Proving Ground: China’s Strategic Ratcheting of the Philippines and the Indo-Pacific’s Gray Zone Problem

The 10th anniversary of the 2016 South China Sea arbitral award highlighted the ruling’s enduring legal significance and the ongoing contest over its implications. A decade on, China has not only refused to comply with the legally binding award, which invalidated Beijing’s expansive historical claims and affirmed the Philippines’ sovereign rights, but has intensified its campaign of unlawful maritime coercion and occupation in the West Philippine Sea. The Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative has tracked record levels of Chinese maritime activities over successive years, with 2026 projected to set new highs. An important feature of China’s maritime “gray zone” operations has been its equally aggressive approach to public messaging. This was on stark display last month in Beijing’s bristly official response to a joint statement by 14 nations reaffirming the arbitral award while Chinese state media released a crude animated video depicting the Philippines as a monkey. On July 20, 2026, China Coast Guard forces attacked and injured a Filipino sailor in the Second Thomas Shoal, highlighting, once again, Beijing’s willingness to mix aggressive information operations with dangerous actions at sea.

Yet, what is happening in the West Philippine Sea is, in many ways, just a microcosm of a broader and multifaceted effort by China to target the entire Philippines archipelago. Philippines government officials have been sounding the alarm for years. As recently retired Armed Forces of the Philippines Chief of Staff General Romeo Brawner Jr. warned, “we are experiencing already cyber warfare, information warfare, cognitive warfare, political warfare. The communist China is already conducting United Front works in our country.” Given the complexity and diversity of these China-linked activities, Philippine officials have acknowledged that simply grasping their scope is challenging. To bring this threat landscape and its policy implications into clearer focus for policymakers, it is crucial to understand the logic and mechanics of China’s campaign.

Beijing’s Strategic Ratchet

China’s influence and interference activities in the Philippines are deliberately varied, ambiguous, and often deniable. This can make it difficult to decipher an overarching strategic logic or monitor the scale of their effects. Compounding this conceptual and strategic confusion is the absence of an overarching Chinese Communist Party or People’s Liberation Army doctrine that lays out the rationale of these activities. There is immense value to be drawn from engaging with primary sources, such as 2025 China’s National Security in the New Era, and expert analyses of recurring concepts such as “community of common destiny” and the “three warfares,” that have shaped China’s military and foreign policy thinking and practice. A pattern emerges when these insights are combined with empirical consideration of the full scope of China-linked operations in the Philippines: three core strategic objectives, pursued through eight interlocking levers, that cumulatively and progressively act as a ratchet constraining the Philippines’ strategic options.

The first objective is to establish cognitive advantage by competitively shaping perceptions and decision-making to increase acceptance of and reduce resistance to China’s interests in the Philippines. This is pursued through two principal levers:

• Information and Narrative Operations: This lever aims to actively shape the perceptions and understanding of target audiences. Typically involving a combination of official government messaging, state-run media, and Filipino proxies, these activities are used to advance China’s interests and undermine critics. Examples include actively shaping local media narratives about Chinese investment projects in the Philippines and orchestrating social media attacks against the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism for its reporting on pro-China influence operations.
• Elite Influence and Capture: China aims to direct the preferences of individuals and groups with sectoral or public influence to either support China’s positions or be silenced. This is exercised by leveraging shared interest, coercion, incentives, or opportunism. Several high-profile cases—including United Front operations and affiliated actors seeking to influence local government and police, Beijing-funded Filipino troll campaigns, and efforts to target Chinese-language media—have prompted calls to update the Foreign Agents Act of 1979.
   

The second objective is to normalize Beijing’s interests working through established political, diplomatic, legal, and economic channels.

• Political and Diplomatic Channels: Activities through these channels seek to routinize acceptance of China’s behaviour and rhetoric to shape relations and entrench new norms. This is exemplified by the “wolf warrior” diplomacy that has recently been on display by China’s embassy in Manila.
• Legal Channels: This work involves the harnessing of domestic and international legal instruments to legitimize and entrench China’s claims while delegitimizing alternatives. For example, when the Philippines passed the Philippines Maritime Zones Act and the Philippine Archipelagic Sea Lanes Act in 2024, China responded by condemning the new legislation and publishing its own territorial baselines.
• Economic Channels: Spanning trade, investment, and development finance, efforts through these channels leverages incentives and dependencies to secure Beijing’s interests. Front of mind for many Filipinos are Beijing’s largely unfulfilled trade and infrastructure agreements during the Duterte administration.
   

