Marcos: Philippines' China Stance Aligned With ASEAN — SkimNews
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- Marcos said the Philippines' stance on China—including publicizing maritime encounters and upholding the 2016 arbitral ruling—aligns with fellow ASEAN claimants like Vietnam and Malaysia, countering suggestions it made Manila an outlier in the region.
- Marcos defended his "transparent strategy" of publicizing Chinese vessel incidents, saying: "What is the aggression in that? We are just showing what is happening. It's not propaganda. It's fact."
- Marcos said he saw no contradiction between Foreign Secretary Ma. Theresa Lazaro's diplomatic approach and Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr's more forceful public stance—both pursuing the same objective of protecting Philippine territory under international law.
- Marcos rejected framing Pax Silica, a US-led AI and semiconductor supply-chain initiative also involving Singapore, as picking Washington's side in its tech rivalry with Beijing, declaring a "bipolar world" was "not an acceptable construct for the Philippines."
- Under Pax Silica, the Philippines and the US plan to develop a 4,000-acre industrial hub in New Clark City, north of Manila, for semiconductor production and advanced manufacturing.
- Marcos played down suggestions his 2022 administration fundamentally reset the US-Philippine alliance, saying ties "have always been that way" spanning defence, trade, diplomacy and people-to-people exchanges.
- Marcos held out the possibility of joint oil and gas exploration with China in the South China Sea, saying it would be "a happy day"—but only if negotiations stayed focused on commercial considerations rather than sovereignty.
Why it matters: Marcos is drawing a careful line: publicly standing with ASEAN on maritime law and US on tech supply chains while keeping joint energy deals with Beijing on the table. That triad matters because Manila's willingness to keep all three tracks open contradicts the binary framing Beijing and Washington often impose, and ASEAN unity on UNCLOS norms depends on the Philippines' posture holding.
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