Last week, a boatload of Filipino fishermen claimed to have been chased away from their fishing grounds by a Chinese coast guard vessel sometime late March. The Chinese reportedly fired warning shots at the fishermen, prompting them to cut their anchor line and flee in a panic.
The Chinese denied any knowledge of the incident and promised to cooperate in any investigation. But if proven true, this would be the first hostile encounter in nearly a year between the two countries.
More recently, last Friday a couple of Philippine military cargo planes carrying Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana and AFP chief of staff General Ed Año were challenged over Chinese radio as they were approaching the airport runway of Pag-asa Island on an inspection trip.
Nothing untoward happened, and Lorenzana later dismissed the incident as just “automatic protocol” on the part of the Chinese. Nonetheless, it’s evident that these senior defense officials of ours were put in harm’s way during those brief moments.
As if trying to rub it in, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman later expressed “grave concern and dissatisfaction” over what was simply a routine visit by Philippine officials to an island that has been continuously settled by Filipinos since the early seventies and is administratively part of a Philippine municipality, Kalayaan town in Palawan.
***
One certainly can’t accuse the Chinese of sleeping on the job. As they have reclaimed land and built their jetties, runways, and monitoring stations on one island after another, they have also assiduously cultivated our friendship while periodically probing the strength of our political will with these occasional provocations.
The real reason they’re taking over those islands is no secret. It’s not (yet?) because they want to annex the Philippines, or because of some mysterious reserves of the deuterium “miracle fuel” lying at the bottom of the disputed waters.
Their objective is simply to deny absolute freedom of passage to US naval forces. And the reason for this denial is to allow the Chinese to convert the seas off the Asian mainland into their own submarine pen as they go about building a truly blue-water navy to challenge US maritime supremacy over the long term.
It’s a big-power game that nonetheless still leaves room for fishermen from around the region to continue to fish in these waters, and more grandly for neighboring countries to conceive of cross-border joint ventures to develop all manner of undersea wealth.
One such example from the time of former President Arroyo was the three-way undertaking among the national oil companies of China, Vietnam, and the Philippines to jointly conduct submarine oil exploration. Such joint ventures are standard practice in the oil industry, especially during the earliest stages of exploration when the risk of failure is at its highest.
***
However, the Aquino administration got off to a rocky start by angering China over their botched handling of the Luneta hostage massacre. Then they proceeded to throw fuel on the fire by bringing the question of maritime sovereignty to international arbitration.
It was a process that the Chinese did not acknowledge from the very start, thereby taking the wind out of an arbitration proceeding that, by definition, ought to be voluntary among all parties.
Neither did the eventual ruling directly address the sovereignty issue. It only established the nature and boundaries of various classes of rights to be enjoyed by the different claimants. Nonetheless, this was, perhaps inadvertently, a Solomonic decision that opened the way for China and the Philippines to bilaterally agree to cooperate wherever possible while setting aside unsettled issues.
Unfortunately, what looked fine in theory has turned out different in practice. In the real world, China vastly dominates us on firepower. And so we’ve had no choice but to grin and bear it while the Chinese go about building their new islands and scolding us from time to time for behaving impertinently.
Our President is a proud man, no less than his predecessors. So it must be particularly galling for him to have to go along in order to get along. But even if he’s not above playing to audiences with his occasional faux braggadocio, he remains a realistic man who will not put military or civilian lives needlessly in harm’s way.
In a tacit quid pro quo, Duterte early on described China as a preferred partner for bringing in investment, trade, and credit. By shifting the focus of the relationship to the economic and the cultural (“people to people”), he has deftly avoided confrontation and opened the door for huge economic gains.
It’s a great strategy that keeps Filipinos out of harm’s way while we buy more time to improve our military defenses and put up a plausible fight someday. The strategy makes a lot of sense….and yet. And yet.
***
Former President Ramos has already started chafing at the bit and recommended going back to the international arbitrator after the latest incidents. Peacemaker though he may be, his West Pointer’s heart still beats strong.
And we should remember that the Chinese need the economic partnership with us at least as much as we need them. By investing heavily in countries like ours, they are able to drain away excess liquidity in their financial system, push down their currency to stay export-competitive, realize higher asset yields abroad, and increase their presence on the global stage through regional institutions like the AIIB.
In addition, there are many other countries out there who would love to invest in us or trade with us, with whom our relationship is more congenial. We can find them in North Asia, in the developed part of Asean, in the Middle East with all our OFWs, in central and eastern Europe.
Sure, they may charge us more for their deals. But whatever we may leave on the table with them by comparison with the aggressive terms usually offered by the Chinese, we ought to be happy to absorb it as a price worth paying to maintain our negotiating leverage and our national pride.
Readers can write me at [email protected].
