Similar and yet different. In chess both sides are equally equipped. The competition is purely between the minds. In the game of geopolitics, the balance of power is never equal. In such a game, the winners are those who understand what they can or cannot do and maximize their gains to their limits.
For example, Vietnam unfortunately failed to understand their limit in the 70's. They played a dangerous game amongst the giants and lost miserably. They were sacrificed first by China and then by the Soviet Union like a piece of pawn. The Philippines look like are about to repeat that feat.
The Viets, a former province of China, have historical understanding of the system, and stratagem here. The Philippines do not, unfortunate for Manila. Hopefully this should awaken them of the futility of the Washington-Manila MDT. It is better to abrogate the MDT and to reconstitute a new defense policy, a creative , realistic, one that will include a more beneficial relationship between Beijing and Manila.
I suppose the Filipinos should ask themselves this question: in the 2 thousand years of Chinese-Filipino relations -- did the Chinese ever subjegate the Philippines? Or launch a state-sponsored invasion of their archipelago? The Spanish, the English (for a time, actually in the 18th century), the Americans, and even Japan. But did China?
China --- had a role in influencing the Philippines positively through more docile and gentle processes through migration and civilizational doctrines.
You need to examine the anti-Sangley culture in the Philippines, my friend. This is not a native abstractist thought, but one that is of Colonial imposition , particularly Spanish (Peninsulare , Insulare) origin. In fact under the Spanish race laws of the time, the Indio (native Malay Filipino) and the Sangley (Chinese) were positioned in the lowest of the strata with the White Iberian (Spanish) at the top.
The Filipinos, unfortunately due to colonial mentality, have retained this insidious and self-hating system in perpetuity.