A Sovereign Republic or a Platform?
The Philippines in the Shadow of U.S.–China Rivalry
Or: "The Philippines, Cold War Hysteria,
and the Poverty of Borrowed Sovereignty"
It is not surprising that, amid the sharpening tensions between the United States and China, the Philippines has again found comfort in the vocabulary of a previous age. The Cold War has ended in chronology, but not in the Filipino political imagination. The Soviet Union has vanished. Mao’s China has long since been replaced by a China of industrial parks, container ports, corporate giants, investment banks, export surpluses, surveillance systems, party-supervised billionaires, and state-directed capital. Yet in Manila’s public speech, China is still made to appear as the old red specter: a communist menace marching across the map, not merely a rival claimant in the West Philippine Sea, not merely an expansionist maritime power, not merely a party-state capitalist empire, but the revived devil of the ideological catechism.
This is convenient. It simplifies what should be a difficult national question. It allows the Philippine elite to avoid the labor of thinking. If China is merely “communist,” then the solution appears easy: summon the “free world,” embrace the Stars and Stripes, wave the treaty, reopen the gates, call every access point a partnership, and present military dependency as patriotism. But if China is understood more accurately as a party-state capitalist power—authoritarian, expansionist, mercantile, technologically ambitious, and deeply integrated into global capitalism—then the problem becomes more complex. It is no longer a morality play between capitalism and communism. It becomes a question of sovereignty, capacity, industry, diplomacy, maritime power, and the Filipino state’s long failure to build the material foundations of independence.
China today is not the China of the Little Red Book. It is not the guerrilla romance once feared by landlords and generals. Since 1978, China’s reform and opening-up period has produced decades of market-led growth, export industrialization, private accumulation, and global integration. The World Bank notes that since reform began, China’s GDP growth averaged over 9 percent annually and nearly 800 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty (World Bank, 2022). Scholars increasingly describe China not as classical socialism, but as “party-state capitalism,” a political economy in which market competition and private capital operate under the commanding authority of the Chinese Communist Party (Pearson, Rithmire, & Tsai, 2022). The party remains Leninist. The economy, however, speaks the language of accumulation, export, technology, property, finance, logistics, and strategic capital.
This is precisely why the old Cold War description is inadequate. It is not that China has become harmless. On the contrary, it may be more formidable because it no longer advances under the old banners of world revolution. It advances through ships, reefs, ports, credit lines, coast guard patrols, supply chains, artificial islands, industrial subsidies, maritime gray-zone pressure, and the brute confidence of a continental power that has found wealth and discipline at the same time. The Philippines must oppose Chinese encroachment where Philippine rights are violated. It must insist on its maritime entitlements. It must defend its fishermen, its coast guard, its continental shelf, and its sovereign rights under international law. But this cannot be done intelligently if the country mistakes propaganda for strategy.
The 2016 South China Sea arbitral award gave the Philippines a legal weapon of great importance. The tribunal concluded that there was “no legal basis” for China to claim historic rights within the nine-dash line beyond what UNCLOS allows (Permanent Court of Arbitration, 2016). This was not an American gift. It was not a Japanese favor. It was a Philippine legal victory. It should have become the foundation of a sober, sustained, independent maritime policy: coast guard modernization, naval construction, fisheries protection, regional diplomacy, national industrial planning, and the education of citizens in the law of the sea. Instead, too often, it has been converted into a stage prop for alliance theater.
The tragedy is not that Manila invokes international law. It should. The tragedy is that Manila often invokes international law while behaving as if its enforcement must come from foreign guns. The Filipino is asked to believe that sovereignty is defended by inviting another power to secure the archipelago’s strategic geography. He is told that dependence is deterrence, that access sites are not bases, that interoperability is modernization, that foreign troops rotating through Philippine facilities are signs of maturity, and that a nation unable to build enough ships, factories, fuel reserves, steel capacity, and disciplined institutions can nevertheless be safe because a treaty exists.
But a treaty is not a substitute for state capacity. The 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty is important, but it is not magic. Article IV does not say that the United States automatically goes to war at Manila’s command. It says that each party would “act to meet the common dangers in accordance with its constitutional processes” (United States & Republic of the Philippines, 1951). That phrase matters. It means Congress, the President, calculations of interest, domestic politics, military readiness, and the changing mood of Washington. It means that alliance commitments are always filtered through the interests of the stronger party.
