MANILA, April 27 (Reuters) – The Philippines on Saturday rejected Chinese claims that the two countries have reached an agreement over the escalating maritime dispute in the South China Sea, calling it propaganda.
A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Manila said on April 18 that the two countries agreed on a “new model” for managing tensions at the Second Thomas Shoal earlier this year, without providing details.
Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro said Saturday that the country’s defense department is “not aware of and is not party to any internal agreement with China” since President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took office in 2022. Pentagon officials have not had any conversations with Chinese officials since then. Teodoro said in a statement last year:
The Chinese embassy in Manila did not respond to a request for comment on Teodoro’s comments outside of working hours.
China and Manila have repeatedly clashed over the reef in recent months, and although the Philippines claims it is within its exclusive economic zone, China also claims it.
The Philippines says China has disrupted exercises and fired water cannons at its own ships to disrupt a resupply mission to Filipino soldiers stationed on a naval ship that Manila purposely ran aground in 1999 to strengthen its maritime interests. He was accused of firing a .
China claims almost all of the South China Sea, which serves as a pipeline for more than $3 trillion in annual ship trade. Its claims overlap with those of the Philippines and four other countries. In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague said China’s claims had no legal basis, but Beijing has rejected this decision.
Teodoro called China’s insistence on the bilateral agreement “a piece of Chinese propaganda,” adding that the Philippines would never enter into any agreement that undermines its claims in the waterway.
“The story being spread by anonymous or unidentified Chinese officials is yet another crude attempt to spread falsehoods,” he said.
(Reporting by Mikhail Flores; Editing by William Mallard)
(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2024.
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