Japanese Buddhists say they believe Tibetans should determine the successor to the Dalai Lama in accordance with their Buddhist belief in the principle of rebirth, and that the Chinese government should have no say in the controversial centuries-old selection method.
China, which annexed Tibet in 1951, rules the western autonomous region with an iron hand and says only Beijing can select the next spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, as stated in Chinese law.
But Tibetans believe the Dalai Lama chooses the body into which he is reincarnated, a process that has occurred 13 times since 1391, when the first Dalai Lama was born.
If China appoints his successor, it will further erode the religious and cultural identity of Tibetans, who have been subjected to crackdowns by Beijing during periods of unrest and whose spiritual sites and centers have been destroyed in recent years. Authorities view the unrest as acts of separatism that threaten China’s national security.
The 14th Dalai Lama, 87, whose original name was Lhamo Thondup, was found in Tibet’s Amdo province, and at the age of 2 was recognized as the reincarnation of the spiritual leader. He took on his full role as ruler of Tibet in November 1950, but a month later fled to India from Chinese troops who had entered the region in 1949.
The current Dalai Lama, who resides in exile in Dharamsala, India, has become an influential global figure because of his espousal of Buddhism and advocacy of rights for Tibetans.
The Japan Buddhist Conference for World Federation, an umbrella organization of a number of sects of Japanese Buddhism, which has millions of followers in Japan and other countries, has condemned China for interfering in the selection of Tibetan lamas and for claiming authority to appoint the reincarnation of the 14th Dalai Lama.
“We, the Japanese Buddhist[s], believe that the Tibetans should decide the succession of the Dalai Lama based on Tibetan Buddhist culture and history,” says a statement the group issued. “The national policy of the People’s Republic of China is communism, and communism is based on the principle of non-religion. Therefore, it is a contradiction to allow people who don’t believe in religion to decide who the country’s religious leader will be.”
The Central Tibet Administration, the formal name of the Tibetan government-in-exile, issued news of the statement on Tuesday when representatives from the organization visited the Office of Tibet in Japan.
“It is of utmost importance for the Japan Buddhist Federation to highlight the issue of succession of His Holiness the Dalai Lama as Tibet’s rich culture and religion is on the threshold of destruction under China’s occupation of the land,” said Eihiro Mizutani, secretary-general of the umbrella organization.
“China continues to hold its unlawful right to interfere in the selection of the next Dalai Lama; therefore, we hope and believe that the government of Japan will also be critical of the Chinese government’s policies towards Tibetan Buddhism and the Dalai Lama,” he said. “The issue of the successor of the Dalai Lama is very important to world peace.”
Dr. Arya Tsewang Gyalpo, representative of the Liaison Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama for Japan and East Asia, said the Chinese government has violated the basic human rights of Tibetans inside Tibet for decades.
“Now the Chinese government is aggressively declaring their interference in the succession process of the next Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhism, so a sharp message to China to back off from interfering in the succession process was a long time coming,” he told RFA.
The Dalai Lama insists he is in good health despite his advancing age. The Kashag, the cabinet of the Central Tibetan Administration under the guidance of the Dalai Lama, has said it believes he will live to the age of 113 as the spiritual leader has predicted. The Kashag also has said that the system of recognizing reincarnated spiritual beings is a religious practice unique to Tibetan Buddhism.
Chinese authorities intend to install a pro-Beijing puppet leader in place of the current Dalai Lama after he dies, giving it an opportunity to firm up its control of the region, according to a report issued in 2022 by the International Tibet Network, a global coalition of Tibet-related groups.
Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA Tibetan. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Edited by Malcolm Foster.
Nearly three years ago, former state TV host Kcriss Li was live streaming his arrest by state security police in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where he had gone to report as a citizen journalist on the emergence of the pandemic in 2020.
“I’m suddenly being chased down by the state security police. The car they’re driving isn’t a police car,” Li tells the camera after being hassled and obstructed for days by local officials and security guards as he traveled around Wuhan reporting on the epidemic, including the round-the-clock operation of crematoriums in the city.
“They’re chasing me, so I can’t live stream any more. I will just have to leave you with this clip,” Li says in a video shot in February 2022, not long after he tried to film the P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which some rumors claimed was the source of the COVID-19 virus.
“It’s hard to describe the feeling I had then, in Wuhan … sometimes I was reminded of a trip I made to North Korea in 2019, staying at the Yanggakdo Hotel, which is a place where foreign tourists stay in Pyongyang,” recalls Li, now a student in Rochester, New York. “We were able to move freely around the hotel, but under a state of total control, so that we felt we could be arrested at any time if we left the hotel.”
