The Globe and Mail
Friday, May 11, 2012
So here we are again. It seems like it’s once a year in Beijing that police and media assemble outside a foreign embassy, waiting for the patriotic crowds to gather and decry the nation that dares question China’s “indisputable sovereignty” over (insert name of disputed territory here)
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Philippines, U.S. hold controversial war games
On Friday, it was the embassy of the Philippines that drew the swarms of police and media. The disputed chunk of rock this time is what most of the world calls the Scarborough Shoal – the Chinese and Filipino governments each have their own name for it – a tiny and uninhabited outcrop more than 800 kilometres southeast of Hong Kong and 220 kilometres off the coast of the main Philippines island of Luzon in the resource-rich South China Sea.
In past years, the angry crowds have gathered in Beijing outside the Japanese embassy to shout about another disputed bunch of rocks, the islands that Japan calls Senkaku and China names Diaoyutai. A few years before that, it was the French embassy targeted, over its alleged support for Tibetan independence. Someday it will be the Vietnamese embassy over the Spratly Islands, in another part of the South China Sea.
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