TRULY a big "what if" would be asked if we so much as try to attribute the statement to China.
From the very start of the Ferdinand Marcos Jr. administration in which four more Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) sites were easily granted to America, China exercised all imaginable restraint in handling the situation in the South China Sea. It confined itself to enforcement of Chinese maritime laws in dealing with Philippine violations of the same, like laser-beaming and water-cannoning of Philippine Coast Guard resupply boats to BRP Sierra Madre in Ayungin Shoal. If China had been less circumspect in its assertion of sovereignty over areas covered by its nine-dash line, it would have already physically restrained the Philippines from entering Scarborough and Ayungin shoals back in the 1990s, when the US had not yet thought of its Asia-Pacific pivot which began only in 2008. From the 1900s to 2024 is a long period, more than four decades, for China to have stopped American expansionism early on, yet it didn't. Blame it on Chinese good manners and right conduct.
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