The Philippines rolled back China on Sept. 25. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had set up a new floating barrier across Scarborough Shoal, a rich fishing ground for Philippine villagers.
Beijing has sought to establish a military base on the shoal for years and, in 2012, tricked the Philippines into leaving the area after a standoff, with the Obama administration’s unfortunate and perhaps unwitting assistance, according to my source. Since then, China’s Coast Guard has harassed Philippine fishermen there, even though it’s within the country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). [Full disclosure: The author visited Scarborough to support Philippine activists who planted a flag there in 2016.]
A Philippines Coast Guard team arrived shortly after the latest barrier was imposed to cut the rope. They acted on orders from Philippine President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., son of the late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr., who ruled for two decades.
That the Philippines responded so rapidly to this latest attempt at enclosure was a long time coming and rekindles hope that small nations in Asia can stand up to the regime in Beijing.
While U.S. and Philippine ships frequently joust with China’s coast guard to reestablish freedom of navigation, the Scarborough barrier was a rare opportunity to roll back the PLA’s attempt to establish another physical marker of dominance. That the PLA hasn’t physically defended its new advance indicates that Beijing’s bullying can and should in the future be countered directly and with alacrity. Standing up to a weak bully makes the bully back down.
There’s no time like the present, as Beijing is strengthening itself. Activity by the PLA in the South China Sea is a distraction and training ground for a more important and militarily defensible taking: Taiwan. The nearest Philippine island is just 100 miles from that embattled island democracy.
The U.S. military is finally reestablishing a military presence in the Philippines because of the support of Mr. Marcos. We used to have extensive and permanent military bases there, which got evicted because of lack of U.S. support, China’s influence, and a Philippine Senate vote in 1991 that was won by a single senator.
“In 1990, President George H.W. Bush simply wanted out of the Philippine Bases with not a care to the effect,” author Richard Fisher wrote in an email to The Epoch Times. “But the record now shows that China was actively helping our exit, actively creating the strategic vacuum that it has since exploited, which has severely damaged an alliance based on such shared sacrifice [in World War II].”
“He told me the Beijing government had used Philippines organized crime, specifically ethnic Chinese crime networks, to mobilize vast amounts of money to make sure the Senate vote went against the bases,” he said.
Mr. Sheridan got confirmation of the story as “generally true” from Richard Armitage, who negotiated the Philippines Military Bases Agreement.
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) island grabs and artificial island building gradually worsened after the U.S. Navy failed to defend South Vietnam’s Paracel Islands in 1974, shortly after former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s ill-fated bargaining with the communist country. He’s now a paid consultant who does extensive business in Beijing.
Two years after the People Power Revolution of 1986 removed the Philippine president’s father from power, the CCP’s navy killed dozens of Vietnamese soldiers on a submerged island within the Philippine EEZ and later built a military base there. In 1996, the CCP took another submerged island called Mischief Reef from the Philippines and, in the 2010s, built numerous artificial islands and military bases with large airstrips and naval facilities capable of docking aircraft carriers and submarines.
The threat of the Chinese regime’s violence against neighbors in the South China Sea continues today.
“What we will do is to continue defending the Philippines, the maritime territory of the Philippines, the rights of our fishermen to catch fish in areas where they [have been] doing it for hundreds of years already,” he said.
But Bongbong was being modest. He could have done what others did before: nothing. The cutting of that single cord was a potentially momentous blow in favor of liberty. It could be the Philippine equivalent to “the shot heard round the world” and the opening of a broader vista of future U.S.–Philippine relations to help defend Asia from the CCP.
