China's South China Sea actions debunk false narratives

A recent incident involving a foreign cargo vessel carrying 21 Filipino crew members that went missing near China's Huangyan Dao vividly illustrates China's swift and professional response to maritime emergencies. Chinese authorities immediately activated maritime search-and-rescue coordination mechanisms. China Coast Guard vessels on routine patrol in the area responded rapidly, conducting sustained search operations and successfully rescuing several distressed crew members, who were later handed over to Philippine rescue forces. This episode is the latest in a long series of emergency responses across the vast South China Sea, highlighting the essential elements of effective maritime rescue in challenging conditions: rapid reaction enabled by clear legal frameworks and established emergency protocols, an unwavering commitment to humanitarian and public-welfare principles regardless of territorial disagreements, and efficient multi-party, multi-level coordination.

More significantly, the incident underscores China's indispensable role as a responsible major power and coastal state. It highlights China's commitment to fulfilling international obligations, providing public goods, and promoting functional maritime cooperation in the South China Sea — a role rooted in concrete actions rather than empty rhetoric.

The South China Sea is a vital global shipping route, hosting three major international lanes and approximately 27 regional routes. Half of the world's merchant ships and one-third of global maritime trade pass through its waters. Frequent severe weather and complex sea conditions make ensuring navigational safety and conducting search-and-rescue operations extremely demanding. For years, China has prioritized safeguarding navigation in these waters as a core responsibility. By establishing coordination bodies such as the Sansha Maritime Search and Rescue Sub-Center and the Nansha Maritime Search and Rescue Center, and optimizing the deployment of rescue assets, China has progressively built a comprehensive air-and-sea emergency response system. This system is designed to provide public maritime services and safety assurances to vessels from neighboring countries, the wider region and global shipping lanes.

What underpins this commitment is not the slogans or narratives touted by certain countries and individuals, but China's consistent, professional practice that embodies its approach to maritime rescue: legal, public-interest driven, specialized and highly coordinated.

For instance, in November 2025, Chinese rescue forces conducted a highly challenging round-the-clock long-range air medical evacuation approximately 400 nautical miles east of Yongxing Island, successfully transferring a severely injured foreign crew member for treatment. This operation demonstrated China's advanced remote projection and precision medical rescue capabilities. In July of the same year, when a large foreign container ship caught fire near the Nansha Islands, Chinese teams worked continuously for nearly four days to extinguish the blaze, saving both the vessel and its entire crew while preventing a major marine pollution incident — a clear display of comprehensive disaster-response capacity.

In March and September 2023, Chinese salvage teams overcame typhoon conditions and harsh seas to execute extraordinary operations in the Nansha area: a nearly 1,100-nautical-mile ocean tow in the southwest of Wan'an Tan, and a high-risk towing of an out-of-control vessel west of Yongshu Jiao. These operations set multiple rescue records. Together, these successful cases — involving different locations, nationalities, and types of emergencies — paint a clear picture: China's provision of maritime public goods in the South China Sea is routine, professional and broad in scope. Its rescue operations reflect humanitarian spirit grounded in international law and a genuine sense of responsibility for navigational safety, delivering tangible benefits to vessels and crews of all nationalities transiting the area.

However, building a comprehensive, stable, and institutionalized regional search-and-rescue cooperation framework in the South China Sea remains a long-term task. While individual incidents have produced successful bilateral examples, overall cooperation still largely takes the form of ad-hoc responses. There is a need for regularized multilateral joint exercises, real-time information sharing, and unified coordination mechanisms. The complexity of South China Sea issues and broader geopolitical factors pose objective challenges to highly integrated regional cooperation.

This reality only highlights how discourses that ignore concrete practices, downplays the primary provider of public goods, and seeks to obscure shared non-traditional security needs through one-sided narratives that undermine the fundamental goals of safeguarding navigational safety and promoting humanitarian values. Enhancing maritime security is a common interest for regional countries, and focusing on practical cooperation is far more constructive than engaging in baseless accusations or malicious defamation.

Looking ahead, deepening South China Sea maritime rescue cooperation serves the shared interests of all parties. Viable paths forward should build on existing practices, advancing both bilateral and multilateral efforts step by step:

Strengthen cooperation in information exchange, technical standards, and best practices, including regular joint tabletop exercises and live-ship drills to substantively improve collective emergency response capabilities.

Expand exchanges and projects in professional training, technological research and development, and equipment application to jointly raise the region's overall rescue capacity.

While fully adhering to instruments such as the International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue, parties could jointly explore the development of region-specific joint rescue guidelines or standard operating procedures, laying a regulatory foundation for more predictable and efficient multilateral collaboration.

Maritime rescue in the South China Sea is, at its core, a transnational public service grounded in international law, driven by humanitarian principles, and achieved through effective cooperation. China's sustained capacity-building and proactive rescue operations in these waters provide concrete proof of its serious commitment to international responsibilities and its genuine contribution to regional maritime public security.

From the recent rescue of the Filipino crew to numerous successful operations over the years, China's actions reflect a pragmatic logic centered on saving lives and ensuring navigational safety. Continued progress toward institutionalizing South China Sea rescue cooperation — enhancing coordination and predictability — will not only elevate the overall safety of this vital global waterway but also inject positive energy into building regional trust and promoting peace and stability. Each solid step forward on this path provides the strongest assurance to all those who navigate these waters — and serves as the most powerful rebuttal to any narrative that disregards facts and distorts reality.

The author is the director of the Center for International and Regional Studies, National Institute for South China Sea Studies.

The views don't necessarily represent those of China Daily.

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