Marcos defense secretary Juan Ponce Enrile in May 1972 inspecting assault rifles shipped to the NPA, courtesy of Mao Zedong.
In the South, Malaysia had already trained the first Moro National Liberation Front commanders and had been arming that Muslim insurgency, and sending arms and finances through our very porous borders in Sulu. China had started to undertake its plan to arm the NPA with as many rifles as it could use, and had even built a gun factory in Fujian to replicate the American M-14. The factory ironically formed the nucleus of China’s world-renowned Norinco in the 1980s that would flood the world with cheap but quality versions of US and Western arms.