It is important to acknowledge the role that legitimate statecraft activities play in China’s engagements with the Philippines and the potential for positive and mutually beneficial outcomes. The Philippines is going through a transformational period that has seen it transition to upper-middle-income status, heightening the importance of a stable relationship with China. However, normalization across the three channels can also work through constant pressure over time. This leads to Beijing increasingly dictating what is acceptable discourse and behaviour while institutionalizing its preferences in ways that one-sidedly benefit China, to the Philippines’ disadvantage.

The third objective is to coerce acquiescence through incrementally escalating actions below the threshold of armed conflict to alter behaviour, reshape norms, and compel compliance. This is pursued through three principal levers:

• Cyber Operations: Actions such as hacking attacks on Philippine government networks are deployed to gain network access, collect intelligence, disable capabilities, and coerce decisionmaking.
• Covert Foreign Interference and Espionage: These activities, such as recent China-linked intelligence operations to recruit Philippine government officials, are conducted to gain access, exert influence, and exploit vulnerabilities through clandestine and deceptive means.
• Military, Paramilitary, and Militia operations: These establish a coercive presence that raises the cost of resistance and, over time, entrenches new baselines of presence, occupation, and militarization that are impossible to reverse without significant escalation. This is exemplified by Chinese naval, coast guard, and maritime militia activities closely monitored by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative and SeaLight.
   

The threat and risk dynamics confronting the Philippines are unlike China’s direct strategic competition with the United States or even Japan, where relative capability and posture are the primary points of contestation. China’s principal target is the Philippines’ decisionmaking environment, which it seeks to shape through a process of competitive conditioning. Beijing looks to position its preferred outcomes as reasonable and inevitable, but if that is insufficient to achieve compliance, it has increasingly raised the cost of resistance through coercive measures. This approach is designed to gradually constrain the Philippines’ future choices and tilt outcomes in China’s favour. The result is a ratcheting effect as each lever reinforces the other, combining to compound effects that, over time, result in conformity with China’s interests. Acquiescence ends up looking like stability, while resistance, let alone reversal, seems the risky, escalatory move.

For the Philippines, these challenges are asymmetric. China is applying its overwhelming weight on a much smaller nation, while the Philippines is not seeking to offensively condition China in return. However, it is a competitive dynamic because the Philippines has waged a multifaceted defensive campaign in response to China’s aggressions. The Philippines’ pushback has been complicated by ambiguities around actors, intent, and effects as China blends attributable actions and centralized coordination with opportunistic exploitation of deniable and unattributable actions.

The lack of a shared understanding of the problem has perhaps most hamstrung the Philippines’ responses. Beijing’s blend of legitimate statecraft with coercive and deceptive tactics has too often had the effect of reducing public debate to a Rorschach test for partisan loyalties than a serious policy discussion. This plays to China’s advantage. The incremental “slow boil” escalation of China’s coercive campaign is easily dismissed in its early stages, a dynamic epitomized by the oft-cited “a bunch of rocks” equivocation about China’s maritime operations in Philippine waters. Such dismissals buy Beijing time and space to tighten the ratchet. 

Priorities for Breaking the Pressure Cycle

This analysis points to five policy implications for the United States and the Philippines.

1. Coordinate messaging and actions around shared values and red lines. Trust between the United States, the Philippines, and like-minded partners is a target of China’s influence and interference activities and needs to be defended as deliberately and methodically as any other strategic or physical asset. This requires a shared understanding of how China’s levers operate so that public messaging and concrete action are appropriately calibrated. Ideally, the U.S.-Philippines-Japan trilateral should anchor a wider architecture of like-minded nations that needs sustained activation and coordination. 
   
   In practice, this requires states that support the Philippines to act as strategic partners willing to defend shared values and establish clear red lines that are consistently and repeatedly validated through coordinated actions and amplified by disciplined messaging. Say-do gaps are credibility gaps, and only a steady rhythm of coordinated messaging and action will build resilience and trust among partner nations and shift momentum away from Beijing. Coordinating with, complementing where appropriate, and just giving space to Philippines efforts, such as the transparency and mulat campaigns, will be important for amplifying mutually reinforcing effects.
2. Win and hold the semantic high ground. Language is terrain in this contest, shaping all three of China’s objectives simultaneously. Borrowed or ambiguous words cede cognitive advantage while aiding normalization and acquiescence. When the Reagan administration pivoted from containment to roll back of Soviet influence, NSDD 75 instructed officials to prevent Moscow from appropriating terms like “peace.” It is a valuable lesson for today. Ceding vocabulary cedes ground that argument alone may not recover. It also accelerates the very conditions in the decisionmaking environment that Beijing seeks to foment. Partners should adopt Philippine terms like “West Philippine Sea” over Beijing’s preferred nomenclature. “Gray zone” remains analytically useful for describing integration across the eight levers, but its reflexive use in public messaging should be reconsidered. Beijing avoids the term precisely because “gray” implies ambiguity. When China’s actions are illegal, coercive, aggressive and deceptive, they should be clearly described as such.
3. Watch the right indicators and recognize missteps. China will continue to incrementally embed and militarize its presence in Philippine waters. The major challenge for the Philippines and its allies is to not lose sight of China’s broader whole-of-archipelago campaign by myopically focusing on China’s maritime gray zone activities. Adopting a more holistic view of the competitive terrain also requires Washington to consider that Beijing’s most effective instruments have often been legitimate tools of statecraft. China remains one of the Philippines’ largest trade partners, and the view from Beijing is that while administrations in Manila come and go, economic leverage is strategically durable. 
   
