By Adolfo Quizon Paglinawan

 

Part Two of Four: Foreign spies, anyone?

The Armed Forces of the Philippines and the National Bureau of Investigation have recently released a spat of cases accusing certain Chinese of spying activities.

At first glance, the arrests seemed to be significant because no less that AFP Chief Romeo Brawner, Secretary of Justice Jesus Crispin Remulla and National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) Chief Jaime Santiago presented the suspects to the media.

As days went by, however, the frivolity of the situation unfolded when certain equipment that were confiscated turned out to be available from Lazada and Shopee. The raw information gathered also could be sourced from Google and Waze, thus of public import and common knowledge.  No forcible entries were also committed by the alleged offenders.

Public doubt on the integrity of the apprehensions also grew when the NBI refused access to the detainees by next of kin, legal counsel and consular visit by their respective embassy in the Philippines.

But worst of all, the whole show deteriorated to a witch hunt, as the suspect they arrested was wrong person they thought they were surveilling all along. The Chinese national now detained by the National Bureau of Immigration for espionage is Deng Yuanqing, a graduate from Yangzhou Industrial Vocational and Technical College, where he majored in oil and petroleum refinery. 

His name in Chinese characters is 邓元清, meaning “clear.” Mr. Clear has been mistaken by the NBI for Professor Deng Yuanqing, whose Chinese name 邓元庆 means “celebration,” a distinguished academic affiliated with the Chinese Peoples’ Liberation Army University of Science and Technology.

The blunder by our Armed Forces of the Philippines, the Department of Justice and the National Bureau of Investigation is nothing short of a man-made catastrophe as it sends the credibility of three important agencies of the Philippine government to smithereens.

I mean, really?

Given the present condition of our nation, what level of seriousness can we really weigh on espionage?

Internally, is our national security under any threat at the level building up to when the New People Army was bruited to already be in the boundaries of Metro Manila just like in the 70’s; when the Moro National Liberation Front was about to separate Mindanao from the republic? Are there almost an uncontrollable slew of violent mass demonstrations banging at the doors of Malacanang? Is there even a city, a town or even a barangay where the Philippine National Police today is not capable of controlling?

Is not the United States the only source of the chaos permeating in our country? I will say it with a straight face: Since February 2, 2023, the only cause of destabilization begins with why our president is tolerating foreign intervention in this country. On that day, four more sites were added to the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement of 2014 to suit the US Air Force’s new doctrine called Agile Combat Employment (ACE), designed to embolden American presence in the Indo-Pacific, an essential element of President Barack Obama’s Asian Pivot policy.

But why single out China? The reason is deep in the weakness of the ACE doctrine, as pointed out by no less than the US Naval Institute, so the US is bidding time through propaganda. China is well in advance of Pentagon strategems with China’s introduction of two 6^th generation super jets and the Sichuan, China’s first Type 076 vessel, tailored-fit for the SCS, the largest combat ship in China’s navy and one of the world’s largest amphibious assault ships, all launched last December. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2024/july/problems-agile-combat-employment

Sovereignty and poverty

Due to this hangup, the US has held the Philippines as hostage for the past two years, with our independent foreign policy betrayed by the sitting president who in obeisance to the Americans has neglected what the Filipino people in numerous Pulse Asia surveys have already disclosed to be their most urgent national concern. President Marcos Jr. says his priority is protecting the sovereignty of the country primarily in the mythical West Philippine Seas. But only 5% of the population agrees with him, as over 70% says the priority is curbing inflation, or micro-economy.

According to a recent Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey, 63% of Filipinos identify themselves as “poor,” marking the highest percentage of self-rated poverty in the country in over 20 years. This means that a significant majority of Filipinos consider their household income to be below what is needed to meet basic needs. Marcos Jr. has failed to deliver us, post-pandemic.

Our national security now is predominantly measured by what the Americans say it is – the protection of the nine EDCA bases, and Marcos agrees because that is the only thing he sees that can insure his hold on power amid charges of wanton corruption surrounding him. Sadly, the only way to enforce this anomaly is through authoritarianism. As a result, Constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms and inherent rights of citizens have been trampled upon.

The classic example of this oppression is the use of some 3,000 police forces deployed in a provincial city just to arrest one individual. This never happened even in the dark days of martial law of the 1970s. Not even 10% of that was sent to Oplan Exodus to arrest Zulkifli Abdhir alias Marwan at Mamasapano in Maguindanao in 2015. In fact, a special action force of 73, with only 29 survived, 44 massacred.

But the worst curtailment has occurred against the economic rights of the people. Immediately following the four new additional bases was the repudiation by Marcos of the $23 billion development assistance pledged by Xi Jinping, a stimulus that could have allowed new money into our economy alleviating the people from the effects of worldwide inflation.

The American paranoia which had underlined Marcos foreign policy-making has stalled our bilateral consultative mechanisms with China. All ongoing infrastructure projects, especially those involving railways, were first announced for rebidding, but when no takers came to the plate, were just stopped. The Philippine Coast Guard has been used to provoke false flags in the South China Seas, even outside of our 12 nautical mile territorial seas. Tourists from China have been imposed a quota, as a result, arrivals has not even reached 10% of the volume achieved in the three-year period from 2017 to 2019 under President Duterte.

Because of this, the United States continues to be desperate winning the hearts and minds of the Filipino, as our people have grown accustomed to the ugly head of injustice having undergone 500 years of colonial abuse, some leading to numerous massacres, under Spaniards, Americans and their own kind. In stark contrast, our amity with the Chinese people extends over a millennium. This is why Chinese espionage is too hard sell, and Sinophobia is dead in the water. 

