The US plan to contain China is unraveling fast. Today in Japan Duterte reiterated his plan to remove US troop from Philippine. I saw the joint declaration with Abe . Where they both said what they want.
His plan to realigned Philippine foreign policy has been in making for a long time.But China is much closer to Philippine than Japan both geographically and figuratively."You can choose your friend but you cannot choose your neighbor". And one of the delegate that accompanied his visit said. We always have a close relationship with China and for many of us a connection as well. Apparently she is a Tsinoy
From Quartz
Long before he was elected president, Rodrigo Duterte let Beijing know the South China Sea was theirs
Right in step, all along. (Reuters/Thomas Peter)
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Written by
October 25, 2016
Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte has made frequent appearances in the international headlines in the past few months. Since coming to power in late June, the former Davao City has mayor has come across as wildly unpredictable at times, with his
, emotional outbursts, and his seemingly sudden
.
The latter has certainly been newsworthy, but it hasn’t been surprising—at least to anyone who happened to watch a news segment by CCTV News, China’s state broadcaster, posted online in May.
“The guy is saying exactly what he’s saying now,” said Richard Javad Heydarian, a political scientist at De La Salle University in Manila. “It’s not like he was hiding anything. It’s just that people in the Philippines were not paying attention.”
In the video Duterte (coming in at the 1:33 mark) questions the usefulness of a case then winding its way through an international tribunal, in which Manila challenged China’s maritime aggression against the Philippines. He notes that any decision the tribunal reaches would be unenforceable by the United Nations.
“If we cannot enforce, and if the United Nations cannot enforce its judgment, then what the heck?” he says in the video. “What are we supposed to do? Just sit there and wait for somebody to take our cudgels and go to war or demand obedience from China? For what?”
The CCTV segment narrator adds (at the 1:55 mark), “And if it were up to him, he says he would not count on the Americans coming to the Philippines’s rescue, and would have even considered dropping an arbitration case the Aquino administration filed against China.”
The timing of this is important. Heydarian, who also appeared in the segment, said he was interviewed for it in early May. The CCTV reporter told himDuterte’s interview was conducted earlier, in March or February. Duterte, described in the segment as the frontrunner, won the election in late May, taking office in late June. The tribunal issued its ruling in mid-July. So Duterte had made up his mind about the case, whatever the outcome, well before the ruling was issued or he won the election—and Beijing knew it all along.
The
by the Philippines in 2013, under the administration of then-president Benigno Aquino III, and in response to aggressive tactics by China in the South China Sea. Handling the case was the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague, ruling under the
(UNCLOS).
In 2012 China
, a strategically located reef near the Philippine coast, and started
from operating there, even though they’d relied on the area’s rich fishing grounds for generations. It also prevented Philippine attempts to explore for oil and and natural gas within its own exclusive economic zone (EEZ), despite the country’s sole right to natural resources there, per UNCLOS.
China insists that a “
” it has drawn, encompassing most of the sea, defines its territory, even if it overlaps with another nation’s EEZ, as it does
of the Philippines’ zone. China is insisting on “joint development” of the resources—claiming, in effect, a cut of the profits from the Philippines’ assets.
A contested sea.
The tribunal
that China’s actions were illegal under UNCLOS, and it invalidated the nine-dash line. The Philippines erupted in celebration, with #chexit (“China exit”)
on social media and the international community calling upon Beijing to abide by the ruling. With
passing through the sea annually, many nations have a vested interest in keeping it open, and are unsettled by China’s claim.
Beijing vowed to ignore the decision and pressured others to do the same. Still, it was easy to imagine at the time that Beijing was sweating bullets over the tribunal’s ruling, though as the CCTV segment suggests, it probably never was. Perhaps Manila wouldleverage the legal victory to rally international public opinion against China, and help other nations around the South China Sea, like Vietnam and Malaysia, bring their own legal fights against China’s maritime aggression.
Beijing insisted all along on bilateral negotiations only, with no outside third party involved—especially some international tribunal. That policy went for the Philippines as well as for any other claimant nation in the sea. But many in the Philippines were against this, noting the arrangement would give far too much power to China, which dwarfs the Philippines economically and militarily and could easily overpower it in any negotiations or conflict—as it could most Southeast Asian nations.
