By AFP and Argyll Cyrus B. Geducos
The government said yesterday it is in talks with a Chinese state firm for joint South China Sea energy resource exploration and extraction.
The proposed deal was described by President Rodrigo Duterte as akin to “co-ownership” of contested areas.
The two countries have long been embroiled in a bitter dispute over their competing claims to the region – with China claiming nearly the entire sea – but Duterte has in recent years softened his predecessors’ policy of opposing Beijing’s claims.
Duterte said an arrangement to turn two of the rival claimants virtual joint owners of the strategic and supposedly oil and gas-rich sea was preferable to the “massacre” of Filipino troops in a war with China.
“Now their (Beijing’s) offer is joint exploration, which is like co-ownership. It’s like the two of us would be the owners. I think that’s better than fighting,” he said during a visit to Marawi City.
Negotiations between the Philippines and China over South China Sea exploration were raised last month by Foreign Affairs Secretary Alan Peter S. Cayetano.
Presidential spokesman Harry Roque provided more detail yesterday, specifying that talks were under way between the Department of Energy and an unnamed Chinese state firm, and that extraction of energy resources was now on the table.
He did not specify which specific area of the sea was under discussion.
Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Vietnam also claim all or part of the sea. Proposed cooperation between Manila and Beijing has caused alarm among neighboring Southeast Asian countries in the past.
“We might enter into an agreement with a Chinese-owned corporation, not the Chinese state itself,” Roque said, adding the company he declined to name was state-owned.
“I know that they’re discussing, they’re moving forward and it’s likely to happen,” he added without giving a timetable or the exact terms of the proposed deal.
“This will now actually entail joint exploration and possible exploitation of natural resources.”
Duterte’s willingness to cooperate with China marks a turnaround from predecessor Benigno S. Aquino III’s stance accusing Beijing of encroaching, occupying, and building structures on reefs and rocks that Manila claims as part of its Exclusive Economic Zone.
Aquino won an international arbitration tribunal ruling in 2016 invalidating Beijing’s claims, but Duterte set aside the ruling while courting investments and trade from the giant neighbor and the world’s second-largest economy.
