Skip to footer
Integrity
The Monitor's View

Avoiding war by truth-telling

The Philippines arms itself against China’s aggression by exposing violent incidents at sea by Chinese vessels.

|
REUTERS
Chinese Coast Guard vessels fire water cannons towards a Philippine resupply vessel at Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea, March 5.
  • By the Monitor's Editorial Board

For nearly two years, the Philippines has been on a global truth-telling campaign, dubbed the “transparency initiative.” The Southeast Asian nation has invited journalists aboard its security vessels to witness aggressive actions by Chinese ships near rocks and reefs that are clearly within the Philippines’ legal domain. In August, for example, a “60 Minutes” crew was on a Philippine coast guard ship when it was rammed by a Chinese ship near Sabina Shoal.

Has this public exposure of China’s territorial grab far from its shores done anything to head off a dangerous showdown?

This month, the Philippines plans to find out. It will ask the United Nations General Assembly to look over evidence of violent incidents by China in hopes that truth will prevail in persuading Beijing to honor international maritime law.

For now, China’s taking of islets in the South China Sea still goes on. And Beijing has launched a public relations campaign of its own. According to “60 Minutes,” for example, the Chinese government publicized its version of the ramming incident soon after it happened, blaming the Filipinos.

Yet the more that this truth-versus-lies contest continues, the more the Philippines has been winning on a bigger stage. It has gained wide diplomatic and military support from nations as far away as South Korea and Germany. 

“We have the law on our side, but the battleground is for other countries to help us recognize our rights,” said the country’s defense secretary, Gilberto Teodoro Jr.

At home, Filipinos now widely support their country standing up to Beijing after seeing videos of China’s aggression. Abroad, the Philippines now has closer military ties with Australia, Japan, Singapore, and India. It has also welcomed the United States to use four military bases, install a defensive missile system, and back up a 1951 mutual defense treaty between the two countries.

The transparency strategy by Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is modeled on Ukraine’s experience of rallying countries to its side by exposing Russian atrocities against Ukrainian civilians. “The more the world sees of China’s claims and the ugly way it tries to enforce them,” stated The Economist magazine, “the less legitimate they will seem.”

China refers to the truth-telling campaign by the Philippines as “cognitive warfare.” But truth’s power lies in dissolving lies. At the U.N. and elsewhere, the Philippines aims only “to talk some sense” into China, as one of its diplomats put it. If anything, truth can bring peace.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Avoiding war by truth-telling
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2024/0925/Avoiding-war-by-truth-telling
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe