So, the Chinese are escalating in the South China Sea. This time, they did not just cut in the way of our boats, or embark on a close collision course, or hit us with water cannons, they actually rammed and boarded our vessel and, armed with “bolos, spears and knives,” confiscated the guns of our Navy personnel and put holes in our seacraft.
While I am incensed at the heightened bullying by China, I must admit that it was kind of embarrassing, the way our supposedly “elite” military forces were overpowered by the China Coast Guard personnel, who were civilians. They were outnumbered, to be sure, and “fought with their bare hands,” but didn’t a purported Filipino expert on warfare hawkishly point to the Battle of Yultong in pushing for going to war against China.
For the uninitiated, the said battle occurred in the Korean Peninsula in 1951, during the Korean War, when around 900 Filipino troops beat back some 40,000 Chinese troops. This, the “expert” said, was proof positive that in a showdown between our armed forces and the People’s Liberation Army, we would be kicking ass.
Many of these warmongers also keep reminding us that General MacArthur famously said, “Give me 10,000 Filipino soldiers and I will conquer the world,” after he saw how determined and resilient the Filipino guerrillas were in fighting the Japanese after the USAFFE had formally surrendered. Of course, MacArthur didn’t trust these guerrillas enough to keep American casualties down to a minimum when he embarked on his “I shall return” crusade, preferring instead to bomb Manila back into the Stone Age so that his Yankee troops wouldn’t have to do close quarters battle with the scarily desperate Japanese soldiers.
But the Battle of Yultong was many generations away, when all China had was its People’s Volunteer Army. In the 1950s, the Mainland was just emerging from a civil war with the Kuomintang. Its economy was in shambles, its society backward, its people starving and its military budget niggardly.
Yet, it had to intervene in the Korean War because the South Korean and American forces had crossed the 38th Parallel, and North Korea was close to collapse. Mao could not risk having a hostile country controlled by the Americans — its ideological arch-enemy — sharing a 1,000-kilometer border with it. So he had to rush to war with his ill-equipped army.
Odd that from some accounts, many of the Chinese soldiers in the Korean War were, just like those who boarded our boats, were armed only with spears and knives. What they had to offset that were numbers — there were hundreds of thousands of them — and a fanatical ideological mindset that made them willing to charge headlong into enemy fire and die for Mao.
Thus, it was that the strategy of Mao was to have wave after wave of combatants charge the enemy positions until the enemy was overwhelmed by the sheer number of Chinese troops. During World War Two, when his allies remarked about the low quality of his tanks, Stalin explained that Russia could make them faster than the Germans, and that his forces had many more of them than Hitler did, finishing with the well-known quote: “Quantity is its own quality.”
And while China may have lost the battle of Yultong, it eventually won its objective of saving North Korea. Due to the Chinese intervention, the South Korean alliance had to retreat back across the 38th Parallel, instituting what is now the Demilitarized Zone, thus keeping China’s border safe with a friendly neighboring country next to her.
Things are different now. China does not only have more of everything than us, it has them better than us. So unless a solution is quickly found, our missions to Ayungin Shoal will only give China a free pass to keep boarding our boats, hurting our men, and confiscating our guns. A veritable, humiliating boarding pass.