The Civilian Face of Chinese Sea Power

Hundreds of fishing boats ring a reef no one is technically fighting over. No missiles fired, no warships trading shots, just a coast guard that cannot get close and fishermen who eventually leave. Weeks later, the water functions as someone else's. China has spent over a decade building this capability: the People's Armed Forces Maritime Militia, a fleet that flies no naval flag and answers to no declaration of war, subsidized and coordinated to advance state objectives in the South China Sea without crossing the threshold that would draw in the US Navy, trigger a treaty, or unite the region against Beijing.

The significance of the militia extends beyond China's activities in the South China Sea. It provides an example of a broader trend in which civilian assets are increasingly incorporated into national security strategies. The more useful question is not what China is doing with these assets, but why this specific tool, and what it signals about how the next round of great-power competition will be fought.

Since 2012, China’s maritime militia has been linked to more than 270 documented harassment incidents in the South China Sea — vessels with no naval markings performing tasks no ordinary fishing fleet performs. On paper, the People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia (PAFMM) is a civilian reserve. In practice, it reports up a military chain of command to China’s Central Military Commission.

Maintaining that civilian profile requires sustained state investment. Beijing subsidizes steel-hulled vessel construction, covers fuel costs for voyages to the Spratlys, and funds up to 90 percent of Beidou satellite terminals, now installed on more than 50,000 fishing boats and feeding a surveillance network run out of Sansha. At the centre sits a fully state-owned fleet, including Sansha’s 84-vessel “Qiongsanshayu” unit, whose crews draw salaries and train year-round at dedicated militia bases.

The militia concentrates where China’s claims are most contested: the Paracels, the Spratlys, Scarborough Shoal, taken from the Philippines in 2012, and Second Thomas Shoal, where a Philippine garrison has held out since 1999. At Whitsun Reef, more than 200 vessels sat anchored in uniform rows in 2021, and again in 2023 with 135 vessels. At Second Thomas, tactics have escalated to blocking, ramming, and a 2024 boarding incident involving militia and coast guard crews. None of it has crossed the line that would trigger Manila’s mutual defence treaty with Washington, which is the point. A coast guard cutter ramming a foreign vessel is an incident with a paper trail. A fishing boat doing the same is, officially, weather.

Grey-zone competition is coercion calibrated to a specific line: enough to advance a strategic goal, not enough to justify a military response. China runs this on a “salami-slicing” logic, no single incident is worth retaliating over, but string enough of them together and the map quietly moves. Cheaper commercial technology, legal grey areas, and the political cost of open war have made this kind of strategy difficult for any major power to resist outright.

The same action can therefore produce very different political consequences depending on who carries it out. An attack by a naval vessel could trigger a military response, whereas similar behaviour by a fishing vessel can be treated as a civilian maritime incident. No government wants footage of its coast guard engaging unarmed civilians, however capable those civilians actually are. International law has not caught up either: frameworks built for state-on-state conflict have no clean category for a fisherman who is also, functionally, a combatant. For treaty allies like the United States, that ambiguity cuts against intervention, striking a “civilian” vessel risk looking like the aggressor.

The structure favours whoever wants to change the map. Democracies need consensus before acting; Beijing can exploit the asymmetry between the speed of incremental coercion and the political difficulty of responding to it. Each incremental advance makes the next slightly larger footprint feel normal, until presence alone becomes the claim, with no invasion and no single moment anyone can point to as the start.

The mechanics explain how the militia operates; they do not explain why Beijing built it instead of simply expanding the navy. Four factors do.

Deterrence math comes first. The 1951 US-Philippines Mutual Defence Treaty binds Washington to respond to an armed attack on Philippine forces, vessels, or aircraft in the Pacific, but a swarm of unarmed-looking fishing boats does not trip that clause. A central advantage of the militia is that it can operate below the threshold likely to trigger an American military response.

Second is chokepoint anxiety. China imports roughly 80 percent of its energy and moves close to 60 percent of its seaborne trade through the Malacca Strait, a passage it does not control and cannot easily defend by force. Grey-zone tools let Beijing build coercive leverage in waters near its own coast, since it cannot yet project comparable power over the distant chokepoints its economy depends on.

Third is cost asymmetry. A militia vessel is a subsidized fishing boat; a guided-missile destroyer costs well over a billion dollars and years to build. The militia lets China sustain an indefinite presence without the fiscal and political weight of a formal war footing, degrading a rival’s position steadily rather than seizing it outright.

Fourth, and often underweighted, is that this is not improvisation but policy. China’s 2016 “Opinion on the Integrated Development of Economic Construction and National Defence Construction” and the 2018 Military-Civil Fusion Strategy Outline formalize the folding of commercial capacity into national defence as a top-level state objective, coordinated by a central commission that answers directly to Xi Jinping. The maritime militia is simply the most visible application of a doctrine that governs how China plans to fight, long before any war actually starts.

