There are two ways to look at the incident involving a 23-year-old Chinese fashion student who threw her soybean curd dessert at the policeman who prevented her from bringing it into the Metro Rail Transit 3 on Saturday.
It could be that the woman, Zhang Jiale, the daughter of a Chinese investor, was naturally rude and uncouth, or was just having a bad day.
Perhaps she truly wanted to savor her “taho” on her way to her destination and did not have time to finish it before she entered the train station. Thus, when PO1 William Cristobal stopped her from doing so, she became upset and threw her drink at him on instinct.
Zhang was charged before a Mandaluyong court for direct assault, disobedience to an agent of a person in authority and unjust vexation. She posted bail on Wednesday, but was immediately taken into custody by the Bureau of Immigration. She is now at the BI detention facility at Camp Bagong Diwa in Taguig.
A spokesperson for the BI said Zhang had been deemed an undesirable alien for posing a risk to public interest. She faces the possibility of being deported and blacklisted.
The other way to look at Zhang's act is to see it as a symbol of China's low regard for the Philippines.
From this perspective, the incident could be incendiary, all right. Throwing taho—anything, really—anything at a person's face is not erased by washing it off. It tells us that Zhang (China) thought she was superior to Cristobal (the Philippines) that she could trample on his dignity. That a foreigner had the gall to do it in a country she was just visiting makes the act doubly insulting.
It's a testy relationship we have with our neighbor to the West. On the one hand we have a president who has all but professed his love for China. He does not even make a show of enforcing the Permanent Court of Arbitration's decision upholding our claim to parts of the South China Sea. He has received China's pledges of investments, loans and grants and has put up no apparent resistance to its attempts to fortify its claims on our territory. There is talk of joint exploration of resources despite documented acts of bullying of Filipino fishermen. A Palace spokesman says we should be grateful that China built a “maritime rescue center” on Kagitingan Reef in the West Philippine Sea.
Not everybody approves of President Duterte's pivot, of course. In varying degrees, other officials in the different branches of government have expressed their disagreement with what he is doing, or not doing.
We have also always expressed our wish that Mr. Duterte calmly but firmly set boundaries as to what China can and cannot get away with. No characteristic invective-laden macho talk: Just a statesmanly articulation that while we seek to build close ties with a valued neighbor, we are not doing so at all costs.
The absence of such guidance is, we believe, why people have fallen so easily to the temptation of equating the act of one haughty soybean drinking young foreigner to our China policy. If the administration were more unequivocal about our position, we would all realize that it was just one incident, and that it is nothing that the courts or the BI cannot resolve satisfactorily on their own.