Marcos spreads fake news on China at political rally

PRESIDENT Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is probably the most undiplomatic and most tactless president any nation can have in conducting relations with a neighboring country. In his speech at the rally last week to launch the electoral campaign of what he designated as the senatorial candidates he is supporting, Marcos practically branded China as an enemy, claiming:

“Wala sa kanila ang mga pumapalakpak sa Tsina at natutuwa pa kapag tayo ay binobomba ng tubig, tinatamaan ang ating mga Coast Guard, hinaharang ang ating mga mangingisda, ninanakaw ang kanilang huli, at bukod pa roon ay inaagaw pa ang mga isla natin para maging bahagi ng kanilang bansa (None of my candidates are applauding China, unlike the opposition who are happy when Chinese vessels water-cannon our Coast Guard ships, block our fishermen and steal their catch, and most of all have grabbed our islands so as to make these part of their country).”

It is downright impolitic for a head of state to make accusations against another country in a domestic political event, more so against his country’s biggest trading partner, with which it has diplomatic relations and where Filipino businessmen own and operate factories and malls.

True, we have a dispute with China over ownership or control of certain areas in the South China Sea, but these should be dealt with through civilized diplomacy, not through accusations made in a political rally. It is despicable for Marcos to demonize China as a tool of domestic politics.

Worse, though, Marcos’ accusations against China are blatantly false, fake news that only stirs up racist animosity against the Chinese.

First, the fake news being spread by Marcos: The Chinese have grabbed our islands so as to make these part of their country. This is false if he is referring to Bajo de Masinloc, which, in the first place, is not an island but a shoal made up of a few rocks that are above water at high tide.

Abandoned

China didn’t grab it; the Aquino III regime abandoned it.

While China and the Philippines have been claiming the shoal, both nations have put the issue on the back burner, letting fishermen from Southeast Asia fish freely in the area. However, in April 2012, five months after the US turned over a Hamilton-class cutter to the Philippine Navy, renamed BRP Gregorio del Pilar, President Benigno Aquino III sent the Navy warship to Scarborough to assist the Philippine Coast Guard to help arrest several Chinese fishermen who allegedly were fishing endangered species of shellfish. Aquino III was like a kid given a brand-new pistol; he brandished it at the streetcorner where teenagers hung out.

That move, however, gave the Chinese the high moral ground, giving it the impetus to claim that Aquino had militarized the area, as that was the first time a Navy vessel from any county went to the shoal. After realizing his booboo, Aquino quickly got the vessel out of the area but ordered Philippine Coast Guard ships there to try to arrest the fishermen. The Chinese responded by deploying nearly a dozen China Coast Guard vessels as well as fishing vessels to the shoal’s lagoon.

What ensured was a stand-off, as vessels of both countries refused to leave the shoal, realizing that the developments had created a situation in which the act of leaving the shoal would mean abandoning its sovereignty claims.

Two months into the stand-off, US State Department official Kurt Campbell told our ambassador to the US, Jose Cuisia, that he had brokered an agreement with a high-ranking Chinese foreign affairs ministry official, Fu Ying, in a meeting at a hotel in Virginia, for a simultaneous withdrawal from the shoal by both Chinese and Filipino vessels. Cuisia informed Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario, who believed him and immediately ordered our two remaining Filipino vessels out of the shoal. The Chinese denied that it had agreed to Campbell’s plan, emphasizing that such a major decision could only have come from China’s highest levels of authority, with Fu pointing out that she had not even relayed the proposal to Beijing.

Aquino III

Aquino gave no orders through the end of his term for Philippine vessels to return to the shoal, while the Chinese continuously had its coast guard vessels inside the shoal. In November last year, China deposited documents at the United Nations and its UN Convention on the Law of the Sea detailing the geographical coordinates for its baselines for Scarborough. This is a formal declaration of sovereignty over an area analogous to a real estate’s property line designated by geographical coordinates. The Philippines has not submitted its baselines to the UN for Scarborough to this day.

Marcos Jr.’s claims of the Chinese “water-cannoning of Philippine Coast Guard ships” refers largely to the Chinese blocking our Coast Guard’s attempts to enter the shoal and its lagoon to reclaim the area, stupidly hoping that the Chinese would leave. It was, however, a propaganda operation to portray China as an aggressor: The Chinese naturally had to defend an area it claimed was theirs — which the Aquino III government had abandoned in 2012 — by blocking the Philippines’ vessels and even water-cannoning them.

While repeated again and again by the PCG Commo. Jay Tarriela, there hasn’t been any proof that Chinese vessels have blocked Filipino fishermen from approaching the shoal and stolen their catch.

Marcos says China had grabbed Philippine islands. What are these?

In his speech, Marcos claimed the Chinese had “grabbed our islands.” He can only be referring to the reefs that China occupied from 1988 to 1989, which were unoccupied at that time. He is spreading fake news, first, as none of these were islands but reefs.

China and Vietnam had, even before World War I, claimed these reefs and islands as part of their outlying archipelago (the Spratlys, which the Vietnamese called Quan dao Truong Sa, and the Chinese, Nansha Qundao), which Japan had grabbed during that war but formally surrendered after.

Marcos Sr. issued a presidential decree in 1978 annexing this archipelago, making it a municipality of Palawan province. However, Marcos was able to occupy in 1970 to 1971 only eight of these, mainly the biggest islands there — Pag-asa, Likas and Parola.

Despite claiming it decades before World War II, neither China nor Vietnam had occupied any feature in the Spratlys, with the former in political and economic chaos due to its Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the latter (South Vietnam) fighting for its survival, the communist North Vietnam.

Vietnam after its reunification as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, asserted its claims by occupying from 1988 to 1989 the remaining features in the Spratlys closest to its mainland not occupied by China and the Philippines. On the other hand, China, which was starting to recover both politically and militarily from the Cultural Revolution, stopped the Vietnamese blitz to occupy all of the Spratly features and occupied in 1988 the six reefs that had not been occupied by the two other countries.

Mischief Reef

The Chinese occupied another reef, Mischief Reef in 1994 in retaliation against President Ramos’ grant of a permit in May 1994 to local firm Alcorn Petroleum and US company Vaalco Energy to explore oil in the Reed Bank. The Chinese claimed that it needed this outpost to monitor if the Philippines would continue allowing US firms to explore in that area it considers part of its Zongsha island group.*

From 2012 to 2013, China undertook an unprecedented massive reclamation project that transformed these seven reefs into artificial islands. The Chinese would then build airstrips, ports, communication centers, and troop barracks on these.

It was China’s retaliation against the Philippines’ filing of an arbitration suit in 2012. Part of the suit was for the arbitral panel to rule that China’s occupied features were not islands and, therefore, not entitled to a territorial sea nor an exclusive economic zone.

China cleverly responded by turning the reefs into islands, even if artificial, a classic move by a country having a territorial dispute with another country, called in geopolitics “proving facts on the ground.”

When he claimed in the political rally that the Chinese “have grabbed our islands so as to make these part of their country,” Marcos Jr. demonstrated his penchant for blabbering things he doesn’t really know about. As the head of our state, he should be ashamed of himself.

*This little-known fact was revealed in a US Naval College 1998 master thesis by Lt. Michael Studeman, who retired in 2022, his last post being an admiral in charge of naval intelligence. All of the assertions in this column are based on documents and event participants, narrated in my 2022 book, “Debacle: The Aquino regime’s Scarborough fiasco and the South China Sea arbitration deception,” available at rigobertotiglao.com/shop, Fully Booked, amazon.com, and Lazada.com.

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Marcos spreads fake news on China at political rally
Source: Breaking News PH