FIRING LINE | Spy season

By ROBERT B. ROQUE JR.

Gong Xi Fa Cai! Welcome to the Chinese New Year of the (Trojan?) Horse!

More often do I see journos visiting the inroads of China in their inviting posts on social media. Tourism diplomacy works both ways, of course, and the Philippines would gladly welcome the return gesture of maybe more Chinese visitors filling our island tourist spots.

It is against this backdrop that lawmakers are now pushing proposed legislation to update the Philippines’ decades-old anti-espionage law — a reminder that cross-border movement today carries security implications that older statutes never anticipated.

This recognizes the big “but” in wanting more Chinese tourists. There’s an uncomfortable asymmetry because when Filipinos travel to China, it’s likely for work, maybe study, or plain sightseeing. Pinoys do not travel there to burrow themselves into China’s political or security structure.

However, when the people traffic is reversed, the scale alone raises eyebrows. From a population now exceeding 1.4 billion, even a tiny fraction of Chinese citizens acting with strategic intent would pose a real threat, not just paranoia.

And if we were to look at intelligence reports over the last 20 years, it’s easy to sense how the Philippines is no longer dealing with hypothetical espionage risks. Foreign operatives embedding themselves here — physically, digitally, and politically — for reasons far beyond innocent commerce or tourism are a very real prospect.

And yet our main anti-espionage framework traces back 84 years, to the Commonwealth and World War II era — decades before the Internet, cyberwarfare, satellite mapping, biometric databases, or the quiet harvesting of state secrets through malware and message interception.

In January last year, the Bureau of Immigration Commissioner Joel Anthony Viado revealed that an alleged Chinese spy arrested by authorities had lived in the country since 2013, secured permanent residency through marriage, and traveled in and out of the Philippines for over a decade before being figured out. 

Likewise, Senator Ping Lacson — a former intelligence officer and PNP chief — raised louder alarm bells last September during hearings tied to the arrest of a mining executive allegedly misrepresenting himself as Filipino. He made this appeal, and I’ll quote: “The whole network of espionage operations must be dismantled… agents come and go. You arrest one, someone will replace him.”

Truth is, none of this should shock us. Foreign intervention and the embedding of spies are not new. We have seen extremist networks train Filipino militants in the past, and cross-border terrorists slip in from neighboring countries to carry out bombings in Mindanao and even the capital.

The only difference today is scale, insidious intent, and digital savvy in execution — all within the backdrop of growing foreign interference tied to regional tensions, especially in the West Philippine Sea. With China’s actions in the seas, the risk of espionage is no longer theoretical or imagined, I would believe.

Along the road to passing new anti-spying legislation, some uncomfortable questions should be asked. Like: “Why did governments, past and present, tolerate decades of restraint in confronting embedded foreign operatives?” “Was it complacency, miscalculation — or something worse?”

With time already lost, Congress must move faster than its usual pace. Cyberattacks attributed by many IT analysts to China and other actors are daily reminders that espionage is now online just as it would be on the ground.

With these threats clearer, I almost understand why Presidential Communications Undersecretary Claire Castro warned that electing a “Manchurian candidate” in 2028 could put the country itself at risk — a leader who might serve another power’s interests. But why stop short of saying it outright? Is it really far-fetched to think a foreign-backed candidate could be fielded here?

You tell me.

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