Although China had become a member of several regional multilateral organizations before this date, 1995 may be seen as an important turning point marking the time when Chinese diplomacy become more active, as opposed to being for the most part reactive to the initiatives of others. Although China had become a member of APEC in 1991 and was a founder member of the ASEAN Regional Forum in 1994, it was only in 1995 that the Chinese formally agreed that issues of the South China Sea could be discussed on a collective basis with ASEAN. This was also the year in which the Philippines discovered that the Chinese had been secretly building structures on Mischief Reef, an atoll only some 120 miles from the Filipino coast. The significance of the meeting with the ASEAN group as a whole was that China gave up its relative advantage as the regional great power of dealing with these smaller states one by one. Undoubtedly, the Chinese did so because they did not want their southeastern neighbours to line up with the US against them in view of the Taiwan crisis. But the critical point was that, as a result, the Chinese began to pay more attention to their collective views, and they have been careful since then not to repeat the Mischief Reef land-grab elsewhere in the Spratly Islands china. Moreover the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs began to use the multilateral institutions of the region to diffuse the fear of China as a threat, to consolidate friendly relations, and to strengthen China’s role as a leading economic power in the region.