A UNITED States-based maritime defense analyst said "assertive transparency," the Philippines' new strategy for countering China's aggressive actions in the West Philippine Sea, is working.

"A bad actor can't hide in the shadows because the light has been turned on. (Assertive transparency) does help to disinfect the whole thing. It makes that bad actor responsible for their actions in a way that they are hoping to avoid," said Raymond Powell, a retired US Air Force colonel and founder and director of SeaLight, a maritime transparency project that monitors and reports activities in the South China Sea, during a roundtable discussion with The Manila Times on Thursday.

From the expert Raymond Powell, director of SeaLight and project lead for Project Myoushu at Stanford University's Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation, discusses incursions in the West Philippine Sea with The Manila Times reporters Franco Baroña, Kristina Maralit and Bernadette Tamayo. PHOTO BY J. GERARD SEGUIA

Assertive transparency involves the use of photographs and videos to expose and document illegal incursions and incidents of harassment and intimidation at sea.

Powell said what the Philippines has done with this tactic in the past year is "revolutionary."

The strategy helped bring to international attention the Feb. 6, 2023 incident at Ayungin Shoal in the West Philippine Sea, when a China Coast Guard (CCG) ship used a military-grade laser to drive away a Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) vessel.

"The laser-pointing was incidental or reactive transparency: there was an incident that happened, and there were photos so they decided to release it. But what happened next was really unique," said Powell, who coined the term assertive transparency.

After the said incident, the PCG began to document other incidents of Chinese harassment at Philippine outposts and vessels in the West Philippine Sea.

"They took pictures of the Chinese vessel swarm off Pag-asa Island, which has been in the area for a couple of weeks. What happened after the pictures were taken and released to the public was the vessels dispersed," Powell said.

"It was clear that Beijing did not like those pictures and they did not want any more of them. So the Philippines discovered something that it could use as leverage in the struggle," he said.

"The Philippines is obviously overmatched by the strength of the CCG and Chinese maritime militia (CMM) ships, but what it did have was essentially a moral high ground," he said.

Powell said conclusions can be drawn that assertive transparency has worked to achieve certain conditions for success.

First, he said, it strengthened the Philippines' national resilience.

"Getting the Filipino people behind you so that you can take steps like building the country's maritime security, and passing legislation so it is not easily exploited or pushed around," said Powell, who was the team leader of Project Myoushu from July 2022 to July 2023 under the Stanford's Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation.

The project seeks to develop tools to counter Beijing's "gray zone" tactics in the South China Sea.

Second, the international support it generated gives the country the moral and material leverage against China.

Finally, it imposes reputational costs against Beijing to force a change in its behavior based on risks.

He said the tactic provides the Philippines leverage in future negotiations "because, in the end, Manila is not interested in fighting with China."

"I do think that China is looking at changing its tactics. The questions they could be asking now: Is it still in China's interest to be so overtly coercive? Maybe it sort of needs to adjust. But what it adjusts to remains to be seen," said Powell.

He said he sees assertive transparency as in the same spectrum of activities with the 2016 arbitral tribunal ruling that rejected Beijing's expansive claim over the South China Sea.

"None of these things by themselves wins. It is finding those things that give the Philippines a little bit more of an edge," Powell said.

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