This is the sentence that many Filipino Atlanticists prefer not to read aloud. They prefer the emotional version of the treaty, not the legal one. They prefer the mythology of rescue, not the grammar of obligation. They prefer to imagine the United States as an eternal liberator, rather than as a great power that acts when its own interests are served. The old colonial schoolroom still speaks: America as freedom, America as democracy, America as benevolent protector. Renato Constantino warned long ago that education must become “a vital weapon” for political independence and cultural renewal (Constantino, 1970). Yet the old miseducation persists in foreign policy. The flag changed, but the reflex remained.
One sees this in the renewed celebration of the so-called “free world.” The phrase has returned, polished and modernized, under the language of a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” The United States’ Indo-Pacific Strategy speaks of a region that is “free and open, connected, prosperous, secure, and resilient” (White House, 2022). On paper, the words are pleasant. Who can oppose freedom? Who can oppose openness? But in the language of great powers, “free” often means free for their ships, their capital, their military architecture, their preferred rules, and their strategic corridors. “Open” often means open to access, open to positioning, open to logistics, open to surveillance, open to forward deployment.
For the Philippines, the phrase must therefore be interrogated. Free for whom? Open to what? Secure for whose supply chain? Resilient for whose war plan?
The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, or EDCA, shows the transformation of language. The United States and the Philippines announced four additional EDCA sites in 2023: Naval Base Camilo Osias and Lal-lo Airport in Cagayan, Camp Melchor Dela Cruz in Isabela, and Balabac Island in Palawan (U.S. Department of Defense, 2023). Official statements describe EDCA as supporting humanitarian assistance, disaster response, training, interoperability, and modernization. These phrases are not false, but they are incomplete. Cagayan faces Taiwan. Balabac faces the maritime approaches of the South China Sea. Palawan is not merely a province; it is a strategic platform. Northern Luzon is not merely a disaster-response zone; it is geography in the shadow of a Taiwan contingency.
The old bases have not returned in the old form. There is no need for the old form. Empire has learned better grammar. Where once there was a base with a fence and a neon city beside it, now there is access, rotation, interoperability, prepositioning, joint use, capability enhancement, and disaster response. The flag may remain Philippine. The land may remain Philippine. The constitutional language may remain intact. Yet the strategic function is unmistakable: the archipelago is being inserted more deeply into the U.S. Indo-Pacific military framework.
Japan’s role also deserves a sober eye. The Japan–Philippines Reciprocal Access Agreement, signed in 2024, establishes procedures for cooperative activities between Japanese and Philippine forces when one country’s forces visit the other (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 2024). Japan has every reason to worry about China. It has its own East China Sea disputes, its own Taiwan anxieties, its own energy vulnerabilities, its own constitutional debates, and its own alliance dependence on Washington. But Filipino policymakers should not confuse Japan’s strategic interest with Filipino salvation. Tokyo is not returning to Southeast Asia as a charity. It is returning as a state that has read the map and understood that the first island chain is no longer an abstraction.
Thus the Philippines now finds itself praised, courted, armed, visited, photographed, and congratulated. It is told that it is strategically important. It is told that it stands at the front line of democracy. It is told that the world admires its courage. But poor countries should beware the compliments of great powers. A frontier is rarely prosperous. A tripwire is rarely sovereign. A strategic hub is often a polite name for a place whose geography is more valuable than its people.
The defenders of this policy will ask: what is the alternative? Should the Philippines simply surrender to China? Should it abandon the West Philippine Sea? Should it trust Beijing? These questions are meant to end the discussion by reducing all choices to two: Washington or Beijing, the eagle or the dragon, the old patron or the new bully. But this is the poverty of dependent thinking. To reject Chinese expansion is not to embrace American militarism. To criticize U.S. strategic use of the Philippines is not to excuse Chinese coercion. The Filipino nationalist position is not pro-China. It is pro-Philippines.
The problem is that by clinging to the Cold War narrative, the idea of defending the country becomes less about defending sovereignty and more about consolidating interests. The rhetoric of anti-communism becomes useful to those who want foreign military access without calling it dependency, alignment without calling it subordination, and strategic obedience without calling it obedience. The red bogeyman becomes a convenient figure. Under its shadow, every question is silenced: Who benefits? Who decides? Who pays? Who becomes the target? Who receives the contracts? Who is photographed beside the visiting admiral? Who gets the illusion of importance while the country remains poor, exposed, and structurally weak?
