Jinan University

And actually, probably there is some momentum on advocating, advocating the values of free and open Indo-Pacific and other iterations of that, as well as the need to uphold norms of international law, freedom of navigation over flight, and freedom from malign influence and distortive influences.

Well, since we're talking about the malign influences, of course, two months ago, the top of the news was dominated for a period of time by this symposium that took place at Jinan University in Guangzhou, where seven universities came together and unanimously concluded in their report that that the Batanas Islands in the very, very northern part of the Philippines, the ones that extend closest to Taiwan, actually belong to China by way of Taiwan.

And this obviously got a lot of attention.

That same university is the same one, Jinan University is the one that hosts the center that convened this, called the Center for Philippine Studies.

So Two questions.

One is, how concerned are you about the fact that now you have China Coast Guard and maritime safety ships operating east of Batanas? And, of course, China claiming Batanas.

Uh, so but a- a- you know, what happened was they, they...

this group of academics at Jinan University got together, and they put out a statement saying, "We have looked into this.

Based on what, what is in the national interest, we looked into this, and we came to this unanimous conclusion that Batanes actually belongs to China."

So this is Jinan, actually, with some folks even from, uh, from Shanghai and Beijing, right? So it's not just-

Which was very interesting, because of course they do.

They do all the time, [laughs] if it, if it's something they wanna talk about.

Um, and then, uh, you know, they, then Jinan University took the report down for several days.

Interesting.