How the United States Can Support Allied and Partner Efforts to Counter China in the Gray Zone
This RAND report examines how Southeast and East Asian states—particularly Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam—are responding to China's gray-zone coercion in the South and East China Seas, where Beijing uses tactics like island-building, ship ramming, and water cannons to advance political objectives below the threshold of open conflict. Regional responses are uneven and span use-of-force, multilateral, legal, economic, media, diplomatic, and civil initiatives, with the Philippines pursuing an "assertive transparency" approach that deliberately exposes Chinese coercion and Indonesia oscillating between sinking illegal fishing vessels and conciliation driven by economic exposure to Beijing. The authors argue that China's economic leverage and escalation dominance constrain how forceful regional partners are willing to be, and recommend that the U.S. shore up regional will through reaffirmed security commitments and transparency support, build resilience through alternative economic investment and resolution of territorial disputes, and expand capacity through continued military and coast guard development—while reconsidering long-standing assumptions that more direct confrontation in the South China Sea necessarily leads to escalation.