The battle for territory is no longer just fought on land or sea.
According to China in a state broadcast over the weekend, its Coast Guard had implanted control on part of Sandy Cay in mid-April. Sandy Cay reef is near Pag-asa Island where the Philippines maintains a coast guard monitoring base.
Some accounts even show Chinese soldiers holding the Chinese flag on Sandy Cay.
But Philippine authorities belied China’s claim, with National Security Council spokesperson Jonathan Malaya saying there was no truth whatsoever to China’s claims of seizing the sandbanks of Sandy Cay.
China’s pronouncement, he said, was a made-up story because it was in the interest of the PRC to use the information space to intimidate and harass.
Just as our military is resisting the brazen advances of China in the West Philippine Sea, so must the rest of the country reject these narratives that China is peddling. Foremost, the West Philippine Sea is ours – even Google Maps has acknowledged it to be so. More importantly, this has been established by the ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2016. No amount of disinformation, water cannon, sideswiping, monster ships, and any other tactics can overwrite this fact.
The West Philippine Sea is not disputed territory. The dispute has long been settled. It is time we showed the Chinese that nobody is buying their tall tales about owning what rightfully belongs to ours.
With a resolute shift to external defense and with the support of various countries, the Philippines is modernizing our military.
But we should also beef up our capability, individually and as a nation, when it comes to discerning between truth and disinformation, especially those manufactured to weaken our defenses and to bully us into resignation as a bigger, mightier nation tries to claim what is ours. It is incumbent upon Filipinos to resist these attempts – because truth, not lies, is the real source of power.