Former state TV host Kcriss Li live streams being chased by Chinese state security police in Wuhan in 2020. Credit: Screenshot from Kcriss Li video
“The fear, the threat of existing under the threat of totalitarianism was what I felt most keenly in Wuhan back then,” says Li in an exclusive interview with Radio Free Asia, speaking to the public for the first time since disappearing about two years ago.
But Li, whose story has been written up as a book by exiled writer Liao Yiwu, dismisses the fear of totalitarian power as “tragic,” especially for young people.
“We should be worrying about what kind of practical action we can take, not about the so-called power of those who make the rules,” he says while strolling around a lake near his dormitory.
“Rumors were flying around”
Li, whose Chinese name is Li Zehua, said he was drawn to Wuhan by the disconnect between the official narrative, which claimed the ruling Chinese Communist Party had the newly emerging pandemic under control, and the cries for help from healthcare workers and ordinary people on the ground.
“Frontline medical staff were crying out over the lack of protective equipment, saying patients were dying in large numbers both in and outside of hospitals,” he says. “Rumors were flying around about the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
At the start, cutting-edge private media like Caixin, Caijing, Freezing Point and Southern Weekend were publishing front-line reporting out of Wuhan. But President Xi Jinping gave a Feb. 3, 2022, speech calling for “the strengthening of public opinion management.”
Citizen journalists had been quick to step into the breach, despite the banning of a number of key blogging platforms including Tencent’s “Daija” in the wake of Xi’s speech.
But their days were numbered too, given the strength of Xi’s directive to control the public narrative.
Li managed to hang in there for a few more weeks until his dramatic, live-streamed chase by police on Feb. 26, while lawyer-turned-reporter Zhang Zhan was detained and taken back to Shanghai, where she is reportedly close to death in prison following months of on-off hunger-striking and forced feeding.
Li said his main concern in live streaming the police chase was self-protection.
“I knew that as long as I had a platform, that would give me some protection against a totalitarian power that was trying to hurt me or suffocate me,” he says, although he ended the broadcast with an impassioned plea to China’s young people to “stand up.”
Kcriss Li livestreamed being detained in Wuhan in 2020. Credit: Screenshot from Kcriss Li video
Now, he finds inspiration in November’s anti-lockdown protests across China, in which people held up blank sheets of paper and called on Xi to step down and call elections, or at least to put an end to three years of grueling lockdowns, mass surveillance and compulsory testing under his zero-COVID policy.
“The most ridiculous thing is that I didn’t do anything,” he says. “We didn’t do anything — so people can’t even hold up a blank sheet of paper now?”
“What are they afraid of?”
Living the Chinese dream
Li was detained by police in February 2020 and held for two months. He came to the United States in 2021 on a student visa to obtain a masters degree in computer science.
That wasn’t his first brush with authority.
A high-school drop-out from the eastern province of Jiangxi, he narrowly escaped being sent to juvenile detention, winding up instead in the shopping malls of Shenzhen as a computer salesman.
Life in that cosmopolitan trading city brought him into contact with the wider world, and he eventually caught up on his studies and got admitted to the Communication University of China as a trainee anchor.
Li eventually got hired as a host and presenter, and lived the Chinese dream for a while, traveling all over and filming for his food shows.
Now, his existence is reduced to a room in a university dorm in Rochester, New York, with a desk crowded with computer monitors displaying code, or papers on artificial intelligence.
“We have been oppressed by unfreedom for a long time in China,” Li told RFA. “This unfreedom, especially the unfreedom of information, has brought about many other unfreedoms.”
“I believe that the digital totalitarianism we see today was brought about by technology, and the problems brought about by technology may only be solved by technology itself,” he explains.
Cultural Revolution 2.0
He likens the last three years of the zero-COVID policy, with white-clad enforcers welding people into their apartments or shipping them off to quarantine camps in the middle of the night, to the political turmoil of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.
“After I left, things got even worse — the guys in white turned into White Guards,” he says. “Nothing has changed since the Cultural Revolution.”
Kcriss Li says China’s zero-COVID policy and its white-clad enforcers [shown] resembled the political turmoil of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. Credit: AFP file photo
Asked what he thinks China is, or could become, he pauses for a long while to collect his thoughts.
“I think China could become very diverse,” he says. “It’s precisely because of the lack of tolerance and diversity that any talk of China these days is dominated by leftist nationalism and pointless patriotism.”
