Last of two parts
TO be sure, Foreign Affairs Secretary Theresa Lazaro’s role requires quiet diplomacy, but she has also been a solid and principled defender of Philippine sovereign rights when called upon. Just days after her appointment in July 2025, she publicly described China’s continued rejection of the 2016 arbitral award as “worrisome,” accused Beijing of pushing a “revisionist, self-serving interpretation” of international law, and declared the award the “cornerstone” of Philippine maritime policy. Her department filed 47 diplomatic protests against China in 2025 alone — and more than 200 since 2022.
In March 2026, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) repudiated China’s sweeping claims, stating that “the Philippines flatly rejects China’s assertion of indisputable sovereignty over the entire South China Sea” and that “sovereignty is not merely claimed, it is exercised.”
Those are not the words of an institution accommodating Beijing; they are the words of a government defending its people’s lawful entitlements.
And yet not one of those statements drew the kind of aggressive, personalized attack from the spokesperson’s office that the Philippines’ vocal transparency advocates routinely receive. Beijing’s bad cop tones it down when the DFA asserts Philippine sovereignty, reserving his tirades for the transparency operations — those that generate the national resilience and international solidarity that DFA needs to strengthen its hand at the negotiating table.
For example, Ji’s [Chinese Embassy spokesman Ji Lingpeng] Jan. 27 statement directly quoted Lazaro’s public acknowledgment that “foreign heads of state and government should be off-limits or at least treated with respect,” using her words to justify a diplomatic protest. A Philippine official’s measured, professional language was lifted from its context and pressed into service as a Chinese talking point against her own government’s transparency program.
The rhetorical question embedded in that same statement has since become a recurring motif: “Whose statements represent the official foreign policy position of the Philippines?” This is not a genuine question, but a wedge designed to fracture the Philippines’ whole-of-society approach to the West Philippine Sea and to imply that institutional coherence requires every Philippine agency except the DFA to be silent.
These demands have escalated in plain view. In January, Guo [Chinese Embassy deputy spokesman Guo Wei] publicly asked why [Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Jay] Tarriela was “able to act so recklessly without being held accountable” — a foreign diplomat implicitly demanding that the Philippine government discipline one of its own officials. By February, Ji went further still, publicly calling on the DFA to “play a responsible role in restraining certain individuals in the Philippines from making such remarks.”
That Tarriela was acting with the full faith and confidence of his government was made clear with his recent promotion, but that has not diminished the embassy’s onslaught.
By March, the operation had scaled into coordinated, multi-platform amplification. When Secretary Lazaro stated that the Philippines was committed to keeping the South China Sea “a sea of peace, stability and cooperation” — a routine diplomatic formulation any new Asean chair would make — the embassy weaponized her words across social media within days, misusing the quote as a counter-narrative to Philippine transparency efforts.
Secretary Lazaro was not, of course, endorsing China’s position — the embassy simply decided to act as if she was. This is not diplomacy; it is information warfare, with a Philippine Cabinet official’s voice loaded (without her consent) into the magazine as ammunition in order to induce the Philippine government into arguing with itself while quietly accepting a new reality that China is already enforcing at sea. The entire operation depends on one assumption: that diplomacy and transparency are in conflict.
They are not. They are two oars of the same boat — pull on only one, and you go in circles. Beijing is telling the Philippines to drop the oar it doesn’t like in the name of progress.
By selectively praising the language of restraint while relentlessly attacking the language of transparency, the Chinese Embassy is attempting to dismantle the multi-agency architecture that has made the Philippines the region’s most effective voice against Chinese maritime coercion. That architecture — real-time photographic evidence, coordinated public messaging, international media engagement — has effectively laid bare Beijing’s double game.
That is, of course, precisely why Beijing wants it gone. It prefers to continue its decades-long project of maritime imperialism quietly, far from the public eye, and its opponent is robbed of the leverage that comes with strong national and international support for its position.
That is why Ambassador Jing has been running this good-cop, bad-cop political interference operation in Manila. It should be clearly named as such, and the ambassador himself should answer for it.
In any police procedural, the good cop and the bad cop work for the same department. Ji Lingpeng and Guo Wei are Ambassador Jing Quan’s subordinates. Their statements are his policy; their attacks are his attacks. The charm offensive and the information assault are a single campaign, and it has his name on it.
The Philippines does not need to choose between talking to Beijing and telling the truth about its aggressions. The DFA’s diplomacy and the Philippine Coast Guard’s transparency are not competing visions, any more than your right eye competes with your left. You need both to possess depth perception.
Any foreign embassy that works to turn one against the other is not pursuing peace. It is pursuing submission.
Ray Powell is the executive director of the SeaLight Foundation, a nonprofit maritime transparency initiative based in California.