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U.S. officials and outside experts agree that China is undertaking a comprehensive modernization of its military. The Chinese military has gotten smaller but smarter.

China should be developing through the various foreign investments it receives. I hope for its level-headed and rational understanding that anything to discourage that is a disservice to itself.

We see China becoming an unstoppable force. It's a huge threat and a huge opportunity.

I believe that if you treat China as an enemy, then it is likely to become one.

That's the reason some schools of thinking don't rule out a destruction of the Chinese military potential before the situation grows worse than it is today. It's bad enough now.

Obviously, the Philippines or any regional state can never match Chinese defense spending, but we will have to develop minimum deterrence capabilities that allow us to resist and inflict sufficient retaliation if China continues to undermine Philippine territorial integrity.

Chinese growth will either be strong or very strong. They have a voracious demand for energy that will only continue to grow. What they're doing... is looking at all forms of energy. They're going ahead very strongly with coal, nuclear, oil, natural gas.

I visited the Chinese side last year. The Chinese are in a constant state of military readiness. They have all their nuclear weapons in the area, presumably trained on targets across the border.

China is still a developing country with a myriad of tasks and challenges.

China is doing lots of things right. It's investing in education and R&D, it's opening up, it's more cosmopolitan than it's ever been. I think it's very likely that China will continue to explode economically and certainly become a superpower.