“I discovered when I got to the United States that freedom … is the result of diversity, or diversity is the premise of freedom, which was a pretty profound feeling,” he says.
Later, asked who Kcriss Li is now, he struggles to find an answer.
“I’m a learner,” he eventually concludes with a laugh. “I’m a person who is constantly learning, and who keeps discovering that he is nothing.”
But he still plans to keep up the fight against totalitarian rule, which he views as a threat anywhere due to the global spread of technology.
“If a totalitarian regime is using (artificial intelligence) technology to control the people, the people want to fight back. But you don’t even have the chance to know the opponent,” he says. “I think it is necessary to tell how the most backward society abuses the most advanced technology to harm. It makes sense to take, inform, and explain the details to people. I think it is meaningful.”
“I will definitely keep fighting those things that I don’t like, like totalitarianism and tyranny, and fight them in my own way,” he says. “I think more people will join me in future … I’m not alone.”
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.
An ultranationalist Buddhist monk is leading the charge against Myanmar’s armed rebellion in Sagaing region for the military regime, establishing a network of pro-junta militias using a combination of violent coercion and fear-mongering.
While you won’t find him on any list of sanctions targeting the junta and its cronies for their repression of the country’s opposition, Warthawa is well known in Sagaing, where the military has faced some of the strongest resistance to its rule since its February 2021 coup.
The stern-looking 40-year-old monk with broad shoulders and wide-set eyes made a name for himself in Sagaing’s Kanbalu township, where he previously served as the abbot of a temple in the Muslim-majority village of Hmaw Taw – a tract where only 10% of the 500 households observe Myanmar’s national religion of Buddhism.
He later became a former leader, or “sayadaw,” of the country’s now-defunct Ma Ba Tha network of extremists, who residents of the region told Radio Free Asia stoked fears of an assault on Buddhism to gain followers.
“These monks made people delusional through the use of religion, but they are evil monks,” said a resident of neighboring Taze township, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.
Despite a ban of the Ma Ba Tha under Myanmar’s former National League for Democracy government, sources in Sagaing say that since August 2021, Warthawa has used the support of the military regime to push his nationalist agenda. He’s also helped form “Pyu Saw Htee” militias that assist the junta in its offensive against the region’s People’s Defense Force paramilitary groups and armed ethnic groups.
“After the military coup, [Warthawa] supported the military and the USDP,” the Taze resident said, referring to the pro-military Union Solidarity and Development Party.
He said that the monk and his followers have made the Pyu Saw Htee “much stronger,” prompting a recent rash of revenge killings of civilians with suspected links to the PDF in response to attacks on the military.
A PDF member in Kanbalu who also declined to be named told RFA that Warthawa “uses religion as his weapon” to turn the largely uneducated population of rural Sagaing against the armed resistance.
“He deludes the people, telling them that our country will become part of [neighboring] India [if they do not fight],” he said.
“He first built the Pyu Saw Htee forces. Then, when they became strong, even the NLD supporters dared not oppose them,” he said. “Some of them fled from their villages. Those who remain are recruited by force. One person must join their forces from each household and then these groups serve as the village defense.”
Expanding militia network
Sources say Warthawa has seen significant recruiting success in Kanbalu and Taze, as well as the township of Kyunhla – three areas where there is already strong support amongst villagers for the military and its political party, the USDP.
But reports indicate he is also working to expand the network throughout Sagaing, where at least 77 pro-junta militia groups are currently operating, according to a confidential report by the Northwest Military Command, leaked to social media in March 2022.
That same month, a video went viral on social media, purportedly showing members of the Ma Ba Tha on a “tour” of several pro-junta villages in Sagaing in support of forming Pyu Saw Htee units. The video appeared to show the monks helping to train people and delivering Buddhist sermons.
In one clip, Warthawa and two other Ma Ba Tha sayadaws Wira Raza and Pandita appear to be holding guns in their hands and telling residents that the PDF fighters were killing people and setting fire to villages.
Sources told RFA at the time that the footage was filmed on Feb. 27 at the Yadanar Kan Myint Htei Monastery during a Pyu Saw Htee training camp graduation ceremony in Taze township’s Kabe village. They confirmed that pro-junta monks had been “carrying guns” and “taking part in some of the fighting” in the region.
In this undated photo, the monk Warthawa attends a ceremony marking the delivery of military uniforms and equipment from the junta to a pro-junta Pyu Saw Htee militia. Credit: Citizen journalist
‘They call us bald-heads’
A more recent video, filmed at a monastery in western Kanbalu’s Kyun Lel village and viewed by RFA, showed members of a Pyu Saw Htee group telling residents that they must take up arms as part of an effort to “build peace” and defend the area from PDF fighters who are “insulting and destroying our country, our people, and our religion.”
“They kill their own people just because they hold different views. They call monks venerable when they need us, but when they don’t like us, they call us bald-heads,” says one monk-turned-militia member. “The PDF is a group of inhumane people with an animal mindset.”
“Therefore, you, my comrades, are taking up arms to defend your village, your region and your country. Isn’t that so?”
Local media outlet Myanmar Now reported that in October, Warthawa led a group of monks and gunmen to Kanbalu’s Ngar Toet village, where they ordered residents of the tract’s 250 households into the local monastery before one of the armed men fired his weapon into air and warned them they would be shot if they tried to leave.
Warthawa oversaw the selection of 150 men to attend a two-week training to prepare them for joining the Pyu Saw Htee, held at the same monastery. Nearly all who were chosen went to the training “by force,” the report said, quoting one resident whose name was among those called.
The resident fled the village with his family and went into hiding, but Myanmar Now said junta troops killed one person who attempted to run away – a former campaign organizer for the ousted NLD – and recaptured another, whose condition is currently unknown.
Warthawa has also used the military to build up his Pyu Saw Htee network by offering incentives to potential recruits. Myanmar Now said the junta provided Warthawa with nearly U.S.$2,000 in cash earmarked for disaster relief, local development, and monasteries to buy food for Pyu Saw Htee members in Kanbalu and Taze in October. Villagers familiar with the militias in the townships said members are provided with free uniforms and paid U.S.$80 monthly, while leaders receive a salary of U.S.$100.
Other residents told RFA that there are currently around 400 members of the Pyu Saw Htee in Taze, all of whom have been equipped with weapons issued to them by the junta’s Northwest Military Command based in Monywa, Sagaing’s largest city.
‘No major sins’
While Warthawa initially established the Pyu Saw Htee groups in western Kanbalu with the vow that they would only be used for “village protection,” sources told RFA that he had since ordered them to join military columns throughout the township.
In the nearly two years since the coup, Pyu Saw Htee groups fighting alongside the military in Taze have arrested or killed at least 77 civilians, burned down 83 villages, and forced more than 16,000 people to flee their homes, the residents said.
In November and December alone, the Pyu Saw Htee groups under Warthawa’s command killed 30 civilians and torched more than 1,100 houses in 21 villages in the three townships, they said.
In an interview with Myanmar in June, Warthawa defended his attacks on villages he claims to be aligned with the armed resistance movement, claiming that he was acting in the spirit of “angry benevolence.”
When asked about his role in the conflict, a former Ma Ba Tha monk named Pauk Ko Taw told RFA that Warthawa’s actions are “righteous” and that he “doesn’t support killing people.”
“He is just working as a monk for building peace in Sagaing’s Kanbalu township, that’s why he organized [the groups] for peace making,” he said. “We Buddhist monks need to organize people to stay peaceful and united and preach harmony to our ethnic groups. Warthawa has not committed any major sins … in Buddhism.”
‘Training killers’
But a Sagaing-based monk characterized Warthawa’s actions as “far from acceptable” for a member of the clergy.
Junta leader Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing “abuses his power, torturing and killing the people and burning their villages through military might,” said the monk, who requested anonymity.
“Since Warthawa is training such killers in the Pyu Saw Htee, what he is doing is not in accordance with the codes of Buddhist monks in any way.”
A monk in Mandalay agreed that Warthawa is abusing his role as a monk to further his own agenda. “We Buddhist monks are prohibited from even using harsh words against others or cursing, let alone killing or taking up arms,” the monk said.
“Monks are the object of veneration and worship for the people and we have to preserve morality as the model for the people. Taking up arms like he has is completely wrong and such monks can no longer be considered followers of Buddhism.”
The monk told RFA that it is the responsibility of the State Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee, which oversees the nation’s Buddhist clergy, to discipline such wrongdoings, but said that in this case, “they are turning a blind eye.”
Multiple attempts by RFA to contact Warthawa for this report went unanswered, as did inquiries made to the Yangon-based State Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee.
Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.
China has shut down the social media accounts of hundreds of people recently released from prison in a bid to deny an online platform to “illegal and unethical” people, the country’s audiovisual regulator said.
The move targets “illegal content” produced by people who “fail to correct their political stances” after completing a prison term, according to an opinion article published on the state-run China News Service.
