Redux of Red Dawn redux

Redux of Red Dawn redux | Daily Tribune

As with the original “redux” piece from this corner, this written sequel is not about a fictional Red Dawn-style armed invasion from the Hollywood hit movies about a group of rural American high school students valiantly fighting off a bunch of invading Russian and North Korean communist soldiers.

No, this is about a real-life phenomenon, a troubling development unheard of just a few decades ago before the intertwined geo-political issues involving Taiwan and the West Philippine Sea became an extremely volatile flashpoint in Asia, namely, the sudden increase in the number of Chinese students attending tertiary schools in Cagayan Valley, a northern-tip province of the Philippines overlooking Taiwan that also hosts a couple of newly installed US military bases under a recently fortified defense cooperation agreement.

Yes, students from China, as in former Red China, also known as the water cannon dragon of Asia.

According to the Philippines’ Bureau of Immigration, 1,516 student visas were issued to Chinese nationals for the Cagayan region last year. Of these, 400 are reportedly attending school on-site, while the others are enrolled in long-distance learning programs, presumably with unlimited travel access to the country.

While it is true that this is not an armed invasion by any means, it is a virtual invasion nonetheless, considering that Cagayan Valley happens to be the Philippine territory closest to and directly facing Taiwan, in addition to being the strategic location of two active US military installations.

This immigration anomaly can be dismissed as benign in itself. However, when combined with other suspicious happenings in the country involving foreigners from China, national security red flags (no pun intended) — of which there are aplenty — are alarmingly raised.

For instance, news reports abound of Chinese nationals getting their hands on spurious Philippine identity documents that purportedly show them as natural-born Filipino citizens, including original birth certificates issued by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) and the local civil registrars in some provinces.

Per news reports, these fraudulent identity documents are used to obtain genuine Philippine passports and acquire real properties in the country, some of which are conveniently located in areas adjacent to or near military camps and installations.

But even more disturbing are reports of Chinese citizens getting a foothold on the membership program of the Philippine Coast Guard’s (PCG) auxiliary branch, a fact brazenly admitted by the PCG leadership with a dubious pushback narrative that the members are legitimate Chinese businessmen wanting to serve their host country in a semi-military capacity.

Unfortunately, this putrid-smelling explanation is rendered preposterous, if not downright ridiculous, by the fact that the PCG is the principal agency tasked with patrolling the country’s oceanic boundaries, including the West Philippine Sea, which is the subject of the Philippines’ highly volatile territorial dispute with China.

Further stoking the fire of controversy is the alleged recruitment of active and retired Filipino military personnel by Chinese-controlled companies hiding under the cloak of American and Western corporate identities.

But the most concerning of all, given China’s militaristic tendencies, are the reported police raids in some Chinese-occupied houses in Luzon that yielded weapons and firearms.

Indeed, a confluence of these strange but troubling events raises the specter of a pre-war penetration strategy employed by Japan against the US before World War II, in which Japanese “sleeper cells” disguised as innocuous tourists and civilians roamed the streets of Hawaii while conducting clandestine intelligence-gathering and other preemptive operations in anticipation of a war between the two nations.

Perhaps it is time now for Filipinos to start taking those Red Dawn movies seriously.