WE have learned to take what President Duterte says in stride. In his nine months in office, he has often made dramatic declarations, only to turn around and tell us he was joking. On other occasions, it is his Cabinet officials who must massage or soft-pedal the message, saying, “What the President really meant was this.”
So, what did the President really mean when he said he is willing to sell off islands in the South China Sea that the Philippines claims as its own?
“We do not [mean harm] to China. We are friends, as a matter of fact. And maybe when we get rich, very rich, I can sell the land to you for—it’s yours,” he said.
Duterte apparently made the remark to allay China’s concerns over his recent order to the Armed Forces to occupy the nine Philippine isles in the Spratly Islands.
At the same time, the President assured China that he would not put weapons—“not even one gun”—in the Philippine-controlled isles, which he had ordered the military to fortify.
That the President did not provide any details about the offer to sell land to China suggests that he was not serious, after all, and that we should all move on.
As a lawyer, Mr. Duterte would know that such a land sale would run smack into the explicit constitutional provisions that restrict land ownership to Filipino citizens or corporations that are at least 60-percent owned by Filipinos. It would also go against the stated goal of the Armed Forces in the Constitution to secure the sovereignty of the state and the integrity of the national territory.
Assuming the President had taken all this into account before he opened his mouth, we can conclude that he was making the offer in jest, to mollify Beijing, which had expressed concern about his earlier order to the Armed Forces to occupy and fortify all the islands claimed and already controlled by the Philippines.
Those orders had won the President some support among Filipinos—including leftist groups—who felt he was conceding too much to China, particularly after he played down a UN tribunal’s decision in favor of the Philippines with regard to Beijing’s excessive territorial claims in the South China Sea.
But now the President is offering to sell land to China—not seriously, we know, but clearly bending backwards again to smooth any ruffled Chinese feathers.
The administration likes to describe this as an independent foreign policy. From where we sit, it is starting to look a whole lot more like rubber band diplomacy, where we pull in one direction, then get yanked in the opposite direction almost immediately.