The South China Sea has been a source of connection between China and the Philippines and not a source of conflict, said a Filipino scholar at the just-concluded 11th Beijing Xiangshan Forum on Friday.
Rommel Banlaoi, president of Philippine Society for International Security Studies, said it was Western colonization that turned the Philippines' positive attitude toward China into hostility.
"Japan and the United States can play a role in peace and in stability in the Asia Pacific, but this role should not be used for a strategic encirclement of our close neighbor, China. I'm writing a book, China and the Philippines lived very peacefully for more than 1,000 years until Spain colonized us, until America colonized us, until Japan colonized us. We had a very good attitude towards China, but we were colonized by Western powers with a strong anti-China attitude. And now, we're having that attitude, too," said Banlaoi.
"We want to go back to our shared path of peaceful coexistence. The South China Sea was not the sea that divided Filipinos and the Chinese. The South China Sea was the source of our connection, the source of our shared history, the source of our shared experiences, but that kind of history was distorted by colonialism," he said.
The 11th Beijing Xiangshan Forum was held from Thursday to Saturday, with unprecedented participation from over 100 countries and organizations. Under the theme of "Promoting Peace for a Shared Future," this year's event featured critical discussions on global security, regional stability, and innovative technologies in defense.
Initiated in 2006, the Beijing Xiangshan Forum is a high-level security and defense forum in the Asia-Pacific with significant international influence.
South China Sea source of Philippine-China connection not conflict: Filipino scholar
With the beginning of the cotton harvest season, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is anticipating higher yields from advancements in agricultural technology and mechanization.
Xinjiang is the largest production area of high-quality commodity cotton in China. The 2.47-million-hectare cotton growing area in the region has produced more than 5 million tons of cotton for six consecutive years.
The northern and southern parts of the vast autonomous region have different climates, different cotton varieties and also different growing periods. Currently, cotton picking started two weeks ago in northern Xinjiang, while the harvesting has just begun in the southern areas.
In Tumxuk City, located in southern Xinjiang, cotton farmers are using all-in-one harvesters to help them pick cotton, separate the flowers from the stalks and pack them into bundles.
"In the past, we picked the cotton manually. It took us more than a month to pick 100 mu (6.67 hectares) of cotton, and the cost reached 1,000 yuan per mu (about 2,106 U.S. dollars per hectare). Now, we use domestically produced cotton pickers to gather them, which have high efficiency and low cost. It now takes less than a day to harvest my 100 mu of cotton, with a cost less than 200 yuan per mu," said Turaxun Samat, a local farmer.
This year, Xinjiang has vigorously promoted the new cotton planting technology of drip irrigation under the mulching film at the appropriate emergence temperature, replacing the old method of irrigating before sowing. The technology can greatly improve the emergence rate while also saving water resources.
In addition, the precision sowing supported by BeiDou Navigation Satellite System and remote sensing monitoring by the agricultural big data platform have also been widely adopted across Xinjiang, contributing to the growth of cotton output.
"This year, a total of 1,057,800 mu (about 70,520 hectares) of cotton have been planted in Tumxuk City, and the unginned cotton yield is estimated at 451.4 kilograms per mu, an average increase of 11.7 kilograms per mu over the previous year," said Chen Yongsen, a member of the leadership of the city's Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.
The cotton harvesting in Xinjiang is expected to end in early November.
Xinjiang enters cotton harvest season with higher yield expected
