A conversation with Chinese friends about Aquino

China’s coast guard fleet, which is illegally occupying the Philippines’ Panatag Shoal (Scarborough Shoal) 550 miles from China, recently sprayed Filipino fishermen with wastewater and oil fired from a water cannon to drive them away from their traditional fishing grounds. This new controversy, which has ignited a firestorm of protests in the Philippines, reminds me of a conversation I had recently with two Chinese friends.
My friends had just arrived from a visit to Beijing and they described the Chinese reaction to Pres. Benigno S. Aquino’s New York Times February 4, 2014 interview where he compared “China’s turf claims to Nazi legacy.” Aquino warned “world leaders not to make the mistake of appeasing China as it seeks to cement control over contested waters and islands in the strategically vital South China Sea.” He called on “nations around the world to do more to support the Philippines in resisting China’s assertive claims to the seas near his country, drawing a comparison to the West’s failure to support Czechoslovakia against Hitler’s demands for Czech land in 1938.”
My friends described the furious Chinese reaction to Aquino’s comments not only from the Chinese press but also from the Chinese public. In editorials published and aired in all the Chinese media, the Xinhua news agency declared that Aquino’s “latest reported attack against China, in which he senselessly compared his northern neighbor to the Nazi Germany, exposed his true colors as an amateurish politician who was ignorant both of history and reality.”
That’s the difference between China and the Philippines, I told my friends. In China, every TV, radio and online news report has to toe the official government line that “Aquino is an ignorant fool who does not know anything about history.” No Chinese reporter or commentator would dare disagree with the Chinese government’s view of Aquino.
But in the Philippines, I told them, China’s supporters like columnist Rigoberto Tiglao, the former spokesman of Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (“China’s favorite Philippine president” I told my friends), are free to denounce Aquino for his remarks. As viciously as they care to.
For example, in his Manila Times column on February 6, 2014, Tiglao wrote: “Aquino likened China’s claims over the Spratly Islands to Hitler’s demand in 1938 for Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland region to be turned over to Nazi Germany. Aquino’s analogy is something only an ignoramus would make… How many people live in the disputed Spratly Islands area which Aquino likens to Sudetenland?” 
I must be an ignoramus too because I don’t understand Tiglao’s point. Does he mean it’s okay for China to seize the Kalayaan Island Group because only a few hundred Filipinos live there unlike the Sudetenland where, Tiglao reported, “22 percent of Czechoslovakia’s population, or 3.2 million people, who considered themselves ethnically Germans, lived”?
Even the Philippines’ most militant labor union, the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), through its secretary-general Roger Soluta, got in on the action and slammed Aquino for “comparing the leaders of China with Adolf Hitler.” KMU activists can compare Aquino to Hitler, and they have in their rallies, but Aquino shouldn’t compare China to Hitler.
I told my friends that the state-run Xinhua news agency and China’s supporters in the Philippines had distorted Pres. Aquino’s comments. According to the New York Times, Aquino said: “Like Czechoslovakia, the Philippines faces demands to surrender territory piecemeal to a much stronger foreign power and needs more robust foreign support for the rule of international law if it is to resist”. He did not compare “the leaders of China with Adolf Hitler”. He simply compared the appeasement of Hitler in 1938 over the Sudetenland issue with the appeasement of China now.
My friends looked at me and asked: “Don’t you see the US is just using the Philippines to contain China?”
I assured them I harbored no illusions about the self interest of the US in the conflict between the Philippines and China. But, unlike in the past when the Philippines was acting at the behest of its colonial ruler, here the Philippines is acting on behalf of its own self interest.
China wants to seize the Ayungin Reef, the gateway to the Recto Bank, which according to the US Energy Information Agency (EIA), contains 17 billion barrels of oil worth trillions of dollars along with 25.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. China desperately wants this oil to fuel the ever expanding needs of its ever-growing economy.
 Somehow our discussion then shifted to Pres. Richard Nixon and the role he played in opening China to the west in 1972. My friends shared that it was actually Chairman Mao Zedong who initiated China’s opening to the US because of its border conflict with the Soviet Union which flared up in violent clashes in 1969. China needed the US as leverage against its more powerful neighbor in the north.
“Bingo! There you go,” I said. The Philippines is simply taking a page from China’s playbook, I told them. It also needs the US as leverage against its more powerful neighbor in the north.
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