Ambassadors do not usually pick fights with a host country. The reason is simple: Your stay in a country is dependent on how good the relationship is between your country and your host. You are not in your home country, meaning that the people and the place surrounding you are not your people and your place. You are safe inside the embassy, but outside it is a different story. You definitely need your host’s protection.
China and the Philippines are currently engaged in a territorial dispute, but our envoys in China have not been sniping at their host. Our envoys are silent because talking about that dispute is above their pay grade. But some Chinese envoys do talk too much. They either lack training on diplomacy or are just arrogant.
China is a one party state, meaning that its government officials are also members of one party, the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP. The CCP follows the Marxist principle of democratic centralism. The state policy is set by the party’s central committee and every party member follows that policy once the central committee sets it. And since even Chinese journalists are party members, they also follow what the party central committee sets. I know that principle because, in my younger years, I was a member of the Communist Party of the Philippines, or CPP. The CPP is Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, just like the CCP.
The Chinese ambassador, when asked about his country’s territorial dispute with the Philippines, arrogantly claimed that if his country wanted to, it could easily defeat the Philippines and end the dispute, but that would require the use of violence. That was the same reasoning Rodrigo Duterte used when he was the Philippine president. China is a big country. We are no match to them. So we won’t provoke them.
That defeatist attitude is not what President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is following so the diehard Duterte supporters, or DDS, hate him. But the same defeatist attitude seems to be what Digong’s daughter Sara wants Filipinos to follow. Sara wants to run for president in 2028 and succeed Bongbong Marcos.
So why isn’t China using its military might to end its territorial dispute with the Philippines? Because the world does not operate that way anymore. Military might is now just one of the ways to be dominant in the world. Diplomacy is another way. Weak countries can unite to defeat the resolve of a militarily strong country. In the case of the Philippines, it has an “ironclad” defense treaty with the United States. China attacking the Philippines would be like China attacking the US.
China could not even attack that rusty Philippine ship manned by Filipino troops and moored inside one of the disputed territories in the West Philippine Sea because such an act would trigger our defense treaty with the US. So, yes. The Philippines is not, militarily, as strong as China. But its claim to the territories that China also claims remains. China can be arrogant, true, but that’s only what it can do for now. And our leaders know that.