The Alice Guo case is the tip of the iceberg in China’s malign infiltration of the Philippines

Third in a series

First word

A THIRD podcast from “China Unscripted” on the Philippines-China conflict (“Xi Jinping is terrified of this Asian military,” August 2, 2024) focuses on what they call China’s infiltration of the Philippines, with its flip side of criminal and illegal activities including Philippine offshore gaming operators (POGOs), drugs, human trafficking, and espionage.

“Unscripted” characterized Xi (Goliath) as “terrified,” but it is surely more realistic and sensible to simply describe the Chinese leadership as “on guard” against the Philippines. The ingenuity and skill of the biblical David with a slingshot are mirrored by the creativity and tactics of the Philippine military in its pushback strategy against China’s bullying.

Shifting the focus from the pushback strategy to the congressional investigation into the Alice Guo-POGO controversy, the podcast highlights that Guo and POGOs are just the tip of the iceberg of China’s infiltration of the country with criminal activities. It also explores former President Rodrigo Duterte’s involvement in legalizing online gaming in the country, even when POGOs were banned in both China and the United States.

“Unscripted” begins its analysis with a potentially dark and sinister reason why China is pushing these activities into the country.

Keynote guest David Day, Chairman of the Global Risk Mitigation Foundation, joined the panel of Chris Chapel, Shelley JN and Matt Ganesa on the August 2 podcast.

David Day: It appears that there is a tentative agreement, but there is some disagreement between the two sides about the details of that agreement, and the Philippines is working in a responsible way to try to de-escalate the whole conflict. But I think it’s important to understand the larger issues here. What’s really going on, the Philippine negotiating team agreed that they would keep the details out of the public, and you all know from your experience that China is not really good at keeping the substance of the deal or the substance of the deal, so the Philippines is going to hold up its end of the bargain for at least a while. And I think there’s been ample testimony by the national security adviser and the National Security Council and others who come along … that we would not agree to these kinds of provisions, and I think that’s going to have to be sufficient for now.

Interesting that you bring up the rift between Marcos and former President Duterte, because I think I got some of the details wrong. However, information has just come out about the POGOs, the Philippine offshore gambling operations, and a connection between those operations and Duterte. It makes it seem that Duterte was more involved with the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) at the time than one might think.

The explosion of these offshore gambling operations in the Philippines occurred under the Duterte administration, on the theory that they would generate revenue for the Philippine government, and those revenues have been very modest. There is also a question about the extent to which Duterte is actually involved in these POGOs, and I have no evidence of that.

What I do know is that these foreign gambling operations really brought in the seedy underside of China’s criminal activities; they brought in not just gambling, but all sorts of scams, human trafficking, and certainly the espionage side of things, and in a way they are related to the discovery of at least three arms caches in Metro Manila over the past year, and these arms caches included the seizure of not only small arms, but also PLA (People’s Liberation Army) uniforms, and some of them even had the term “reconnaissance team” on the badge. So there is a nasty connection on the espionage side, as well as the criminal side, but to the extent that Duterte is personally involved in those things, I don’t know. I will add an interesting bit that there is an island at the mouth of Manila Bay Harbor, and that island is very close to Sangley Point or Cavite Naval Base. That island is now called Pogo Island. It used to be owned by the Remulla family, who sold it to a Chinese SOE (state-owned enterprise) that runs a huge POGO operation there.

President Marcos declared in his State of the Nation Address on July 22 that these POGO operations were no longer welcome in the Philippines and that he wanted them and all their personnel to leave by the end of the year.

So, a couple of things to clarify about these POGOs. They’re bringing in all this crime and human trafficking and other kinds of illegal activities, and you also said that it was an SOE from China that owns at least one of these POGOs.

So this is not a case of Chinese gangs setting this up themselves. There is a very clear connection between China and the PLA uniforms. This is a very serious infiltration by the Chinese Communist Party to get its boots on the ground in the Philippines, infiltration through these POGOs and the weapons caches.

To be continued on August 15, 2024

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