Three Chinese coast guard vessels were being monitored in the waters off remote islands in the northern Philippines near Taiwan, maritime officials in Manila said on Friday.
The vessels were first spotted on Thursday, a day after a YouTube video appeared in which Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr said there was no way Manila could stay out of conflict if China invaded Taiwan.
The three Chinese vessels were spotted near Batanes province, a remote group of sparsely populated islets north of the Philippines’ largest island, Luzon.
Photo courtesy of the Philippine Coast Guard
An aircraft was deployed on Friday to monitor the “irregular movements” of the three Chinese ships near the Batanes islands, the Philippine Coast Guard said in a statement.
China Coast Guard ship 4304 was located about 140km west of Sabtang town, but bad weather prevented authorities from getting close to the other two vessels, it said.
Marcos said in an interview with Indian news agency Firstpost that, in the event of a confrontation between China and the US over Taiwan, “there is no way that the Philippines can stay out of it, simply because of our physical geographic location.”
The Philippine leader said that is because of his country’s geographic closeness to Taiwan, as well as the presence of Philippine citizens in Taiwan.
“If there is an all-out war, then we will be drawn into it,” he said in the interview, which was uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday.
Many Philippine citizens living in Taiwan would need to be rescued and repatriated, he added.
China has lodged a protest with the Philippines over Marcos’ remarks.
The Philippines “has kept making wrong and provocative remarks and actions, kept fudging and hollowing out the one China principle, and kept harming the China-Philippines relations,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Friday said in a statement.
The tension over Marcos’ comments about Taiwan adds to the lingering territorial dispute between Beijing and Manila over the South China Sea.
Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs meanwhile said it “highly commends and respects President Marcos for once again voicing his strong concern for regional peace and his emphasis on humanitarian values.”
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
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