Scarborough Shoals: from Maritime Harassment to GreyZone Tactics
Summary of Findings:
> Coinciding with the harassment of Philippine vessels in the South China Sea, Beijing also started an elaborate influence operation in mid-May against the Philippines, targeting the Philippine audience.
> The theme of Chinese propaganda was to blame the US as the ‘agent provocateur’ and portray Manila as a ‘puppet,’ playing into the hands of the US.
> The Chinese propaganda machinery was ubiquitous — covering all digital platforms in the Philippines to create a plethora of fake news and deception to peddle their propaganda.
> They were also engaging across social media platforms — from X (Twitter), Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, etc. As our study shows, the propaganda pushed by China was in line with the Philippines’ social media landscape.
> On X (Twitter), multiple fake accounts were created — most of them around the time of the incident — and posted anti-Philippine content. These social media accounts, masquerading as ‘Filipinos,’ peddled Beijing’s claim over the island.
> The content was then amplified by another group of handles, which boosted the reach of the posts via ‘engagement farming’ — by replying, commenting, and reposting key posts.
> The influence operations were two-pronged: on the one hand, they blamed the Philippines and the US as ‘troublemakers’; and on the other hand, they reinforced Chinese ownership of the disputed island by glorifying the beauty of Huangyan Dao, ostensibly ‘promoting tourism.’ This despite the fact that no tourism is allowed on the island.
> However, despite the elaborate design, the Chinese accounts were an easy giveaway, as they referred to ‘Scarborough Shoal’ as ‘Huangyan Dao’ in their conversations, despite at times portraying themselves as Filipinos.
> On Facebook, the Chinese-sponsored media was the most active and they were also the ones getting the most traction, but we found that accounts pushing this content were all relatively new.
> They also covered TikTok and YouTube, and content creator accounts like ‘China Unlocked’ were working closely with China-sponsored media to promote the above content on YouTube and TikTok.
Background:
On May 15th, a group of 100 Philippine fishermen and activists sailed off from the mainland towards the Scarborough Shoal to reclaim their country’s territory. The shoal is a group of islands in the South China Sea. This area is a topic of heavy dispute among five Southeast Asian countries: the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and China. The members of Atin Ito, an NGO whose name translates from Tagalog to mean ‘This is Ours,’ set off on a small wooden boat accompanied by a convoy of the Philippine Coast Guard. This trip succeeded in a triggering incident on May 10th, where a Philippine Coast Guard vessel was deliberately blocked and hit with a water cannon from a Chinese Coast Guard vessel. The Philippine vessel sustained damage due to Chinese aggression. The Scarborough Shoal is 120 nautical miles from the Philippines and part of their Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).
Another major incident occurred when a Chinese Coast Guard boat blocked a Philippine vessel on a resupply mission to the Second Thomas Shoal. The Second Thomas Shoal is part of the Spratly Islands and is home to rich fishing areas. It is also a hotbed of contestation between China and the Philippines. A grounded old warship houses a group of small Philippine sailors; the Filipino government intentionally placed the warship to reassert its territorial claims over this part of the Spratly Islands. The contested small shoal falls under the EEZ of the Philippines, while the Chinese claim it as part of their territory as a part of their nine-dash line. This results in China claiming 90% of the South China Sea. Chinese repeated attempts to assert sovereignty claims have brought a lot of attention to the zone. Many experts and scholars view it as the prepping ground for the next global conflict.
History of the Conflict:
The conflict arises due to continuous Chinese aggression in claiming control over the South China Sea. Since the 1940s, China has regularly published maps showing its own maritime waters and territory. It has been met with severe reactions from its neighboring countries.
Secondly, the Chinese have been engaged in illegal activities, including artificial island building, dredging, and other infrastructural activities in many of these islands. The Chinese side claims these areas as part of their historical waters. The nine-dash line extends hundreds of miles south and east from its most southerly province of Hainan. These feeble claims are marked with severe challenges by the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei.
Taiwan refuses to accept Beijing’s historical claim over the waters, citing it as dubious and incorrect. The remaining countries also contest based on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS) and their rightful EEZs. However, the Chinese seem to remain unhinged and continue to expand their military bases closer to these countries, prompting unrest among them and the other big nations.
The issue is not just limited to asserting sovereignty but also because the South China Sea is one of the world’s major shipping routes. As per the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, in 2016, $3.37 trillion in trade, over 21% of the total global trade, passed through here. Additionally, this area has flourishing fishing hubs and is believed to house significant oil and natural reserves. These estimates are determined from the areas that have been researched.
The Philippine Reaction:
In 2013, the Philippines took China to the Permanent Court of Arbitration, situated in The Hague, under UNCLOS, accusing them of excessive claims over the shoal and interfering with its navigation rights in the waters at and adjacent to the shoal. The accusations also included preventing the rotation and resupply of Philippine personnel stationed at the shoal, along with participating in illegal artificial island building, dredging, and infrastructure activities. China didn’t participate despite being a signatory to the convention. The court ruled in favor of the Philippines in 2016. Moreover, it was ruled that China interfered in the Philippine oil exploration of the Reed Bank lying in the Spratly Islands off the Philippines’ Palawan.