Here, too, the Cold War narrative reveals its own poverty. Filipinos speak of China as if the matter were simple: there is China, there is Taiwan, and there is the United States standing nobly in between. But the matter is not simple. It is made simple only by those who prefer slogans to history.
For if one wishes to speak in the language of the old Cold War, then one must at least remember the old Cold War’s own confusion: there were, in fact, two Chinas claiming legitimacy. There was the People’s Republic of China in Beijing, born of the communist victory of 1949. There was also the Republic of China, which withdrew to Taiwan and continued to exist there—not as a ghost, not as a mere province with a flag, but as a government with institutions, elections, courts, armed forces, currency, passports, and a constitutional name. The Republic of China did not disappear simply because Filipino textbooks forgot it. It did not cease to exist simply because Manila transferred diplomatic recognition to Beijing. It did not vanish merely because popular speech now says “Taiwan” as if Taiwan were born outside the Chinese civil war.
This is the irony. Filipinos who accuse others of misunderstanding China often misunderstand the China question themselves. They speak of Taiwan as if it were naturally and permanently separate from China, while also accepting a Philippine One China Policy that officially recognizes the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal government of China. They condemn Beijing’s claim over Taiwan, yet do not ask what the Republic of China itself means. They say “Taiwan” when the legal and historical residue still says “Republic of China.” They say “China” when they mean only the People’s Republic. They say “One China” without asking the most dangerous question: whose China?
This is not an academic quibble. It goes to the heart of policy. In 1975, the Philippines recognized the Government of the People’s Republic of China as “the sole legal government of China,” and at the same time stated that it “fully understands and respects” Beijing’s position that there is but one China and that Taiwan is an integral part of Chinese territory (Government of the Republic of the Philippines & Government of the People’s Republic of China, 1975). That was not merely a diplomatic courtesy. It was a strategic repositioning. Manila accepted Beijing, removed official representations from Taiwan, and adjusted itself to the geopolitical reality that the United Nations and most of the world had already accepted.
Yet the older China did not die. The Republic of China remained in Taipei. Its constitution still speaks in the name of the Republic of China. Its president is still President of the Republic of China. Its state still functions, whatever the limits of recognition may be. The everyday world calls it Taiwan because that is its political reality; its formal name remains Republic of China because history did not close neatly in 1949. This contradiction is precisely why the Taiwan question cannot be reduced to a childish slogan of democracy versus communism.
Beijing says there is one China, and that Taiwan is part of it. Taipei, depending on who governs and which political tradition speaks, has moved between inherited Chinese legitimacy, Taiwanese identity, and the practical defense of its existing democratic state. Washington says it has a One China policy, but that policy is not identical to Beijing’s One China principle. Manila says it follows the One China Policy, but keeps unofficial economic and cultural relations with Taiwan through the Manila Economic and Cultural Office. Thus everyone says “One China,” but not everyone means the same China.
This is where Filipino discourse becomes embarrassingly shallow. It wants Taiwan to be treated as a democratic outpost against communist China, yet the same discourse often ignores that Taiwan’s state is the Republic of China—the very anti-communist China of the old Cold War. If the Filipino right wishes to revive Cold War language, then it should at least face its own contradiction. Which China is it defending? The China seated in Beijing, which Manila officially recognizes? The China in Taipei, whose formal name many Filipinos no longer even remember? Or the American version of the Taiwan question, where Taiwan becomes less a China and more an unsinkable strategic asset in the first island chain?
The ordinary Filipino is then pushed into a dangerous confusion. He is told that Taiwan is separate from China, yet his government does not recognize Taiwan as a sovereign state. He is told that Beijing is communist, yet Beijing trades, invests, lends, manufactures, exports, and accumulates like a ruthless capitalist power. He is told that Washington defends democracy, yet Washington itself maintains ambiguity because certainty might require war. He is told that the Philippines must prepare for a Taiwan contingency, yet the Filipino worker in Taipei, Taichung, Kaohsiung, and Hsinchu becomes a footnote in someone else’s strategic map.
This is why the question must be asked plainly: if both Beijing and Taipei are trapped in the long shadow of the China question, why must the Philippines behave as if its role is already assigned? Why must Northern Luzon become a waiting room for a war over Taiwan? Why must the Bashi Channel become the geography through which Filipino sovereignty is again militarized by other states? Why must the Filipino be educated to panic before he is educated to think?
