Chinese coast guard ram and puncture Philippine military boats in disputed shoal

More of this will happen if the west doesn’t support Philippines or Ukraine Enough
- America did it too and is trying to again
- Philippines is a shithole that willingly elected the fascist Duterte as their president, they deserve no support.
  
  Your taking about people from over 7000 islands as if it's one entity.
  
  Electing a fascist is rich America's privilege, no? I'm speaking of trump just to make that perfectly clear.

So an act of war, right?
- Yeah, attacking a military unit seems like an act of war to me. Pretty blatant. Demonstrates that China only behaves as a bad actor with its neighbors, and can't be trusted to be anything other than a bully.
  This is basically China daring the US to do something about it. We shouldn't take the dare, but we should respond with a show of support for the Philippines. China is flexing because they think the US is too busy with Ukraine, Israel, and the upcoming election.
  
  Yeah, attacking a military unit seems like an act of war to me.
  Civ 6 agrees with you.
- Well, according to China, those waters are their territory, which means that the presence of foreign military vessels is an invasion.
  Practically speaking, I think you could call that area a contested region, so minor skirmishes like this are expected and could escalate to war (like Crimea eventually did).
  I think that the Philippines approach has been something like, 'You can claim those waters if you want, but you can't possibly keep us from entering them, so we're just going to ignore you until you start killing our people, and then we're gonna call in big brother America.'

I was wondering how they "punctured" this military vessel, then I watched the video... They're fighting it out on freaking zodiacs.
- The Chinese are pursuing a very weird passive aggressive strategy here that I do not at all understand.
  "Surely if we spray water at the other boats and run our boats into them and jump on board the opposing ships with poking weapons like some kind of Maori tribesmen the rest of the world will get sick of it and go away and give us what we want i.e. full control of the South China Sea, without us having to actually start a war about it"
  I really don't understand. I can't even say for sure it is a bad idea, because like I say I just don't understand, but it seems unlikely that it's going to produce the impact that they seem like they want it to produce.
  
  imo, I think they're playing the plausible deniability card.
  They can always say they don't know what is happening in the lower ranks. Once the other side raises arms, suddenly they're going to play the self-defense card.
  On the other side, they preach about how asians should support each other against the power and influences of the west.
  
  I only have two ideas:
  They're seeing what they can get away with. Or, and more likely, normalizing more and more aggression in pursuit of seeing what they can get away with.
  
  Have you seen videos of the skirmishes at the Kashmiri border? It's absurd, like something out of a bad alternate history movie.
  
  The impact as of right now is that everyone thinks they're being absolute assholes about it.
  
  It reminds me of this tradition. Especially this quote from a modern incident "Successfully counting coup disgraces your opponent. It’s a way of publicly shaming them. We believe that if you are shamed, you must admit defeat." It makes me wonder how much of the motivation for the incidents is internal consumption. Acting aggresively, but in a carefully crafted way to avoid an escalated response. The message sent internally that the other side restrains themselaee not out of reason, but fear.
  
  It's the "I'm not touching you" of international geopolitics. They're doing everything they can think of, short of actual war.
  
  Just waiting for them to try this with a US Navy Ship gonna be a bad day for the Chinese 😂

Somehow this factors into taking over Taiwan.
- It factors into China's ambitions to control the entire South China Sea:
  Straight-up imperialism. All your ocean are belong to us.
  
  That "China/Taiwan" is just kinda thrown in there without even an asterisk or anything
  (Actually I guess leaving Taiwan out of the legend entirely would have looked like an accident or something, and having a separate color for it would have been a huge deal and they'd have started to get phone calls, and so they just shrugged and put that down and said you know what it's not a perfect world let's move on)
- Anything China wants becomes "disputed" so they have an excuse to act like bullies.