However, the internal state politics of the Philippines have had a considerable impact on the escalation in these contested waters. While the Chinese were provoking them continuously, incidents have increased recently. The previous government, under President Rodrigo Duterte, was said to have China-inclined politics. His views were remarkably anti-US, which came as a shock given that the US has been an ally of the Philippines for a long time. Even though he rolled back his comments where he claimed ‘separation’ from the USA, the West noted it. However, with the defeat of Duterte in the elections, Bongbong Marcos took over as his successor. He reverted to US-centered prudence, intending to remove discord, division, and disunity from the previous policies.
Chinese Claims:
Meanwhile, the Chinese started harassing the Philippines by claiming that their Navy official agreed to a “new model” for the resupply missions to the Second Thomas Shoal. The “new model” came from an alleged leaked call between a Chinese diplomat and a Filipino admiral suggesting that they supposedly agreed that the Philippines would use fewer vessels for their resupply missions to the disputed shoal where their grounded warship is present. The National Security Advisor of the Philippines, Eduardo Año, directly attacked the Chinese Embassy in Manila for having been responsible for orchestrating the “repeated acts of engaging in and dissemination of disinformation, misinformation, and misinformation” with the objective of sowing discord, division, and disunity. The Chinese have embarked on a journey to discredit the Philippines’ claims on the shoal. Although elusive and almost spectral, the transcripts are wielded as leverage in the dispute claim. Such tenuous claims have received strong reactions from the Philippines. If such calls exist, then following the country’s anti-wiretapping act, diplomats who have maligned influence and interfered in the operations must be removed.
The World’s Reaction and the Risks Ahead:
The US and the Philippines are bound by a mutual defense treaty, and by extension, US President Joe Biden has stated that Washington will defend Manila if Beijing attacks. A return to its natural ally, the US, has ostensibly irked China, which finds the new government in Manila strikingly anti-Beijing. Relations between Manila and Beijing will seemingly remain strained. But this brings the United States back into the conversation. While the US hasn’t taken any official stand on the sovereignty claims of the South China Sea, it is clear that any undertaking against the Philippines will evoke the ‘mutual defense’ treaty.
The volatility in the region has been marked by the creation of fresh and extrapolation of old security relationships to deter China. The Philippines has granted access to four more new island sites to the US to house their military equipment and supply, bringing the total of such sites to nine. Vietnam and the Philippines have also begun their security cooperation between their Coast Guards. The ASEAN countries collectively and individually face the impact of this titanic regional problem. While the region is in hot waters, ASEAN and ASEAN+ will face the challenge of securing the area. The largely successful ASEAN has alleviated many economic tensions and social issues. However, the challenge of resolving the question of autonomy and sovereignty will bring forth the fault lines and complexities of navigating diverse historical claims. It will underline delicate political landscapes necessitating diplomatic dialogue. In this era of uncertainty, it is paramount for the countries to come together as a unified front to confront the imperative threats, reaffirming resilience and self-confidence.
Part II
A disinformation campaign is going around
As soon as the news of conflict emerged, PRC official and unofficial media trolls sprang into action. Propaganda about the Philippines operating under US influence has been in the Chinese state media headlines for a while, and it got boosted on social media during particular events, as in this case, on May 15th.
Understanding the Philippines’ Social Media Landscape
> Out of a population of approximately 117 million, 87 million people use Facebook.
> The most used platforms in the Philippines are Facebook and FB Messenger, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr. The number of YouTube content creators surged between 2023 and 2024.
> 84 million users can be reached through FB ads, 19 million through Instagram, and 10 million through Twitter.
> English and Tagalog are the most spoken languages across social media platforms.
The Disinformation Campaign:
The Chinese disinformation campaign started the very hour the attack happened on May 15th. We analyzed data on social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
The tweets that blamed the US were specifically high in number and some of those initial results are shown below:
The above is the graph for tweets created in early hours of the Chinese propaganda. These tweets are about the China-Philippines issue with the keyword ‘USA’ contained in them. We can see that the tweets started pouring in from early morning of 15th itself.
One of the ways to analyze whether the behavior is organic or is being pushed by certain vested interests is by the pattern of engagement. We analyzed the top 50 tweets for their engagement, and people retweeting and replying to these tweets and it came out to be closely involved network suggesting a bot behavior:
Below is a graph that illustrates the analysis we conducted on the accounts replying to the top 50 tweets containing the keyword ‘USA.’ These accounts are part of what we refer to as a ‘closed network’. In this graph, the nodes represent individual accounts or people. The engagement surrounding the keyword ‘USA’ indicates a connection between these accounts. Some accounts were found to have replied to 20 out of the top 50 tweets. Such systematic behavior is indicative of a bot targeting a specific keyword, in this case, ‘USA’.
It is also to be noted that ‘reply’ tends to be more engaging and therefore reflects an active participation and interest on X.
