Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro criticized China’s warning against the “biggest ever” war games of the Philippines and the US, saying Beijing’s intentions had always been “sinister.”

“There is no trust at all in China because their intentions are sinister and non-transparent,” Teodoro said in an interview.

Thousands of American and Philippine troops, joined for the first time by a significant contingent of Japanese forces, began the annual Balikatan, or “Shoulder to Shoulder,” exercises Monday.

The war games will feature live-fire exercises in the north of the Philippines facing the Taiwan Strait, as well as a province off the disputed South China Sea, where Philippine and Chinese forces have engaged in repeated confrontations.

China slammed the joint exercises, saying the United States, Japan and the Philippines were “playing with fire.”

“What the Asia-Pacific region needs most is peace and tranquility, and what it needs least is the introduction of external forces to sow division and confrontation,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said in a news briefing.

“We wish to remind the countries concerned that blindly binding themselves together in the name of security will only be akin to playing with fire — ultimately backfiring upon themselves,” he added.

But Teodoro said the war games were only “an exercise of collective deterrence,” noting that if China negatively reacted “then it means to say whatever plans they have are deterred.”

“If the shoe fits, it’s not the problem of the participant, it is their problem,” he said.

“It is always for China a question of guilt avoidance and the world knows these kinds of messages only serve to concretize the case that they are against the world in terms of freedom of navigation, in terms of norms,” Teodoro said.

“And it is undoubted that they really have an expansionist agenda.”

Meanwhile, Teodoro said that there had only been “marginal” use of Philippine military bases to US forces, called the EDCA sites, because of land issues.

The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement allows US troops to rotate through the bases and also store defense equipment and supplies at them.

“The use of the EDCA sites has been marginal because some of these, we still have to settle the land and tenurial issues,” Teodoro said.