How reliable is China as an ally?

We totally agree with Associate Justice Antonio Carpio (“PH can take China war threat to UN—Carpio,” Front Page, 5/21/17), Randy David (“Aid with no strings attached?” Opinion, 5/21/17) and Solita Monsod (“Looking at the issue of foreign aid,” Opinion, 5/20/17). The views they shared were very instructive.

We rue the day we thought and believed that Alan Peter Cayetano, then a senator, carried a sensible head on his shoulders. Now as foreign secretary, he seems to have become a bloviating buffoon with nothing coming out of his mouth (and brain?) but diplomatic nonsense—all in defense of a manifestly indefensible president.

Against all logic and common decency, President Duterte keeps saying there is nothing we can do in the teeth of China’s bullying and military buildup right on our maritime claims. China has threatened “war” against anyone who stands in its way.

World opinion is the only weapon available to nations with little or no military might to speak of. But Carpio’s suggestion to go to the United Nations has fallen on deaf ears as the President keeps cursing and insulting most of the world leaders, saving all praises for the Chinese and Russian despots who are not bothered at all by his excesses simply because their own regimes are just as blood-stained as his.

And Mr. Duterte is boasting about his accomplishments in securing promises of “foreign aid” from China and Russia. His rejection of all “foreign aid” from the European Union is being justified by claims of “strings attached” and of being used to interfere with our domestic affairs.

David and Monsod asked the most elementary of rhetorical questions: Chinese and Russian “foreign aids” are purely altruistic? Hello? Anybody home at Cayetano’s Department of Foreign Affairs?

And how reliable is China as an ally? Remember the NBN-ZTE deal which reeked of too much “bukol” and corruption? The Chinese government was right in the thick of it all, along with our country’s best architects of kickbacks. Though scrapped for being too graft-ridden, that project would never have succeeded anyway due to cheap (i.e., substandard) infrastructure and equipment on account of the cost-cutting schemes necessitated to satisfy the “unmoderated” greed of the public officials involved.

Lest we forget, China is no stranger to “poor quality products.” Just take a quick look at all the cheap (i.e., substandard) goods and wares made in China being dumped on our markets since time immemorial. And the President wants all of us to pin our hopes on China’s integrity, sincerity and good will—never mind its current invasion of our territorial waters?

Pray tell, can Russia be any different, given its own self-aggrandizing, back-stabbing and double-talking regime?

ARNULFO MAGISTRADO,
[email protected]