   All this matters because current U.S. advantages could prove more fragile than they may appear from Washington. For instance, bucking the global trend in the Pew Spring 2026 Global Attitudes Survey and regional trends in the State of Southeast Asia: 2026 Survey Report, Filipino public opinion still favours Washington over Beijing. Bilateral ties also remain strong. However, recent U.S. policy decisions detrimental to Philippine interests, particularly alongside the energy shock triggered by the Iran war, risk steadily eroding U.S. favourability. Without sustained engagement, today’s favorable strategic position could prove more transient than enduring. Equally, China’s unpopularity in Philippine public opinion should not be interpreted as evidence of the failure of its influence efforts. Authoritarian regimes care little for popularity at home, let alone abroad. The entrenchment of Beijing’s interests across the Philippines is the only metric that matters. Whether Filipinos like how they got there is largely inconsequential.
4. Build domestic resiliencies across Philippine government, business, and civil society. To be clear, the Filipino people are a major target of China’s conditioning campaign—just not to boost Beijing’s popularity. Enhancing sustainable resiliencies requires a shared understanding of China’s activities in the Philippines, the vulnerabilities it seeks to exploit, and to what effects. As other studies have detailed, Beijing seeks to erode a “trinity of trusts”—social trust, trust in expertise and authorities, and trust in democratic institutions and processes—among Filipinos that over the long term weakens societal, political, and cognitive resiliencies while exacerbating vulnerabilities. Protecting that trinity should be treated as a core resilience objective. This work is urgent because Beijing has real vulnerabilities it can exploit in the Philippines, including corruption scandals across the national government, inconsistent pushback against China’s maritime coercion, an escalating Marcos-Duterte feud, and a Bangsamoro peace process under intense strain. 
5. Accelerate capacitation efforts before the window to the 2028 election closes. Some of the most cost-effective, high-impact support the United States and other partner nations can provide is the capacity to detect and monitor influence operations, coordinate strategic messaging, develop sustainable indigenous capabilities especially around cybersecurity, and align efforts across partner nations. That work is urgent and the implementation window is closing. The Philippines’ 2028 elections bring acute uncertainty about the strategic direction of the next administration. Joint mechanisms with the United States and other partners can serve as a bridge to close gaps via arrangements that build near-term resilience while cultivating capabilities the Philippines will need to sustain independently, regardless of who governs after 2028. The strategic logic is simple: Whatever capacity is not built and institutionalized before that inflection point risks being abandoned or delayed after May 2028.
    

Beyond the Maritime Gray Zone

China’s maritime gray zone operations in the West Philippine Sea are the “tip of the spear” for China’s pressure campaign against the Philippines. It is essential that policymakers do not lose sight of the rest of the spear. That much broader, multifaceted, sometimes seemingly benign and at other times surprisingly insidious, spectrum of activities spanning the entire archipelago must also be better understood and appropriately confronted.

The lessons to be learned from the Philippines’ experience reach well beyond the territories of this critical U.S. ally. In only the last few weeks, China has fired a ballistic missile into the Pacific, intensified multi-lever pressures on Japan and New Zealand, and pushed its maritime gray zone operations east of Taiwan. The Philippines is a proving ground for methods that China is increasingly applying across the Indo-Pacific. The bipartisan Countering Gray-zone Aggression by the People’s Republic of China Act is an important signal that Washington recognizes China’s expanding campaign and its cascading strategic effects as a direct threat to U.S. security and interests. Whether the Philippines or China succeeds in this struggle could determine how the Indo-Pacific threat landscape evolves in coming years.

Haroro J. Ingram is a senior associate (non-resident) in the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.