Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte said on Friday was “unsettling” to read his government’s intelligence reports that a lot of Chinese ships were in the Scarborough Shoal area.
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A Philippines air force plane flew over the rocky outcrop on Saturday and spotted more boats than usual in a flotilla China has maintained since seizing the shoal after a tense standoff in 2012, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said.
In March, Obama had specifically warned Xi at a meeting in Washington in March not to start building an island at Scarborough Shoal.
China is mulling whether to deepen its economic bonds with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) at the group’s summit in Laos on Tuesday to mend rifts caused by the South China Sea disputes, analysts said.
Australia needs to upgrade its missile defences to protect against the increased possibility of strikes as China continues to modernise its military, former national security adviser Andrew Shearer said.
Ronald Baldia, 21, from Barangay Calapandayan here, said most of his fellow fishermen had found alternative fishing grounds in the West Philippine Sea since the Chinese coast guards intruded into and barred them in Scarborough.
“They suspect that’s going to be another construction somewhere”, he said. The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei have conflicting claims with Beijing on the resource-rich area through which US$5 trillion of trade passes annually. “(Perfecto) Yasay (Jr.) to summon the Chinese ambassador to the Philippines to confront her of the proofs of China’s continued activities in the area previously declared to be part of the country’s economic zone”, Piñol said.
A UN-backed tribunal ruled in July that China’s claims to nearly all of the strategic sea had no legal basis and its construction of artificial islands in disputed waters was illegal.
Photos of Chinese ships deployed near a key disputed reef in the South China Sea surfaced over the weekend as USA and Chinese leaders met at the Group of 20 nations summit and discussed maritime disputes.
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Duterte, who took office in June, had earlier vowed to mend ties with China after his predecessor Benigno Aquino angered Beijing by filing the arbitration case in 2013. “But you can be very sure of this, that when we face bilaterals, pag magkaharap na kami [referring to Beijing] there will be a time when I will say that this is the [UN] arbitral ruling and if you want to talk to me, this will be my platform, and we do not go out of the four corners of this document”. “You can not be slapped everyday with those kinds of words”, Duterte said.
