"There is no question that China is bullying everybody else in the tension in the South China Sea. It does so because it can do so. It does so because no claimant nation, except perhaps Vietnam, has the courage to stand up to Beijing, no matter how feeble the attempt would turn out to be.
I am convinced that those nations that claim the Spratlys and its surrounding areas have lost a long time ago in their battle to control whatever territory they could. For the Philippines, it ceded control of the Spratlys when it mindlessly allowed the Chinese to influence its affairs by way of accepting the aid and loans that Beijing has dangled before it.
It is utterly naive of the Philippines to even think that all that money coming from Beijing does not have strings attached. Manila has been getting as much as $2 billion a year in the past three years from Beijing in the form of loans and aid, making the monies coming from such multilateral aid agencies as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, as this story points out, puny".........LINK
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