After taking office, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte changed his post-war national policy to alienate the United States and lean on the Chinese Communist Party. In order to win economic aid from Beijing, he even went so far as to shelve the South China Sea arbitration case that the former dynasty had won in international law. The total amount of money promised by the Chinese Communist Party over the past few years has reached $24 billion, but less than 5% of it has actually come through.
Singapore’s Channel NewsAsia (CNA) reported earlier that the core of the Duterte administration’s economic policy is the “Build, Build, Build” program, which includes more than 20,000 infrastructure projects such as airports, seaports and highways. They touted Chinese Communist Party funding as the best option for upgrading the country’s infrastructure, claiming that the Philippines would see a “golden age of infrastructure development.
He [Duterte] has done a lot for the CCP, but what has he gotten from it? To this day, the CCP has done very little in the way of major infrastructure. He believes that “they [the CCP] are playing Duterte.
The report noted that the Chinese government’s “build, build, build again” loans are expensive and carry high interest rates.
Leon Dulce, a Filipino environmentalist, warned that the Chinese Communist Party specializes in “Debt-Trap Diplomacy,” assisting poorer countries to build infrastructure and then demanding control when they can’t pay their debts. If we default on our loans, we run the risk of giving up these resources and handing them all over to the Chinese Communist Party,” he said.
Jay Batongbacal, director of the University of the Philippines’ Maritime and Law of the Sea Institute, believes the Philippines should consider other funding options. For example, a loan agreement with Japan or South Korea.
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