I RECENTLY posted on Facebook a quote from Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) founding chairman Jose Ma. Sison criticizing the Duterte administration for availing itself of the loans offered by China, which he said collects interest rates very much higher than those offered by Japan. A former activist now based in the United States said criticism of China could play into the hand of the West.
I actually understand my friend’s sentiment, after all, we spent much of our younger years standing up to US imperialism. We saw the Philippines as a neocolony of US imperialism and exploited and oppressed by western multinational companies. We saw China not as an imperialist power but as a country that just liberated itself from imperialist yoke, or one the Philippines should model itself to.
But China’s imperialist designs have gotten obvious through the years. It’s not only about its insistence on its nine-dash line in the South China Sea that stakes a claim to territories there, including those that are ours, according to a ruling by the United Nation’s Arbitral Tribunal. It’s more than just its construction of islands there and the installations of missiles in those islands.
It’s also about the debt trap that China ensnares poor countries in. That, sadly, include the Philippines. That debt trap diplomacy has allowed China to slowly but surely reconfigure the global balance of power. Recently, some Australians are worrying about China’s creeping influence, luring “penniless nations” to go into a borrowing splurge they could not pay, and placing them at the mercy of the lender.
The recently posted article “Does China’s new South Pacific mega-wharf pose a risk to Australia?” written by “60 Minutes” digital producer Lydia Bilton (www.9news.com.au) illustrates this. The mega wharf, funded by a loan from China, is being built in Vanuatu, which is only about 1,500 nautical miles from Sydney.
The worry is that if Vanuatu could not pay the loan for what was described as a “vast wharf” in the outpost of Luganville, the port could end up under Chinese control like what China did to Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port when that country failed to repay its debt. “There’s got to be more to (the Luganville wharf project),” said Australian security analyst Malcolm Davis. He noted that the wharf “is large enough to accommodate large Chinese naval service combatants, guided missile destroyers and cruisers.”
Davis also expounded on China’s debt trap diplomacy. “What the Chinese tend to do is that they put heavy investment into countries that simply don’t have the means to pay back the debt. If China can get a country so deep in debt that it can’t pay back that debt, then they will take something else in return...(like a) port.”
Vanuatu’s foreign minister Ralph Regenvanu insists, though, that the sole purpose of constructing the wharf is to boost his struggling nation’s economy. But he gave away the “subtler” (translation: more sinister) price nations caught in China’s debt trap diplomacy has to pay: voting support for China on critical issues in the United Nations.
Now you know why the Philippines has abandoned its Arbitral Tribunal victory on the South China Sea issue.