It’s a ‘fairytale’–Former sec on China’s 10-dash line

Chinese State Media

MANILA — A former secretary on Friday dismissed China’s 10-dash line, claiming 90 percent of the territories in the West Philippine Sea, as “fiction” and a “fairy tale.”

“There’s nothing China is holding on to except the fiction that they own the South China Sea and nobody believes them,” Former Interior Secretary Rafael Alunan III told reporters. 

“Their (China) claim of the South China Sea is very fallacious there is no factual basis for it. I call it a fairytale,” Alunan added.

Alunan, who is among the brains behind the West Philippine Sea Coalition, said that other national security experts are also disappointed with China’s behavior.

“I attended recently the Shangrila dialogue in Singapore which is an annual conference of national security experts and we came away very very concerned and disappointed with the behavior of China,” Alunan said.

China’s 10-dash line is overlapping with that of the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Taiwan and Vietnam.

The Philippines has recently filed a case before the international arbitral trubunal criticizing China’s “exaggerated” claims.

Despite the persistent calls of other claimant countries for China to respond to the complaints in the international arbitral tribunal, China is still remains silent on the cases.

“Instead of using that forum to engage in preventive diplomacy, they were very very arrogant and were talking down to all the countries,” Alunan said.

“All we can do in social media is to just keep on dishing out the truth, whatever legal issues surrounding the claim of China can be countered by us and we’ve done so,” Alunan added.