Beijing is using the global distraction of the US-Iran-Israel war to entrench its position in the South China Sea — deploying propaganda, coast guard vessels and fishing fleets as instruments of strategic pressure.
As the guns of a war spanning Lebanon, Iran, and Iraq command the attention of governments and newsrooms worldwide, a quieter but no less consequential contest is unfolding thousands of miles to the east. China is methodically consolidating its grip over the South China Sea — and it is doing so with a sophistication that blends legal argumentation, state media messaging, and the strategic deployment of uniformed coast guard officers alongside ordinary fishermen.
The timing is not accidental. Beijing has long understood that geopolitical windows open when great powers are distracted elsewhere. The ongoing US-led military confrontation in the Middle East has absorbed American diplomatic bandwidth, naval assets, and public attention at a moment when Washington can least afford a simultaneous crisis in the Indo-Pacific. China, for its part, appears to have noticed.
Reframing the Narrative: Fishermen as Combatants?
In a telling counter-offensive of its own, China Daily — Beijing's flagship English-language state newspaper — published on 28 March 2026 a sharply worded rebuttal of a recent report by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI), a project of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Writing in China Daily, academics Luo Zhen and Lyu Ming from Shanghai Ocean University dismissed the AMTI's annual survey, titled "All Together Now: China's Militia in 2025", as "a tool of political manipulation" and "politically motivated propaganda."
The AMTI report, according to the China Daily piece, claims that China deployed a record average of 241 vessels per day in disputed South China Sea waters in 2025 — the highest figure since AMTI began monitoring. The report interprets this presence as evidence of a deliberate strategy involving so-called "maritime militia": fishing boats that, critics argue, serve as a paramilitary grey-zone tool under the direction of the People's Liberation Army Navy.
Beijing's academics are having none of it. The South China Sea's reefs and atolls, they argue, have been traditional fishing grounds for Chinese fishermen since antiquity — a claim that is historically contested but forms the bedrock of China's legal and rhetorical posture. The assertion that fishermen operating in their ancestral waters are in fact soldiers in disguise is, in their framing, an act of deliberate Western distortion.
The Moratorium Argument and the Coast Guard Shift
The China Daily article goes further, pointing to China's annual summer fishing moratorium — imposed by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs from 1 May to 16 August in South China Sea waters north of the 12th parallel — as evidence of responsible maritime stewardship. The moratorium, they argue, causes legitimate seasonal fluctuations in vessel distribution that AMTI misreads as strategic repositioning. When the moratorium lifts on 16 August, tens of thousands of fishing vessels return to sea; their clustering around certain reefs reflects fish migration patterns and weather, not military logistics.
Yet the broader picture is harder to explain away. China's Coast Guard (CCG) has, by its own admission, dramatically expanded its operational footprint. CCG spokesperson Liu Dejun stated in a recent interview that the force has deployed 550,000 vessel-trips to conduct law enforcement missions in and around Huangyan Dao and the Nansha Islands over the past five years — a figure that would be remarkable for any maritime constabulary and speaks to an intensive, sustained campaign of presence assertion.
China frames these deployments as routine law enforcement within sovereign territory. Its neighbours — Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei, all of which have overlapping claims — view them as a systematic effort to enforce a unilateral interpretation of maritime boundaries that an international arbitral tribunal in The Hague definitively rejected in 2016. Beijing has never accepted that ruling.
The Strategic Window and Its Limits
For regional analysts, the convergence of circumstances in early 2026 carries a distinct logic. American carrier strike groups are deployed to the eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. The White House national security apparatus is consumed by the management of an active war involving two of its closest partners, Israel and the Gulf states, and a nuclear-threshold adversary in Iran. The bandwidth for a simultaneous crisis over Ren'ai Jiao or Xianbin Jiao is, to put it diplomatically, constrained.
China has not launched a military operation. What it has done — consistently, methodically and with growing confidence — is use the tools of lawfare, media narrative, and maritime presence to normalise its position. Each coast guard patrol that goes unchallenged, each rebuttal published in a state outlet that frames Chinese fishermen as victims of Western smear campaigns, each incremental change in vessel counts that gets reinterpreted as mundane seasonal variation: these are the building blocks of what scholars of grey-zone competition call "salami slicing" — the accumulation of strategic advantage through steps too small, individually, to trigger a response.
The approach carries risks. The Philippines, emboldened by a revitalised defence relationship with Washington and growing solidarity from Japan, has shown a markedly greater willingness in recent months to publicly document and challenge Chinese actions. ASEAN, perennially reluctant to confront Beijing collectively, is nonetheless under growing internal pressure to develop more robust shared positions. And the United States, however distracted, has not abandoned its treaty commitments or its Freedom of Navigation operations.
Propaganda and the Information Battlefield
What the China Daily rebuttal illustrates as clearly as anything is that the South China Sea dispute is now fought as vigorously in the information space as it is on the water. Beijing has invested heavily in English-language state media precisely to contest Western narratives in the global arena. AMTI publishes satellite imagery and vessel count data; China Daily publishes academic rebuttals casting that data as fabrication. The effect, intentional or not, is to muddy the epistemic waters for international audiences trying to assess what is actually happening.
The broader lesson for policymakers — and for publics — is one that applies far beyond the South China Sea. When a major war absorbs the world's attention, the actors who benefit most are not always those firing the guns. Sometimes they are the ones quietly, patiently, moving pieces on a different board entirely.
Editorial Note
China Daily is a state-owned English-language newspaper published under the direct authority of the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It is one of the principal instruments through which Beijing projects its official narratives to international audiences. The publication is registered as a foreign agent in multiple jurisdictions, including the United States, where the Department of Justice required it to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) in 2020. Its editorial positions consistently align with Chinese Communist Party policy, and it does not operate independently of government control. Readers should accordingly treat its content — including academic opinion pieces published under its masthead — as representative of the official Chinese government position rather than as independent scholarly commentary. The Levant Files cites China Daily and other state media sources as primary evidence of governmental messaging and strategic communication, not as neutral or verified accounts of facts on the ground.
Photo: China Daily, Xinhua