How China is Using Go (board game) Strategy to Conquer West Philippine Sea

Photo by Cantons-de-l'Est, CC BY-SA 4.0

Go is one of the most famous board games in China, for Chinese, Go is a national sport. For those who don’t know what Go is, you can search the internet and you will find thousands of videos and articles about the game. But for simplicity, I will define Go according to Wikipedia (don’t worry we can trust Wikipedia in this kind of fact). According to Wikipedia:

“Go is an abstract strategy board game for two players in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent. The game was invented in China more than 2,500 years ago and is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played to the present day.”

Now that we know what a Go board game is, we already have an idea that this game is about winning by advancing in the territory. If you notice what China did in the Spratly Islands, you would see the similarity with how the Go is played. First, they sent military ships to the disputed sea, second, they built infrastructure, and third, they sent fishing vessels to strengthen their position. If this is a real Go game, the Philippines is already defeated, but this is not, and we may choose to play the Chinese game, or we play our own game to retrieve our territory. Physically the Chinese have already advanced, but the world does not recognize this advancement as legal or rightful. 

If we play Go with China, we will surely lose, they have already advanced, what we can do is to try to lessen the advancement of China in Spratly, by deploying some patrol military ships, while we are trying to lure China into another Game. Filipinos are not good Go players, but we are good at Chess. In Chess you don’t have to conquer the board to win, all you need to do is to mate the king. In Chess you need allies, those allies will help you advance and corner the king. I say we need allies to regain our territory in the West Philippine Sea, we need strong allies, or else, if we fight this game alone, we will lose against the giant king.