By Jan. 21, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television’s online content arm had shut down 222 accounts and “cleaned up” thousands of items of content “depicting the prison experience [and] questioning the national judicial system,” the report said.
The aim of the clampdown is to block off former prisoners’ ability to “attract online traffic” or sell products online, it said, without specifying what kind of sentences such prisoners had served.
Online platforms Douyin, Kuaishou, Weibo, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu and Tencent had all cooperated in “investigation and reform” of their content, it said.
“All short videos released by the accounts of ex-prisoners were manually reviewed,” the report said, adding that 83 keywords relating to release from prison had been blocked, making it hard for live streamers to attract viewers of such content.
Trying to survive
Dissident Xu Wanping, who has served a total of 20 years in prison, said many recently released prisoners have been sharing their experiences, or simply selling stuff online as a way to make a living on their release.
“They’re trying to address their basic need to exist following their release from jail, and society should pay more attention to how they are supposed to do that,” Xu told RFA. “They should get more help and support.”
Stated-backed news site The Paper cited an industry regulator as saying that the authorities are trying to stop people from “flaunting their experiences of crime or prison” online, or transmitting insider information to the public.
“[Legally], a citizen has the right to freedom of expression,” says activist Gu Guoping, who has been detained by authorities in Shanghai after expressing public support for the anti-extradition movement in Hong Kong. Credit: Gu Guoping
Former university lecturer Gu Guoping, who has been repeatedly detained by the Shanghai police, said those who get out of prison shouldn’t be deprived of their rights.
“They are normal citizens and should therefore not be deprived of their right to speak,” Guo said. “[Legally], a citizen has the right to freedom of expression.”
Under surveillance
In practice, this is seldom the case for former political prisoners, who are held under surveillance at a location decided by the authorities, sometimes for years after their release, and frequently prevented from earning a living.
Prominent rights lawyer Tang Jitian was released after more than a year of police detention on Jan. 14, showing up in his birthplace in the northeastern province of Jilin, instead of his home in Beijing, a common practice for recently released political prisoners.
“I’ll try to keep doing what I can keep doing, but … I can’t say any more right now,” Tang told RFA, saying it was “inconvenient” to speak, a phrase often employed by people targeted for official surveillance.
Tang’s friend and fellow rights activist Xiang Li said Tang had been sent back to his parental hometown of Dunhua, Jilin, on the morning of Jan. 14 by the state security police.
“I personally believe that … the state security police drove him to someplace in Dunhua, and then asked his family to come pick him up,” he said.
Tang’s license to practice as a lawyer was revoked in 2010 after he campaigned for direct elections within the state-run Lawyers’ Association, and represented practitioners of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement.
His friend Zhao Zhongyuan said his “release” doesn’t mean he has his freedom back.
“No, that won’t happen, for sure,” Zhao said. “Tang Jitian was already being monitored before he lost his freedom … the authorities have been monitoring him for many years, and they won’t let up.”
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.
Poor North Korean children are collecting water from springs and selling it in the streets to make money for their families during the Lunar New Year holidays, sources in the country told Radio Free Asia.
RFA reported last week that food prices sharply increased in the runup to the holiday, which began on Sunday, causing many to worry that they would be unable to celebrate the holiday with a special dinner.
But apparently some of the country’s poorest children are desperately trying to make enough money to eat anything at all during the holiday, and a local superstition suggests that drinking natural spring water on Lunar New Year’s Day will bring good fortune.
“There are many children carrying spring water on their backs to sell in the city of Tokchon. Some of them are as young as 8 years old,” a resident of South Pyongan province, north of the capital Pyongyang, told RFA on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.
The source explained that these children are not orphans, but they come from families in dire financial straits. For example, their parents might be factory workers who did not receive their normal wages or food distributions from the state this year, or the side business that most families must run to support themselves might be failing.
“It seemed like it might be difficult to eat even a bowl of rice on the Lunar New Year, so the children just started selling spring water on their own,” the source said.
“Groups of three or four children put spring water into large buckets from the mountain behind the Tokchon food processing plant,” the source said. “They carry the buckets on their backs or drag them with handcarts and then walk around the city apartments, shouting ‘water for sale.’”
A liter (1.05 quarts) of regular spring water goes for about 300 to 500 won, or 4-6 U.S. cents, whereas a liter of mineral water with purported health benefits costs about 1,000 won, or 12 cents, according to the source.
Tokchon is surrounded by forests with lots of springs and the mineral water springs are in the area behind the processing plant, the source said.
