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22 July 2024

[Vantage Point] China’s silent invasion of the Philippines

SPEECHIFY

What if I tell you that China could invade the Philippines without firing a single shot? That it doesn’t even need to escalate the smoldering trouble in the West Philippine Sea? And the much talked about Mutual Defense Treaty would be rendered inutile because it precisely requires armed aggression to trigger intervention from the United States?

By this time, it is no longer a secret how the People’s Republic of China salivates over global dominance and that, unfortunately, the Chinese government finds the Philippines a strategic puzzle piece to achieve its ambition.

An article published recently by Italian quarterly Eurasia Magazine observes that China now practically owns a country, the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos, by putting it in debt to the tune of $5.25 billion, a debt that the latter can only hope to repay by signing away to the former its most important national assets: railways, airports and seaports, even roads and bridges.

A fate worse than that was awaiting the Philippines, but for the fact that then-president Rodrigo Duterte had run out of time. His six-year, non-renewable term had expired in 2022. He tried to revise the Constitution with the express purpose of removing the prohibition against re-election, but failed due to strong opposition from the Filipino people.

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