Manchurian Candidates silent on China 'grab' of Sandy Cay

GOTCHA

- JARIUS BONDOC

ody Duterte's senatorial candidates can have a show of hands. Who among them will jet ski to Sandy Cay, plant the Philippine flag, and declare "This is ours?" Duterte won votes with that campaign promise in 2016. Five years later he sneered that he was only joking and those who believed him were fools.

In the interim he visited Xi Jinping five times, professed love for him and begged him to make the Philippines a province of China.

He belittled the near drowning of 22 Filipino fishermen whose anchored wooden boat was deliberately rammed by a China Maritime Militia steel trawler. He allowed Xi's hundreds of other vessels to fish in Philippine exclusive economic zone, no limit on volume, area, season.

Bongbong Marcos' senatorial candidates can have a separate show of hands. Who among them abet Duterte's Manchurian Candidates in the hope of getting residual votes by fence-sitting? They must be told about Social Weather Stations latest survey: 75 percent of voters will junk China stooges.

So far only three of them—Ping Lacson, Francis Tolentino, Erwin Tulfo—have denounced China's meddling in Election 2025. Not only is there peril of a China Communist Party-controlled Senate in the next three years, but also a CCP puppet-president in 2028.

The Chinese embassy has hired Manila communications firms to propagandize CCP's claim of the entire South China Sea via a concocted nine- or ten- sometimes 11-dash line.