Commentary On May 3, the Philippine Foreign Secretary, Teddy Locsin, told China to “GET THE F*** OUT.” He was referring not only to the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ), including its fishing grounds in the South China Sea, but to what he claimed was an attempt to make the Philippines into “a Chinese province.” Since the 1980s, China gradually grabbed Philippine maritime space, including through the massacre of over 60 Vietnamese marines on Johnson South Reef in 1988, the construction of a Chinese outpost on Mischief Reef in 1995, a 2009 “9-dash-line” claim to nearly the entire South China Sea, the occupation of Scarborough Shoal in 2012, and the occupation of Whitsun Reef this year. Since the mid-2010s, China scraped the seabed for endangered giant clams, and put at least 200 times the number of fishing boats on its reefs, as compared with the fishing boats of other countries on …