MANILA — The Philippine government should take control of the country’s largest shipyard, the defense secretary said on Thursday, after officials raised concerns that Chinese companies seeking to take it over would act as agents of Beijing, projecting China’s power deeper into the region. Among the foreign companies expressing interest in the sprawling shipyard on […]

Manila should review its defence agreement with Washington to clarify when the United States will come to its aid, as tensions in the South China Sea are the Philippines’ “most difficult” security challenge, its Defence Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said on Thursday. A former defence attaché to Washington, Lorenzana was speaking at the Foreign Correspondents Association […]

Students in China have been taught of a “false narrative” as regards the country’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonio Carpio said on Thursday. “China said Chinese activities in the South China Sea started 2,000 years ago… China said it is the first country to discover, name and explore […]

China’s richest man, who has been named a special adviser to the island of Hainan, also said the resort area should aim to become a hub for the digital economy by taking the lead in making the yuan an international currency and promoting mobile payments technology. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. Hainan must […]

Earlier this month, new evidence surfaced regarding China’s efforts to strike a deal with the former Malaysian government back in 2016 to bail out the struggling 1 Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) state fund at the center of a billion-dollar scandal allegedly implicating former premier Najib Razak in exchange for deals tied to the Belt and […]

The U.S. military reportedly is set to conduct its first missile test around the Japanese island of Okinawa later this year amid increasing Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. It is not clear when the test will occur, but Stars and Stripes, citing Japan’s Sankei newspaper, said it will feature the Army’s High-Mobility Artillery […]

Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” arrangement with the mainland was supposed to serve as a model for the eventual unification of Taiwan with the motherland. Obviously, however, the template isn’t working very well or Chinese President Xi Jinping would not have ushered in the new year with a speech in which he threatened to […]

General Li Zuocheng, the PLA’s chief of the Joint Staff Department, made the remarks during a meeting with Admiral John Richardson, the US chief of naval operations, in Beijing. Richardson is in China on a three-day visit that also includes a stop in the eastern city of Nanjing, headquarters of the People’s Liberation Army Eastern […]

The Liberty Magazine interviewed a former Japanese Self-Defense Force official about the South China Sea crisis and the “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” Kunio Orita: Having graduated from the National Defense Academy of Japan in 1974, Orita served as Commander of the 6th Air Wing, Commander of the Air Support Command, and served in the Japanese […]

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — In a recent interview, former Japanese Air Self-Defense Force (JASDF) Air Support Commander, Orita Kunio (織田邦男), offers a warning and a bleak outlook for the Indo-Pacific region over the coming decades. Orita says that China’s national strategy is one of continued expansion, with an aim of establishing absolute regional hegemony, beginning […]