But experts warned that even if it worked this time, it was risky.

“Maybe [China] could suggest the idea that they were tools and not weapons in this case [in the South China Sea]” said Harrison Prétat, deputy director and fellow of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But we're getting pretty close to the line.”

In this week's incident in the South China Sea, Chinese coast guards boarded Philippine navy vessels to damage and confiscate equipment, according to Philippine officials, who said China aimed to prevent the vessels Filipinos to resupply the warship Sierra Madre on the Second Thomas Shoal. a reef that has become a focal point of maritime conflict.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington disputed the claim and said the Philippines had illegally entered the waters without China's permission and “violated international law.”

“The Chinese side has taken necessary measures in accordance with [the] law to safeguard its sovereignty, which was legal and justified, and applied in a professional and restrained manner,” Liu Pengyu wrote in an email to the Washington Post.

U.S. officials have repeatedly said that an armed attack on a Philippine government ship in the South China Sea would trigger the 1951 mutual treaty that commits the United States and the Philippines to mutual defense in the Pacific.

“Not using weapons makes it ambiguous whether the United States is obligated to intervene and potentially assist the Philippines,” Mattingly said. “If they did use weapons, then there is a stronger case to believe that the United States should do so. »

The Philippines said Friday morning that it did not intend to invoke the treaty in response to this week's altercation, with Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin telling reporters that the government did not consider this confrontation week with the Chinese coast guard as an armed attack.

“We saw bolo, an axe, nothing else,” Bersamin said, according to the Associated Press.

Although the use of sharp objects could limit the risk of escalation, it can nevertheless prove dangerous, even fatal. This week, in the South China Sea, a Filipino sailor lost a finger. As of June 2020, 20 Indian soldiers – and at least four Chinese soldiers – died, according to official accounts from both countries.

China and India have fought over the 2,100-mile Himalayan border for decades. The brutal fighting dates back to the 1970s, when armies clashed using fistfights and stone-throwing. Under a 1996 bilateral agreement, border troops are prohibited from using firearms within a two-kilometer radius of the border, known as the Line of Actual Control.

Recent Sino-Indian border conflicts have focused on the Tawang sector, an area located in the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, as well as around Ladakh – in the far north -eastern India – and the Galwan Valley. A 2022 clash in the Tawang sector took the form of an unarmed confrontation, leading to hand-to-hand fighting and injuries among soldiers. This clash constitutes the most serious incident between India and China since 2020.

On another Himalayan border, in 2017, Chinese and Indian troops clashed in Bhutan over an area that China claimed belonged to them but that India and Bhutan claimed was Bhutanese. Also during this skirmish, no use of arms or weapons was reported. Instead, the fighting consisted of “shoving,” in which Indian soldiers and Chinese People's Liberation Army soldiers beat their chests, without punching or kicking, to push the other camp behind, but did not open fire.

Sushant Singh, a senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research in India and a lecturer at Yale, said there was often gunfire on the borders between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. “The culture of the PLA is very different from what a Western military culture would be, where the use of weapons is much more frequent,” he said.

But September 2020 brought a deviation from this norm when, under public pressure following the deaths of Indian soldiers in clashes a few months earlier, shots were fired at the border for the first time in decades, the two sides accusing the other of firing warning shots. .

“Once either side decides the norm no longer exists, it no longer exists on both sides,” Singh said. “Think of them as very weak guardrails, which can be broken and then put back in place. »