The footage Manila released on June 19, 2024 showed small boats crowded with Chinese coast guard sailors shouting, waving knives and beating an inflatable boat with sticks while a siren wailed. In one clip a sailor stood on deck with an axe. The clash itself had happened on Monday, June 17.
The two governments gave different accounts. Manila said one Filipino sailor lost his thumb, that Chinese personnel confiscated or destroyed Philippine equipment including guns, and that the coast guard used tear gas. Beijing insisted its coast guard had acted in a “professional and restrained” manner and that “no direct measures” were taken against Filipino personnel. Armed Forces chief General Romeo Brawner said his outnumbered crew was unarmed and fought with their “bare hands.” The Inquirer, quoting military spokesman Colonel Xerxes Trinidad, reported that the injured sailor suffered a “severe injury” after what Manila called an intentional high-speed ramming. China described such moves as “control measures,” part of a sovereignty claim that covers nearly the whole of the South China Sea, though a 2016 tribunal ruling dismissed that claim.
A deal nobody agrees on
Diplomacy followed quickly. On July 21, 2024, the Department of Foreign Affairs announced that the Philippines and China had reached an understanding on a provisional arrangement covering supply runs and crew rotations for the BRP Sierra Madre, the rusting warship the Philippines has kept on the shoal since 1999. Rappler says the deal grew directly out of the June 17 confrontation. It adds that within a day Manila was already calling Beijing’s description of the arrangement inaccurate.
The text remains confidential, so what is known has come out in pieces. Two years on, the confusion has moved inside the Philippine government. The defense secretary, Gilberto Teodoro Jr., says he is unaware of any such agreement, or regards it as non-existent. The Foreign Affairs department points to its record: 15 resupply missions passed without incident before the July 2026 clash. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. defends the arrangement as a way “to prevent any kind of miscalculation, mistake that might lead to even greater tension.”
July 2026
That record was broken on a Monday morning in July 2026. The armed forces say a China Coast Guard cutter, number 21560, came up to the Sierra Madre at about 0915 and put a small craft in the water. Philippine personnel went out in inflatable boats to drive it off. The AFP said the Chinese crew tried to hit them with a baton and rammed one boat; Maritime Executive described both sides trading blows with oars and poles, and one Filipino sailor was left with a head injury. The China Coast Guard told a different story, saying Filipino personnel struck first with paddles and wooden poles and that its own officers showed restraint.
Maritime Executive called it the second violent clash at the shoal to end in bodily harm, and the first to break a spell of relative calm. Afterward China’s ambassador to Manila, Jing Quan, said the coast guard had needed to inspect the Sierra Madre over suspicions that construction materials had been brought in, a claim the Foreign Affairs department and Lazaro herself denied days later, as they had in July 2024.
Sources
- Chinese sailors wield sticks, axe in disputed sea clash with Philippines
- PH Navy sailor loses thumb, others injured in CCG ramming incident
- China Coast Guardsman Hits Philippine Sailor in the Head in Latest Clash
- He said, she said, Marcos said: What we know about Ayungin arrangement
