South China Sea, explained.
China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi, right, with Philippines counterpart Tess Lazaro on the sidelines of the ASEAN meeting in Manila, 22 July 2026 (Ted Aljibe/Getty Images)
The Philippines has learned that internationalising its dispute with China pays – and that may not stop.
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At a crossroads: How Beijing sees Manila’s South China Sea turnAt a crossroads: How Beijing sees Manila’s South China Sea turn
When China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi told his Philippine counterpart Tess Lazaro on the sidelines of an ASEAN gathering in Manila on 22 July that bilateral relations “now stand at a crossroads (Opens in new window)”, the phrasing was deliberate. A crossroads is both warning and invitation: a prompt to make what Wang called the “correct, rational decisions about the path ahead”.
Wang had come for the ASEAN-related foreign ministers’ meetings (Opens in new window) hosted by the Philippines as this year’s ASEAN chair. So when Chinese and Philippine personnel came to blows at Second Thomas Shoal (Opens in new window) on 20 July – each blaming the other – on the eve of the meetings, Beijing did not read the timing as coincidence.
Chinese officials cast such incidents as deliberately staged by Manila (Opens in new window), which they portray as an attempt to force the dispute onto a multilateral agenda and cast China as the aggressor. This internationalising of the dispute is what has lifted the Philippines, under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, from a bilateral irritant to one of the more vexing problems in China’s periphery diplomacy.
For Beijing, this was never a quarrel over rocks and reefs alone. Marcos abandoned what it preferred as the quiet bilateralism of the Duterte years, publicised nearly every coast-guard encounter, and rebuilt his case on the 2016 arbitral award (Opens in new window) that Beijing dismisses as “illegal and void” – mobilising law, media and outside powers to constrain China in what Beijing regards as its maritime backyard.
Both capitals are now invested in narratives – Beijing’s of external subversion, Manila’s of principled resistance – that leave little room for the quiet compromises that once managed the dispute.
What truly elevates Manila, however, is its success in drawing external powers into the dispute.
The first lever is Washington. The 1951 Mutual Defence Treaty, long treated as a background guarantee, has been reinvigorated: expanded American access under the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (Opens in new window), the Typhon system (Opens in new window) retained beyond its initial exercise deployment, and the NMESIS anti-ship system (Opens in new window) rotated in during 2025. The more striking development is political. Days later, Marcos secured a call, in which US President Donald Trump pledged to raise Manila’s concerns with China’s President Xi Jinping (Opens in new window). That a single Philippine incident can now enter the agenda of a US–China summit is, to Chinese eyes, precisely the form of escalation Beijing believes Manila seeks – a superpower’s prestige tethered to a reef.
The second lever worries Beijing more: Japan. The Reciprocal Access Agreement and the January 2026 military logistics accord (Opens in new window) have given Tokyo a foothold in maritime Southeast Asia (Opens in new window) that China regards as historically loaded. Where Washington’s involvement is expected, Japan’s return – a former occupying power re-entering the region along the first island chain China is trying to break out of – touches a more sensitive nerve. Chinese commentary now casts Japan, not the US, as the power “fuelling” South China Sea tensions (Opens in new window).
Behind this inner pair lies a widening circle. Australia, Canada and European states have joined the Philippines in maritime cooperative activities and joint patrols, alongside continuing US freedom-of-navigation operations that draw ever-closer Chinese intercepts. The pattern was clearest this July, when Washington and its partners marked the ruling’s tenth anniversary with a joint statement (Opens in new window) – what Beijing portrays as encirclement dressed in legal language.
US and Philippine marines last month during joint training at Calayan, Philippines (John Kim/DVIDS)
Conspicuously absent from it was ASEAN. Manila’s own neighbours have stayed near-silent (Opens in new window), neither endorsing nor opposing it, leaving most of Manila’s explicit diplomatic backing to partners outside Southeast Asia.
Seen this way, Wang’s “crossroads” is an attempt to reassert Beijing’s preferred framing. By blaming “external forces” and unnamed Philippine “military and law enforcement factions”, and warning that Manila risks becoming “a pawn manipulated by others” (Opens in new window), China casts itself as the patient neighbour and Manila as a state led astray.
Its deeper wager is that Manila has misjudged the moment. As Wang and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met and both eyed an expected Xi–Trump summit, Chinese commentary argued that the space for the Philippines to “fish in troubled waters” is shrinking (Opens in new window): as the two powers stabilise their rivalry, an opportunistic Manila will be “pushed to the front line”, while Washington “will never foot the bill for the Philippines’ losses”. Beijing has reminded outsiders they are “not a party” (Opens in new window) to it.
Yet the script has limits that Beijing cannot wish away. Marcos’s turn is no whim but an institutionalised reorientation – a Maritime Zones Act (Opens in new window), armed forces retooled for “archipelagic defence (Opens in new window)” – that a successor would struggle to dismantle quickly. The more accommodating bilateral approach of the Duterte era is unlikely to return, and Beijing’s hope that turmoil in Manila reopens that door may prove a costly miscalculation.
That is the hazard the metaphor obscures. Both capitals are now invested in narratives – Beijing’s of external subversion, Manila’s of principled resistance – that leave little room for the quiet compromises that once managed the dispute. Each new clash hardens views further. Avoiding a slide into conflict will require a crisis-management channel insulated from public messaging and alliance politics – one able to handle resupply missions and incidents before either side turns them into tests of national resolve.
What Beijing may not have reckoned with is that Manila has found internationalising the dispute can generate leverage with Washington, Tokyo and other Western partners – and may see little value in returning to quiet bilateralism.
About the authors
Xiaobo Liu
Captain LIU Xiaobo (Ret.) is Director of the Marine Study Center at the Grandview Institution, Beijing. He was previously an associate research fellow and director of the World Navy Research Center, National Institute for South China Sea Studies.
Sophie Wushuang Yi
Dr Sophie Wushuang Yi is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University. She is also a Non-Resident Research Fellow at the Grandview Institution in Beijing and the Wang Gungwu Visiting Fellow at the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.
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