“Children walk around all day and can sell about 10 liters of spring water,” the source said, explaining that even with all the hard work, that means they will earn about 60 cents during one day if they are selling regular water or about $1.20 for mineral water.
Around 10 children in a small town in the northwestern province of North Pyongan were lugging around heavy water jugs on their backs, desperately shouting to try to make a sale, a source there told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely.
“When apartment residents call the children to buy spring water, the children immediately carry the heavy spring water on their backs and walk up to the fifth and seventh floors to deliver it to the customer,” the second source said.
Most of the customers want spring water for New Year’s Day, but they are worried about the children who carry the heavy loads in the freezing cold to bring it to them, the second source said.
“The children say things like ‘I should be studying, but I can’t because I am so poor. Please buy some of my spring water,’” the second source said. “The state of affairs is worrisome for the residents … and they blame the North Korean authorities for their wrong policies.”
Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Written in English by Eugene Whong. Edited by Malcolm Foster.
The Philippine government said Tuesday it was “vigilantly” monitoring developments in the South China Sea and investigating a recent incident where a China Coast Guard ship allegedly harassed local fishermen near a Filipino-occupied shoal.
The encounter at sea occurred on Jan. 9 when the crew of KEN-KEN fishing boat reported that a Chinese ship with bow number 5204 and a smaller boat drove them away from waters near Ayungin Shoal (Second Thomas Shoal), according to the Philippine Coast Guard.
“Ayungin Shoal is part of the exclusive economic zone and continental shelf of the Philippines. The Philippines is entitled to exercise sovereign rights and jurisdiction in the area, without any intervention from another country,” the Department of Foreign Affairs said in a statement Tuesday.
“Filipino fishermen are free to exercise their rights and take whatever they are due under Philippine and international law, particularly the 1982 UNCLOS and the final and binding 2016 Arbitral Award,” it said, referring to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
The Philippine foreign office said it was waiting for the local law enforcement agencies’ official reports on the alleged incident.
“The reports will serve as a basis for diplomatic action on the incident,” the department said.
“The department vigilantly monitors any developments in the West Philippine Sea, especially following the discussions between President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. and Chinese President Xi Jinping during the former’s state visit to China,” it said, using the Filipino name for areas within its EEZ in the South China Sea.
The Chinese Embassy in Manila did not immediately respond to RFA-affiliate BenarNews requests for comment.
The shoal, about 174 nautical miles from Puerto Princesa, a port city in the western Philippines’ Palawan province, is one of the nine areas occupied by Filipino forces in the disputed waters. The Philippines maintains a small contingent of Marines housed aboard the BRP Sierra Madre, a dilapidated World War-II era ship that was deliberately run aground in the 1990s.
Marcos said that his state visit to China in early January had already yielded a positive outcome through the two nations using an agreed-to hotline to focus on sea tensions.
“So we have immediately used that thing, that mechanism that I talked about where I said we can immediately contact the Chinese government, and hopefully our counterparts on the other side can bring it to President Xi’s attention – this problem – and we have done that,” Marcos told a select group of broadcasters Monday, according to transcripts released Tuesday.
“But it does not preclude us from continuing to make protests and continuing to send note verbales concerning this,” he said, referring to diplomatic notes without elaborating.
The Marcos administration has insisted repeatedly that issues in the South China Sea do not define relations with China. On Tuesday, Tourism Secretary Christina Frasco joined Huang Xilian, the Chinese ambassador to the Philippines, in greeting one of the first plane loads of Chinese tourists to arrive in Manila in three years.
Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Artemio Abu confirmed that the Filipino fishermen “were being shadowed” and that the Philippine side responded by intensifying its assets near Ayungin.
He said his agency had sent “raw footage” of the incident to the Department of Foreign Affairs.
“We give confidence to our Filipino fishermen that they are taken care of and protected. We assure our Filipino fishermen that they are protected and secured through our constant presence,” Abu said in a television interview.
The commandant said coast guard leaders would raise concerns with their counterparts from China during “high-level talks,” but he did not disclose the date.
“We really need to coordinate well with the national leadership. It has to be communicated down to the frontlines,” Abu said.
The incident was the first alleged case of Chinese harassment of a Philippine fishing boat reported in 2023. Last year, the Philippines carried out at least 10 resupply missions to the Sierra Madre without any incidents, apart from reports of the Chinese Coast Guard issuing verbal challenges.
In March 2014, a boat carrying supplies and Filipino journalists to Ayungin evaded a Chinese Coast Guard blockade during a two-hour standoff.