Besides, is there anything the Chinese want know about us that still has to be sourced from some clandestine human intelligence, that has not yet been deciphered by its 6^th generation military technology that is also now at the leading edge of the 4^th industrial revolution in economic terms? I supposed we are an open book to China, as there are 28 million individuals of direct Chinese descent legally residing in the Philippines, whether they are citizens or resident aliens.

I was the one who blew the whistle on April 20, 2024 regarding the deployment of the Typhon Missile System in the Philippines nine days earlier. The presence of this offensive weapon in Philippine territory is a blatant violation of the Philippine Constitution and our Treaty with ASEAN on neutrality and non-nuclear proliferation. Of course, this has diminished President Marcos’ credibility down the cellar; it has added to strained relations not only between Beijing and Manila but between US President Biden and Xi Jinping that it had to be hurriedly removed from its former position in Laoag City, a few days after President Donald Trump was sworn to office.

Does this make me a Chinese spy? My source? The US Army Pacific website on April 15, 2024. https://www.usarpac.army.mil/Our-Story/Our-News/Article-Display/Article/3740807/us-armys-mid-range-capability-makes-its-first-deployment-in-the-philippines-for/

Information war

There is something, however, the Americans have been consistent about, besides shallowness – sheer hubris, especially when they earn their living out of it. In an article I wrote for Asian Century last November 2024, I have exhaustively dealt on how the United States built out of its toolkit “Marble”, alleging that China had launched “Volt Typhoon” a ransomware cybercriminal group allegedly aimed at hacking US assets.

No less than Christopher Asher Wray, Federal Bureau of Investigation director, defended the narrative before the US Congress in pursuit of bigger funding, five months earlier. https://asiancenturyph.com/2024/11/07/whitemen-spark-randomware-to-fatten-budgets/

Wray asserted that “We’re up to something like 2,000 active cases across all 56 of our field offices focused on the PRC’s (People’s Republic of China’s) efforts to try to steal our information and our technology.” On two occasions last year, the first April 15 before Wray testimony and July 8, China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center (NCVERC) and 360 Digital Security Group, exposed its operation as stateless, not belonging to any country – yet another farcical narrative by the US operatives, yet another fabrication, yet another hype by the US government, to cast reputational cost against China.

Volt Typhoon obviously dovetails the so-called transparency initiative of the former US air force colonel Raymond Powell’s “Projects Myoushu” and “Operation Sealight” of the US Navy, disguised with an academic twang as undertakings of Stanford University Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation.

These gaslighting strategies have miserably failed, and has in fact brought the Philippines to lose credibility as it failed to bait China into a false flag. China’s consistency and professionalism in enforcing its effective control of the South China Sea outside of our 12 nautical miles territorial waters have successfully disproved any further Philippine claims of “bullying”.  And now without ascendancy, we need to seek permission of China traversing those waters, and risk being challenged if we show any hint in violation of the UNCLOS principle of “innocent passage”.

Despite President Marcos’ request for face-saving secrecy that he had agreed to a protocol that were previously accommodated by China to all presidents before him since President Estrada concerning the routine resupply of humanitarian needs by our troops aboard the BRP Sierra Madre, the Philippines called for a bilateral consultative mechanism last month on January 16, to renew whatever deal has been in effect.

 Our government has been determined however promoting its mythical “West Philippine Sea” narrative, going to the extent of codifying it under the “Maritime Zones and Archipelagic” acts, that are nothing but unilateral, and useless beyond 12 nautical miles.

Alice Go is a Filipino

This administration has also wasted a lot of legislative time and taxpayers money painting the small town mayor of Bamban, Tarlac, as a Chinese spy to divert attention from its incompetence and to cover-up the magnitude of syndicated wanton corruption in and outside of government, involving the Marcos-Araneta-Romualdez dynasties.

Celebrating the dubious self-confessions of a certain She Zhijian that Alice Guo is Guo Hua Ping, is again a case of mistaken identity.  As of January 15, the Philippine Statistics Authority testified before Senator William Gatchalian, that her records are still valid, despite Solicitor General Menardo Guevarra’s petition in the Regional Trial Court of Tarlac to have Guo’s birth certificate canceled. Gatchalian’s partner Risa Hontiveros took hook, line and sinker, the video of Al Jazeera, Qatari’s media network that is heavily invested in the US.

The Senate’s perfidy on this issue is suspect because no senator, not even noisy Risa Hontiveros, had asked for an explanation from Erwin Tulfo, a candidate in the 2025 elections, how he could be born twice, first in Leyte as Erwin Teshida Tulfo in 1963 and then two years after in Hawaii as Erich Sylvester Tulfo in 1965, for which he was issued a US passport in 1991, that the US embassy had cancelled last year after being fraudulently renewed twice in 2001 and 2011. 

The AFP, DOJ and the NBI are busy crafting further “Chinese spy” tall stories. One even tells about five “Chinese spies” posing as Taiwanese tourists putting a silly CCTV camera atop a coconut tree in a beach in Palawan. This has also been debunked after it was discovered that the suspects have been living in the Philippines for the past 10 years.

AFP, DOJ and NBI’s creative digital creators, obviously intended the yarn to vouchsafe the arrest of Deng Yuanqin, who was merely fulfilling a business contract to map certain destinations for a self-drive car business being setup in the country. I have researched over a dozen mobile number tracking applications, using Subscriber Identity Module or SIM, freely available in the internet. One of them, Family Locator, had 14 million subscribers to it – what can be more overt than that?

Has the AFP, DOJ and the NBI not heard that the Global Positioning System (GPS), that makes this possible, is a U.S.-owned utility that provides users with positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services. I hate to admit it but this simply indicates that our sleuthing is no better than Rowan Atkinson, a buffoon British character who has the unique talent of turning the most ordinary of situations into moments of excruciating embarrassment, otherwise known as Mr. Bean. #

   

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