None of this excuses Beijing. The People’s Republic has no right to impose its will by force, intimidation, blockade, missile threat, or coercion. No people should be absorbed by decree. No society should be handed over because an empire has a historical theory. But neither should the Philippines allow the Taiwan question to be narrated entirely by Washington. The danger is not only that China may act aggressively. The danger is also that the United States may define the crisis in such a way that Philippine territory, Philippine workers, Philippine ports, Philippine airfields, and Philippine lives are treated as natural accessories of American strategy.
Nor can the Filipino Cold Warrior explain Vietnam. For if China is to be treated as the eternal enemy because it is “communist,” then what shall be done with Vietnam? Shall Hanoi also be dismissed as an enemy of the Filipino people? Shall the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, led by the Communist Party of Vietnam, be placed in the same ideological basket as Beijing simply because both states carry red flags, party congresses, Marxist vocabulary, and socialist constitutions? If this is the logic, then the Philippines should not cooperate with Vietnam at all. It should not speak of common maritime interests. It should not praise Vietnam’s firmness in the South China Sea. It should not see in Vietnam a useful regional partner. It should simply shout “communist” and close the door.
But reality refuses such childishness. Vietnam is communist in party form, nationalist in instinct, market-oriented in economic practice, and fiercely sovereign in foreign policy. It does not fit neatly into the Filipino anti-communist imagination. It is not the China of Beijing, though it shares an ideological language with Beijing. It is not the old South Vietnam of Saigon, though some Filipinos may still imagine Vietnam through the vanished yellow flag of the Republic of Vietnam. It is not an American outpost, though it now cooperates with Washington. It is not a Chinese satellite, though it trades heavily with China. It is a state that learned, through suffering, invasion, poverty, siege, reform, and war, that ideology is not a substitute for independence.
This is what Filipino Cold War nostalgia cannot understand. The Saigon-based government is gone. The Republic of Vietnam fell in 1975. The reunified Socialist Republic of Vietnam was proclaimed in 1976. One may remember the old flag, one may sympathize with refugees, one may study the tragedy of South Vietnam, but no serious state policy can be built on pretending that Hanoi is illegitimate because Saigon once stood. That is exile politics, not foreign policy. It is memory without power. It is nostalgia elevated into strategy.
Vietnam, unlike the Philippines, has not allowed anti-communist sentiment to dictate its national interest. Indeed, Vietnam’s most dramatic modern lesson came not from surrendering to China, but from resisting it. In 1979, China invaded Vietnam in what Beijing called a punitive war. The Chinese forces withdrew after heavy fighting, and the war exposed the depth of Sino-Vietnamese hostility despite shared communist labels. Here was the great contradiction: one communist state attacked another communist state; one socialist neighbor punished another socialist neighbor; one revolutionary regime bled another revolutionary regime. The Cold War slogan collapsed at the border.
If communism alone determines friendship or enmity, then Vietnam and China should have been natural brothers. They were not. If anti-communism alone determines patriotism, then Vietnam should have been dismissed forever by Filipinos as hostile. It should not be. The real question was never ideology alone. The real question was power, territory, memory, sovereignty, geography, and national will.
This is why Vietnam can speak with China, trade with China, sign agreements with China, receive Chinese leaders, discuss railways, supply chains, artificial intelligence, green development, and border cooperation—and still remain wary of China. Hanoi can accept economic agreements without surrendering its maritime claims. It can allow diplomacy without forgetting history. It can talk of socialist friendship while preparing for strategic mistrust. It can sign documents in the morning and protest Chinese actions at sea in the afternoon. Such is the discipline of a state that knows how to separate ceremony from survival.
There lies the lesson Manila refuses to learn. The Philippines keeps reaching for an ideological grammar because it has failed to build a sovereign one. It calls China communist because “communist” is easier to say than “a party-state capitalist power with maritime ambitions, industrial capacity, military reach, and coercive gray-zone instruments.” It calls America the free world because “free world” is easier to say than “a treaty ally with its own constitutional processes, commercial interests, military priorities, and great-power calculations.” It calls Taiwan democratic because “democratic Taiwan” is easier to say than “the Republic of China on Taiwan, historically tied to the unfinished Chinese civil war, unofficially engaged by Manila under a One China Policy.” It forgets Vietnam because Vietnam ruins the sermon.
