The South China Sea has been a focal point of global disputes throughout and the ruling by an worldwide court last week quashing Beijing’s claims on it has escalated things further.
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According to a report in Associated Press, the nationalists’ demands include boycotting KFC and they claimed that Washington encouraged Manila to fight back Beijings’s claims to the vast tracts of ocean.
Messages like “Take out your iPhone, f you don’t smash it, you aren’t Chinese”, photos of smashed Apple products and even videos of young people destroying their phones with hammers or whatever they could get their hands on started showing up online.
In January 2013, the Philippines filed a case in the PCA at The Hague, questioning Beijing’s “nine-dash” claims to practically the whole of South China Sea, including the West Philippine Sea.
An worldwide tribunal ruled that China’s claims to the islands in the disputed areas have no legal basis, however, China is no way near in recognizing the ruling.
Internet users from China criticised Ms Kinoshita for “deliberately” eating bananas that originated from Philippines.
“This is not the right way to express patriotism”, the state-run Xinhua News Agency said Wednesday.
The US said on Wednesday (July 20) that its military forces will continue operation in the South China Sea as per the worldwide law, Reuters reported. This shows that China’s exports to the Philippines were five times more than its imports from our country, or every $1 of Philippine export to China was matched with $5-import from China.
Zhang Yunlong, general manager of Bina Technology, said that their ban on iPhones was an act of “patriotism”.
The protests began last weekend in Hebei, before spreading to large provincial capitals in the south such as Changsha and Hangzhou, Sohu said.
“If the Chinese can compel or coerce the Philippines or Vietnam to agree to the Chinese position through military force, as China tried to do in the Scarborough Shoals in 2012, then that can create a credibility crisis up the island chain”, he said. He said it also told protesters to boycott Japanese and Korean goods.
China rejected the verdict as “waste paper” and asserted its right to establish an Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) controlling flights over the sea.
Hong Kong political commentator Willy Lam said there is little immediate threat from heightened military tensions in the region, in spite of recent PLA military exercises around the Paracel Islands ahead of the court ruling.
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Wu Shengli, commander of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, met with Richardson, the USA chief of naval operations, during a planned five-day visit to China.