Then we analyzed the retweet network of the top 50 tweets with the keyword ‘USA’ and we discovered some accounts that were retweeting 9–10 of these top 50 tweets. And it wasn’t just one or two accounts doing this; there were several such accounts we identified. Refer to the graph below:
Another trend going on Twitter was around the word play. To understand this, one should first look at what are the different names of Scarborough Shoal (The island in discussion in this whole propaganda) and who uses which name.
“Scarborough Shoal, also known as Bajo de Masinloc (“Masinloc shoal” in Spanish), Huangyan Island (Mandarin Chinese: 黄岩岛; pinyin: Huáng Yán Dǎo; lit. ‘yellow rock island’), Minzhu Jiao (Mandarin Chinese: 民主礁; lit. ‘Democracy Reef’) and Panatag Shoal (Filipino: Buhanginan ng Panatag, lit.”
The Philippines and people in western media used Scarborough Shoal as the standard term. Whereas the name used by Chinese media and bot accounts was Huangyan dao. We have done a comparative analysis of the data on both of these keywords on Twitter and the summary of the result is as follows:
The above tweets were made using the keyword ‘Scarborough Shoal’. We can observe that the frequency of tweets is not very high, with the peak occurring around May 16th, when the Chinese attacked the Filipino fishermen’s boat.
And the above is the account creation dates of the accounts tweeting using the term- ‘Scarborough Shoal’, i.e., the accounts which wrote the above tweets. The behavior seems unsuspecting with almost 1–2 tweets per account.
Now, let us analyze the tweets on the Keyword, Hunagyan Dao (Huáng Yán Dǎo) the Chinese name of Scarborough Shoal. This keyword was very common on Facebook posts done by the Chinese controlled news agencies as well, which we will see in the next section.
Below, we can see that the tweets with the keyword ‘Hunagyan Dao’ peaked around the same time period as ‘Scarborough Shoal’ keyword but the number was almost 4 times higher.
The creation date of accounts posting on the Hunagyan Dao keyword, displayed rather intriguing results unlike the previous analysis of the accounts tweeting for ‘Scarborough Shoal’.
Facebook:
The trend on Facebook was a little different and the primary accounts in action posting the content on Facebook were the Chinese controlled media. Some of the prominent ones are China Daily, CGTN, Global Times, China News and Xinhua News Agency
Some of these posts on Facebook blamed US being a party directly involved in conflict while some posts were criticizing the Philippines. Upon examining these posts, we observed a distinct pattern: specific accounts consistently appeared to ‘like’ these anti-Philippines, anti-USA posts. Furthermore, out of those individuals who liked posts across all three news websites, we identified 85 accounts that were recurrently present. And when we looked into the followers/friends of accounts we found these accounts had minimal followers, which is an unusual trend for accounts on Facebook. Almost 60% of these accounts had less than 100 followers/friends.
Now let us look at the variations of content in the posts done by Chinese accounts on Facebook:
The Chinese accounts were posting two types of content using Huangyan keyword:
1. Blaming Philippines fishermen for trying to enter the island illegally.
2. Promoting the Huangyan Island beauty and Chinese Tourism. This technique reinstated Chinese claim over the island. Using the colloquial term to refer it and detailing about the beauty of the island is a very typical Chinese technique (think, Arunachal Pradesh of India) to illegally assert their claim over the island.
Thus achieving — yi shi er niao (一石二鳥) — “one stone two birds”.
There were contents created on YouTube and TikTok as well, where a particular channel was extraordinarily working towards making pro-China content. They seem to be doing it undeterredly and any researcher looking into Chinese propaganda must have come across these accounts. They are actively and systematically propagating a wide array of Chinese propaganda, below is a glimpse of their wide variety of state sponsored content and same content playing across different social media platforms:
China Unlocked content creators were working in sync with the Chinese sponsored state media. They were active on all fronts, sharing exactly the same content everywhere, shows their commitment to feed people with disinformation:
Conclusion:
The Chinese influence operation has become an essential component of their grey zone warfare and appeared to be planned in tandem with their other kinetic operations. This was evident from the fact that the info war started in coordination with the harassment of the Philippine ship. Another notable feature has been a multi-pronged approach to influence operations, especially the indirect ways to demonstrate Chinese claims over the disputed islands by talking about tourism. This is an improvement over the terse official narratives peddled by CCP-controlled media. Though some inherent limitations remain, such as their adherence to approved narratives — namely using the Chinese government-approved naming of the island — overall, the side narrative, that is, blaming the US for orchestrating the crisis and painting the Philippines as a puppet, might be more effective in certain quarters, especially in local language social media propaganda.
“ Next War will not be fought on land, air or water, it will be a digital war, and the best way to win is to educate oneself to analyze and recognize disinformation & propaganda— Team Thinkfi”
Special Thanks to Kashish Kunden for her inputs and for compiling the tangled history of China and Philippines in the best comprehensible way possible.
About ThinkFi:
We develop State of the art tools to gather and analyse data from open sources (OSINT) to detect misinformation, propaganda and disinformation in the cyberspace. Our products are powered by our research in AI and ML.
Website: https://thinkfi.net/
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Contact: thinkfi.net@gmail.com