The same doctrine runs through China’s ports, shipping, and telecommunications sectors. The China Coast Guard has drifted from law enforcement toward something closer to a strategic instrument, bigger cutters, more heavily armed, more assertive in disputed waters, all while keeping its civilian designation. Qingdao’s ro-ro terminal was rebuilt in 2020 as an explicitly dual-use dock, cutting the time needed to berth naval landing ships alongside commercial ferries. Merchant shipping goes further still: PLA exercises since 2020 have repeatedly used civilian roll-on/roll-off ferries and cargo ships, including vessels owned by state-linked COSCO, to move tanks, armored vehicles, and troops. One 2022 exercise alone moved more than 8,500 pieces of equipment and 55,000 personnel across eleven ports.

The same substitution is reshaping conflict elsewhere. Commercial satellites now perform work once reserved for national reconnaissance: in Ukraine, Starlink terminals have relayed targeting data from drones to artillery in real time, and the same terminals have since appeared on Russian strike drones, evidence of how easily commercial infrastructure crosses into combat use. Civilian drones have followed a similar path; Ukraine alone is producing FPV drones at a rate above two million a year. Telecom infrastructure belongs in the same category — commercial on paper, foundational to command and control in practice, and increasingly targeted for that reason.

Ports, satellites, and telecom networks are one axis of this fusion, assets a state builds or co-opts to project power. But the same substitution works in reverse: an adversary doesn’t need to seize commercial infrastructure to weaponize it, only to make operating it too costly to continue. Hormuz shows what that looks like when the target is insurance and finance rather than steel.

The Strait of Hormuz offers an instructive counter-case. When the US-Israel war with Iran disrupted shipping through the strait earlier this year, the closure did not come from mines or a naval blockade, it came from insurers withdrawing war-risk coverage within days, which was enough to freeze commercial traffic on its own. For China, watching the world’s most important oil chokepoint go quiet without a shot fired at a Chinese vessel is a lesson in exposure: energy security dependent on legal and financial systems can be shut off almost as easily as it can be blockaded militarily. It may also explain the caution behind Beijing’s response, leaning on Iran diplomatically rather than escalating, while pressing all parties to keep the strait open.

Iran’s own posture in Hormuz, threats to close the strait, a “shadow fleet” of tankers using false flags and spoofed transponders to keep oil moving under sanctions, naval harassment that stops short of open war, belongs to the same grey-zone family as China’s militia, even if the execution is far blunter. Both cases point to the same emerging norm: states that control or sit near a chokepoint have found that ambiguity, not firepower, is what actually works against status quo powers reluctant to escalate. For Gulf states watching both Beijing’s calibrated version and Tehran’s cruder one, the relevant question is not whether this tactic is exotic, it is whether their own shipping and energy infrastructure could face a comparable version of it.

Zoom out and the maritime militia stops being only a South China Sea story. The next round of competition may turn less on tanks, destroyers, and carrier groups than on who controls the ports, satellites, shipping lanes, and data infrastructure that no defence ministry owns outright and no treaty was ever written to cover.

The Indo-Pacific already shows what that looks like. Roughly 95 percent of intercontinental data runs through undersea fibre-optic cables, and the region’s chokepoints — the Luzon Strait, the routes feeding Japan and South Korea’s near-total reliance on subsea links, sit under the same waters China’s militia patrols. Taiwan’s Penghu Islands saw repeated cable cuts in 2025 tied to Chinese-flagged vessels, coercion pitched deliberately just under the line that would justify a military response.

That leaves governments needing security doctrines built for hybrid assets rather than against them, planning that treats a commercial fleet, a satellite constellation, or a cable-laying ship as a possible instrument of coercion, not a footnote. It leaves international law with a harder problem, since the civilian-versus-military distinction assumes things sort cleanly into one category, and a satellite terminal serving a household by morning and an artillery strike by afternoon breaks that assumption outright. And it leaves businesses playing a strategic role whether they choose to or not: Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon now finance and operate the cable routes carrying the world’s data, which makes their infrastructure decisions geopolitical by default. When the US FCC moved in June 2026 to require security licensing for submarine cable equipment and bar Chinese suppliers outright, it was really acknowledging that private companies now sit inside the security perimeter.

If the model China built with fishing boats is already spreading to satellites, cables, and shipping fleets, and if Iran’s Hormuz playbook shows the same logic at work with a blunter instrument, the more useful question may not be who wins the next conflict, but where it is even fought. Has the battlefield quietly become the civilian economy itself?

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