China Engaged in Illegal Territorial Expansion, Congress Hears

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Communist China is engaged in a decades-long attempt to expand its terrestrial and maritime claims without triggering an overt war, Congress has heard.

Speaking during an Oct. 7 hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific, and International Cybersecurity Policy, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) said that multiple successive U.S. administrations had failed to counter China’s program of expansion because the regime’s actions fell below the threshold of international military conflict.

“China’s trying to change the facts on the ground in the Indo-Pacific just as [Russian President Vladimir] Putin did with Crimea in 2014,” Coons said.

Coons’s statement summarized the broader testimony of experts who told Congress of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) continued efforts to expand its physical territory as well as its influence through malign and oftentimes illegal activities.

In particular, focus was on the CCP’s growing campaign of military harassment against Taiwan, and its illegal claim of sovereignty over natural resources and islands in the South China Sea that are hundreds of miles away from its territory.

The Chinese regime has conducted a decades-long campaign of territorial expansion in the South China Sea through the construction of artificial islands and the claiming of sovereignty over vast swaths of national resources in international waters.

The CCP claims that all islands, rocks, reefs, and other terrestrial features in the South China Sea have belonged to China since ancient times, although communist forces first made the claim in 1947.

In 2009, Beijing issued a statement to the United Nations, claiming it held “indisputable sovereignty over the islands in the South China Sea and adjacent waters” and sovereign rights and jurisdiction over approximately four-fifths of the South China Sea, as well as all the seabed and subsoil.

Many of the CCP’s claims were found to be illegal by an international court in 2016, following a case brought by the Philippines. Beijing dismissed the findings of that case, saying that China “will neither accept nor participate in” arbitration on the matter.

CCP aggression in the region has only expanded since then, and Chinese maritime law enforcement or Chinese naval vessels were involved in 79 percent of all major maritime incidents in the South China Sea from 2010 to 2020, according to data compiled by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Washington-based think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the subcommittee that the CCP’s expansion in the Indo-Pacific is “calibrated to be incremental and ambiguous, carefully designed to avoid tripping U.S. red lines while steadily degrading Taiwan’s confidence in its future.”

In addition to taking over the South China Sea without a valid claim, Singleton said that the CCP was “slowly engineering the conditions for Taiwan’s subjugation.”

The CCP’s military exercises in the region are becoming so rapid and large, he said, that the United States may not be able to correctly identify when an actual attack on Taiwan is taking place.

Raymond Powell, executive director of the nonprofit SeaLight Foundation, said that military officials from the Philippines had dubbed the CCP’s tactics “ICAD,” meaning “illegal, coercive, aggressive, and deceptive.”

If the United States and its allies could not mount a more robust defense and deterrent against such behavior, Powell said, the CCP would only continue to expand its territory.

“For over 50 years, China has systematically seized effective control of vast ocean areas through patient, incremental expansion,” Powell said.

“We are decades into losing a gray zone war we largely don’t recognize we’re supposed to be fighting.”

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