For Vietnam proves that a communist-led state can oppose China. Vietnam proves that national interest can override ideological kinship. Vietnam proves that one can trade with Beijing without kneeling to Beijing. Vietnam proves that one can cooperate with Washington without becoming Washington’s barracks. Vietnam proves that history can be remembered without being turned into colonial nostalgia. Vietnam proves that sovereignty is not a speech; it is a habit of statecraft.
The Filipino, however, too often remains trapped between two ghosts: the ghost of American liberation and the ghost of anti-communist panic. He sees the old flag of Saigon and imagines that Vietnam’s legitimacy ended with it. He sees the red flag of Hanoi and imagines that Vietnam must be the same as China. He sees the red flag of Beijing and imagines Mao still marching, even as Chinese capital buys, lends, builds, exports, speculates, and accumulates in the language of global capitalism. He sees the Stars and Stripes and still imagines democracy descending from an aircraft carrier.
So much for Cold War hysteria revived in the name of sovereignty. It cannot even explain the neighborhood.
A serious Filipino foreign policy would learn from Vietnam without romanticizing it. Vietnam is not a liberal model. It is not a democratic paradise. It is not a country whose political system Filipinos should copy. But it is a country whose geopolitical discipline deserves study. It knows that China can be both trading partner and threat. It knows that America can be both useful and dangerous. It knows that ideology may decorate diplomacy, but geography governs survival. It knows that a country must talk to many powers while belonging to none.
The regional data itself should caution Manila against hysteria. The State of Southeast Asia 2026 Survey Report found that, if ASEAN respondents were forced to choose between China and the United States, 52.0 percent selected China and 48.0 percent selected the United States; the Philippines, however, remained strongly aligned with Washington, with 76.8 percent preferring the United States in that forced-choice scenario (Lin et al., 2026). This is revealing. Much of Southeast Asia hedges. The Philippines sentimentalizes. Others calculate economic proximity, geographic reality, and strategic uncertainty. Filipinos, conditioned by history, still reach instinctively for America.
Even distrust of the United States in the region is changing. The same survey found that among respondents who distrust the United States, the largest share believed that U.S. economic and military power could be used to threaten their countries’ interests and sovereignty (Lin et al., 2026). This is not communist propaganda. It is regional memory speaking. Southeast Asia knows that great powers do not arrive innocent. It knows that military power, once welcomed, develops habits. It knows that promises of protection can become forms of discipline. It knows that one can be saved into subordination.
The Philippines seems determined to learn this lesson repeatedly and forget it repeatedly. It remembers Balangiga as tragedy but forgets it in diplomacy. It remembers Subic and Clark as sovereignty issues but returns to their logic by another route. It remembers the Senate vote of 1991 as a nationalist moment but treats it today as an inconvenience from a less “realistic” age. It remembers American colonial education as benevolent modernization and forgets that colonial benevolence always has a military budget.
The Cold War rhetoric is therefore useful because it suppresses memory. Once China is reduced to “Red China,” America becomes “the free world” by default. The moral account is settled before the policy begins. The Philippine public is then asked to accept the strategic conversion of the country as a patriotic duty. Northern Luzon becomes a shield. Palawan becomes a hinge. The seas become corridors. The republic becomes terrain.
Yet one must ask: what kind of independence survives if the national imagination cannot distinguish alliance from dependence? What kind of sovereignty exists if every crisis requires foreign reassurance? What kind of republic celebrates itself each June only to outsource its security by July?
The Philippine problem is not that it has allies. Small and middle powers often need partners. The problem is the absence of an autonomous national strategy beneath the partnership. Alliances can supplement strength; they cannot replace it. Diplomacy can widen options; it cannot compensate for industrial weakness. International law can clarify rights; it cannot patrol waters. Public outrage can dramatize violations; it cannot build ships. The flag can be raised over reefs in rhetoric, but without capacity, it is the coast guard crew and the fisherman who bear the insult.
A serious Philippine policy would begin by abandoning childish binaries. It would say plainly: China is an expansionist party-state capitalist power whose maritime claims threaten Philippine rights. It would also say: the United States is a treaty ally whose commitments are shaped by its own constitutional processes and strategic interests. It would say: Japan is a valuable partner, but not a redeemer. It would say: Taiwan is not merely a democratic island but the Republic of China on Taiwan, caught in the unresolved legacy of the Chinese civil war. It would say: Vietnam is communist but not therefore an enemy. It would say: ASEAN is weak, but regional diplomacy remains necessary. It would say: the 2016 award is law, not a talisman. It would say: the Filipino people must not be asked to choose between humiliation by Beijing and dependency on Washington.
