Senior Chinese and Philippine diplomats yesterday met in Manila to review their relations amid thorny issues, including Beijing’s alarm over a Philippine decision to allow the US military to expand its presence to a northern region facing the Taiwan Strait and escalating spats in the South China Sea.
Chinese Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Sun Weidong (孫衛東) and Philippine Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs Theresa Lazaro were leading the talks aimed at assessing overall relations.
The discussions were to focus on the long-seething territorial spats in the disputed waterway, the US Department of Foreign Affairs in Manila said.
Photo: EPA
The meetings are the first under Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, who took office in June last year.
He met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in a state visit to Beijing in January, when both agreed to expand ties, pursue talks on potential joint oil and gas exploration, and manage territorial disputes amicably.
However, the territorial conflicts have persisted as a major irritant in relations early in the six-year term of Marcos, whose administration has filed at least 77 of more than 200 diplomatic protests by the Philippines against China’s increasingly assertive actions in the disputed waters since last year.
That included a Feb. 6 incident when a Chinese Coast Guard ship aimed a military-grade laser that briefly blinded some crew members of a Philippine patrol vessel off a disputed shoal.
Marcos summoned the Chinese ambassador to Manila to express concern over the incident, but Beijing said the Philippine vessel intruded into Chinese territorial waters and its coast guard used a harmless laser to monitor the vessel.
Early last month, the Marcos administration announced it would allow rotating batches of US forces to indefinitely station in four more Philippine military camps. Those are in addition to five local bases earlier designated under a 2014 defense pact between the treaty allies.
Marcos on Wednesday said the four new military sites would include areas in the northern Philippines. That location has infuriated Chinese officials, as it would provide US forces a staging ground close to southern China and Taiwan.
The US would also have access to military areas on the western Philippine island province of Palawan, Marcos said, adding that the US military presence under the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement was aimed at boosting coastal defense.
Palawan faces the South China Sea, which Beijing claims virtually in its entirety, but a UN-backed arbitration tribunal ruled in 2016 that historical claim had no legal basis under the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Seas.
China had dismissed the ruling, which Washington and other Western governments recognize, and continues to defy it.
Defense cooperation between countries “needs to be conducive to regional peace and stability, and not targeted at or harmful to the interests of any third party,” Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Wang Wenbin (汪文斌) told reporters in Beijing on Wednesday.
Countries in the region should “remain vigilant and avoid being coerced or used by the US,” Wang said, without naming the Philippines.
A statement issued by the Chinese embassy in Manila was more blunt and warned that the Philippines’ security cooperation with Washington “will drag the Philippines into the abyss of geopolitical strife and damage its economic development at the end of the day.”
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