Ahead of US summit, Philippine envoy’s South China Sea remarks on country’s inertia a ‘strategy’ to counter Beijing aggression

“We can’t continue to be like this. Some people have this wrong notion that we just sit back and nothing will happen to us. We may wake up one day, and we won’t have a country any more,” Romualdez warned.

“What President Marcos is doing is simply saying, ‘enough is enough’. We are going to talk to you seriously. We are not here because we want to have a conflict. We are not here because we are looking for a fight. We are the ones that are being aggressively bullied,” he added.

Manila is locked in an escalating territorial dispute with Beijing in the South China Sea.

Don McLain Gill, a geopolitical analyst and lecturer at the Department of International Studies of De La Salle University, told This Week in Asia that Marcos Jnr had from the beginning highlighted his administration had to be friends with China, but Beijing was “saying one thing and doing [another]”.

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Chinese floating barrier blocks entrance to Philippine ships at South China Sea flashpoint

Romualdez had said the government was finding ways to de-escalate the maritime tension, emphasising his side had already started a conversation with the Chinese government, but if the situation in the waterway worsened, he warned that the United States would not back down on its word to support the Philippines.

“I am very comfortable with that because every single day that I am in Washington and every meeting that I have, it is a serious concern. I have never seen this kind of attention being given to this type of situation that we are in right now,” he added.

The Chinese embassy in Manila made no comments on the latest development.

Asked if the Marcos Jnr administration was serious in its foreign policies towards China or if its stance was only part of political strategy,