Chinese general called the Philippines stirs trouble for asking US help to stop the China's Invasion to Palawan

Chinese major general Lou Yuan laughing and uttering a joke that "If the Philippines could not defend their territory, why don't they submit to us" this Philippines is really a trouble maker! 

A Chinese military general told foreign media Thursday that the Philippines plays the character of a "troublemaker" in the South China Sea.

"The role of the Philippines in the South China Sea is actually, in my view, a troublemaker," People's Liberation Army Major General Luo Yuan, known as "The Hawk" among Beijing's military leaders, said in his first interview with foreign media.

Luo said the Philippines attempted to provoke the Chinese government by asking help from the United States, whom he called "biased" over the maritime dispute.

China is on progress of invading the uninhabited islands of the Philippines in the Palawan province and the Panatag shoal of Zambales Province.

A Chinese news analyst had also called the Philippines a "troublemaker" for seeking help from other nations in pursuing its claims over parts of the potentially oil-rich Spratlys region.

Luo, who is also vice minister of World Military Research Department of the Academy of Military Sciences in Beijing, also took a swipe at India and warned the country not to increase its military power at the Depsang Valley border amid China's incursion since April.

"No other major country in this world has been subjected to foreign aggression and invasion by other major countries, so that is why no other country is more eager than China to become strong," Luo said.

China has kept disputed islets being occupied by Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam under surveillance, as it also claims ownership of the territory. China is claiming almost the entire South China Sea.

In an interview with China Internet Information Center in 2012, Luo claimed that the Philippines has an agenda for making a hard line stance on its claim over Scarborough Shoal (called "Huangyan" by China and "Panatag" by the Philippines).

"The Philippine claim that the Huangyan Island belongs to them is based on their own understanding of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea ... The Philippines is testing whether the international community will accept their actions, and whether China will acquiesce," Luo said.

The military academic added that if the Philippines becomes successful in its campaign over the shoal, it will build confidence in its neighbors to also pursue their claims on parts of the South China Sea, which may eventually force China into losing the islands.

"The Philippines wants to find out whether China will completely rule out military action in any event during this period of "strategic opportunity," or even exchange the island in a peace settlement," he said.

Luo also believes that the country is testing the effectiveness of its relations with the US and see whether Washington will take its side on the standoff.

Luo is also famous for his blogs and social media postings. Among the most contentious posts he had written on Chinese networking site Weibo earned over 200,000 comments, according to a report

"Protect the nation's rights externally, punish the traitors internally," he said in the post.

with report from philSTAR

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Philippines to cut poverty in half by 2015 from 33% to 16.6% - “reasonable assumption,”

Leading financial figures in the Philippines promised on Friday that the government was on track to growing its economy to the point of halving the nation's poverty, by 2015.

That's a sizeable prediction. Almost 28 percent of the country's 97 million residents live below the poverty line, The Associated Press reported. Government economists say they can bring that figure to 16.6 percent in just a couple of years. The government forecasts economic growth of almost 7 percent for the rest of this year, and it's not changing that prediction.

The numbers are being examined, but experts still see that growth pattern as a "reasonable assumption," said socioeconomic planning secretary Arsenio Balisacan.

The key to achieving the poverty-reduction goal, he said, was for the government to prioritize: Job creation first, housing issues second, and cash payouts to poor, third. The country provides cash to poverty-level families with children as long as the children stay in school and make regular visits to doctors.

Creating better jobs for Filipinos and reducing the underemployment rate by half to about 10 percent over the next two years would help the Philippines achieve the nearly impossible 2015 Millennium Development Goal on poverty reduction, the country's top economic manager said.

Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Arsenio Balisacan said that underemployment, or the poor quality of jobs among many Filipinos, was largely to blame for the extremely slow progress of efforts to lift people out of poverty over the past two decades.

Under the Millennium Development Goal on poverty reduction, to which the Philippines as a member of the United Nations is committed, poverty incidence should be halved by 2015 from its level in the early 1990s.

From 33 to 16.6 percent

In the case of the Philippines, the goal is to bring down poverty incidence from 33 percent to 16.6 percent.

As of June last year, poverty incidence in the country stood at 27.9 percent.

Balisacan said the very minimal reduction in poverty incidence from the 1990s level makes the 2015 goal difficult to achieve.

"It is not impossible [to bring down poverty incidence to 16.6 percent by 2015], but it is very challenging," Balisacan said.  "Therefore, we need to generate jobs of good quality," he added.

The bigger problem

Balisacan said that in the Philippines, underemployment is a bigger problem than unemployment, with the underemployment rate in April pegged at 19.2 percent, which is equivalent to 7.252 million Filipinos.

Being "underemployed" technically means that people have a job, but are either looking for additional jobs, new jobs with longer work hours, or additional work hours in their present jobs.

"I would like to see the underemployment rate reduced by about half to 10 percent," Balisacan on Friday said in a forum organized by the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines.

"We also want to see an increase in the proportion of wage and salary workers to the total number of the employed," he added.

Balisacan said the Aquino administration was in the process of updating the Philippine Development Plan and would like to focus on programs and projects that would create decent jobs for the unemployed in the remainder of its term.

These programs and projects included more tourism-oriented infrastructure, a higher budget for education, and the streamlining of policies to boost the manufacturing sector, the economic manager said.

Conservative

Balisacan said the government is sticking to its 6 to 7 percent growth forecast this year despite the surprising 7.8 percent GDP leap in the first quarter, preferring to be conservative due to remaining economic uncertainties in the United States, Europe and China.

The economy was projected to grow between 6.5 percent and 7.5 percent next year, and 7 to 8 percent in 2015, he added.

Balisacan said infrastructure bottlenecks will be addressed and the economy diversified from dependence on consumption and services to one with stronger industries and investments.

The latest Labor Force Survey conducted by the National Statistics Office showed that the country's unemployment rate stood at 7.5 percent in April 2013, up from 6.9 percent in the same period last year.

Significant poverty incidence

But Balisacan said an unemployment rate in the 7-percent territory was not that bad, and that the country's high underemployment rate was the main reason that poverty incidence remains significant.

Data from the NSO showed that of 37.8 million Filipinos who had jobs during the period of the survey, 57.5 percent or at least 21.8 million fell under the category of "wage and salary earners." The rest were either unpaid family workers, self-employed, or employers in their own farms or businesses.

With report from Associated Press and Inquirer News

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