Playing the victim

THERE IT goes again. In his address at Nikkei’s 21st Conference on the Future of Asia in Japan, President Aquino compared China’s unilateral annexation of island territories in the West Philippine Sea to the actions of Nazi Germany in World War II. No sooner had the words left his mouth than China was letting loose another one of its typical verbal fusillades whenever its aggressive moves in the region is questioned.

“I’m shocked about such ridiculous and unreasonable comments and strongly oppose them,” said spokesperson Hua Chunying of the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Let’s backtrack to February 2014, when Mr. Aquino first used the China-Nazi Germany comparison in a widely quoted interview with the New York Times. “At what point do you say: ‘Enough is enough’?” he asked, referring to China’s annexation of a number of islands in the disputed sea and its attempts to bully other claimant-nations into accepting its hegemonic actions in the region as the new status quo. “Remember that the Sudetenland was given in an attempt to appease Hitler to prevent World War II,” he added.

China’s response? It was “shocked at and dissatisfied” with Mr. Aquino’s comment, and called his comparison “inconceivable and “unreasonable.”

Is it? Is the President treading on thin historical ground when he warns the world that unless the international community leans on China more heavily to stop its expansionist moves, the newly roused Asian giant will continue to gobble up more territory in the vital sea region? Is he wrong to see a historical similarity in the world’s weak response to China’s provocative actions so far and Britain and other world powers’ WWII capitulation to Hitler’s march across the German-speaking parts of Europe, which only emboldened the tyrant to make his grab for the rest of the continent, eventually plunging the entire world into war?

From that “inconceivable” and “unreasonable” statement in February 2014 to the latest “ridiculous and unreasonable” word from Malacañang, what has China done in the disputed area? Has it, as the United States, the United Nations and other international bodies have repeatedly called for, done its part to lower tensions by stopping all unilateral expansionist activities and participating in international arbitration to resolve the row?

On the contrary, it has only upped the ante by building an airstrip suitable for military activities in the Spratly Islands, according to the latest satellite data. It has fortified its hold on other disputed islands through massive reclamation and building projects, apparently to achieve a de facto, fait accompli hold on these territories even as it loudly protests other nations’ claims to them and rejects international negotiations to determine their ownership. It has attempted to drive away Philippine Navy vessels en route to Ayungin Shoal to resupply the contingent of Filipino soldiers stationed there aboard the deliberately marooned BRP Sierra Madre, the Philippines’ decrepit but defiant outpost on that island. It has grown so confident of its military muscle that its navy warned a US surveillance plane flying over its ersatz island-bases—under international law still considered international airspace—to scram with a haughty “This is the Chinese navy... You go!”

Who’s being ridiculous and unreasonable? Certainly not the Philippines, which has submitted to UN jurisdiction by filing a formal protest against the legality of China’s tenuous “nine-dash line”—which would gobble up nearly the entire West Philippine Sea right up to the edges of Palawan and Luzon—and basing its claim on international agreements delineating exclusive economic zones and territorial seas under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which China itself had ratified in 1996.

In its poker-faced stance to do as it damn well pleases against world opinion, and then turn around to sanctimoniously accuse its neighbors of provoking and raising tensions in the area, China is engaging in the most typical of bully behaviors: playing the role of the victim. Just last month, despite all evidence that its island-grabbing was in full swing, China again tried to turn the tables by saying that the Philippines should stop its “malicious hyping and provocation”!

President Aquino could have extended the comparison and said that China is similar to the Third Reich in another way: It apparently also subscribes to Hitler propagandist Joseph Goebbels’ cherished dictum, “A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth.”