Such a policy would require discipline. It would require long-term investment in shipbuilding, coastal radar, drones, maritime law enforcement, cyber defense, fuel storage, merchant marine capacity, fisheries protection, and domestic industry. It would require a real reserve system, civil defense, ports that serve national logistics, and railways that serve national integration rather than merely real estate speculation. It would require schools that teach geopolitics without colonial romance. It would require leaders who do not confuse a photo in Washington or Tokyo with a national strategy.
It would also require economic nationalism. The West Philippine Sea cannot be defended by press releases while the domestic economy remains import-dependent, deindustrialized, and oligarchic. Sovereignty is not only a flag at sea. It is steel, food, energy, ships, cables, satellites, engineers, disciplined institutions, and a population that knows why the country must stand on its own feet. A nation that cannot produce enough of what it needs will eventually be forced to accept the terms of those who can.
This is where the “free world” slogan becomes especially hollow. The Philippines is told that it belongs to the democratic camp. But democracy without economic sovereignty becomes a ceremony. Elections occur, speeches are delivered, flags are waved, and yet policy is constrained by creditors, patrons, military donors, import dependence, and elite families whose idea of nationalism ends at the port gate. The people are invited to cheer for freedom while the structure of dependency remains untouched.
The proper answer to China, then, is not hysteria. It is construction. The proper answer to coercion is capacity. The proper answer to the red bogeyman is not the whitewashing of another power’s agenda, but the recovery of Filipino seriousness. The country must oppose China where China violates Philippine rights; it must cooperate with China where cooperation serves Philippine interests; it must work with the United States, Japan, Australia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and others where such cooperation strengthens Philippine capacity; and it must refuse any arrangement that converts the archipelago into a convenient forward operating geography for wars Filipinos did not choose.
The old Cold War taught many Filipinos to think of sovereignty as alignment. The new century demands that sovereignty be understood as capability. In the old script, the Philippines stands with the “free world.” In a mature script, the Philippines stands first with itself.
This is not anti-Americanism. It is adulthood. This is not pro-China sentiment. It is memory. This is not neutrality in the face of aggression. It is the insistence that resistance to one power must not become submission to another.
For too long, the Filipino elite has mistaken proximity to great powers for greatness. It has mistaken access for respect, aid for friendship, and strategic usefulness for national strength. Now, as U.S.–China rivalry hardens and the Philippines is once again praised for its location, the old question returns with a sharper edge: will the republic be a nation, or will it be a platform?
The answer cannot be supplied by Washington. It cannot be supplied by Tokyo. It certainly cannot be supplied by Beijing. It must be supplied by Filipinos willing to think beyond the hysteria of borrowed wars and the nostalgia of borrowed flags. The Philippines need not kneel before China. But neither should it stand at attention every time America calls the formation.
A sovereign people does not merely choose a protector. It builds a state.
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References
Constantino, R. (1970). The mis-education of the Filipino. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 1(1), 20–36.
Government of the Republic of the Philippines & Government of the People’s Republic of China. (1975, June 9). Joint Communiqué of the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Government of the Republic of the Philippines.
Lin, J., Martinus, M., Fong, K., Pham Thi Phuong Thao, Aridati, I. Z., & Gauri, S. (2026). The State of Southeast Asia: 2026 survey report. ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan. (2024, July 8). Signing of the Japan–Philippines Reciprocal Access Agreement. Government of Japan.
Pearson, M. M., Rithmire, M., & Tsai, K. S. (2022). China’s party-state capitalism and international backlash: From interdependence to insecurity. International Security, 47(2), 135–176.
Permanent Court of Arbitration. (2016, July 12). The South China Sea Arbitration: The Republic of the Philippines v. The People’s Republic of China. Press release.
Socialist Republic of Viet Nam. (2013). Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam.
United States & Republic of the Philippines. (1951). Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States of America and the Republic of the Philippines.
U.S. Department of Defense. (2023, April 3). Philippines, U.S. announce locations of four new EDCA sites.
White House. (2022). Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States.
World Bank. (2022, April 1). Lifting 800 million people out of poverty: New report looks at lessons from China’s experience.