PH can’t afford to wage war against China – Duterte

The country cannot not afford to wage war with China over the South China Sea dispute because it is a "rich" country with "plenty of good quality weapons," President Duterte declared last Friday.

In his visit to Negros Occidental last Friday, the President admitted that going to war against China might only lead to the massacre of government troops.

"If we go to war against China, I would lose all my soldiers just as they are leaving for the war. It will be a massacre. We don’t have the capacity to fight them," he said in his remarks.

"Unlike China, our money is being spent for education and the teachers’ wages. They used to feed their people with rations, but what they did was they manufactured many weapons," he said.

He noted that China has "improved a lot" amid the construction boom that generated jobs for its nationals. "Now that they are rich country, they have plenty of good quality weapons... for many years, they were ordered by their president to keep on creating guns," he added.

The President, however, reaffirmed his revolve to protect the nation "from those who want to occupy our land." He acknowledged that China was now "at its farthest" in the disputed region.

"They are only up to that point. Nobody said before that we should place cannons and machine guns here. So China claimed it. Eh ‘di they are only up to there," he said.

The Philippines has a long-running dispute with China's sweeping claims in the South China Sea.

The country won an arbitration ruling nullifying Beijing's claims but Duterte opted to pursue bilateral dialogue with China to manage the territorial dispute for now. When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Manila late last year, he and Duterte agreed to stay committed to addressing disputes by peaceful means without resorting to the threat or use of force.

Some groups have criticized the Duterte government for not doing enough to protest China's increased military buildup in the disputed territory.