First of two parts
WATCH closely how China’s embassy operates in Manila and you will see something straight out of a police procedural. While one officer sits smiling at the table — offering coffee, a road map and the language of peace — his angry partner stalks just outside the door, bursting in regularly to insult and intimidate the subject. It is the classic good-cop, bad-cop routine, and the script has been running since the day the Chinese ambassador to the Philippines, Jing Quan, arrived in December.
What we have observed over the past several months is not a diplomatic mission engaging its host in good faith. It is a coordinated, two-track influence operation designed not to partner with the Philippines, but to divide its government against itself.
Ambassador Jing’s previous posting was as deputy chief of mission at the Chinese Embassy in Washington — making him Beijing’s designated “America hand,” a diplomat trained to present an attractive, reasonable face to skeptical Western-aligned audiences. From the moment he presented his credentials to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in December, he has performed his good-cop role impeccably. He speaks of bridges, not walls. “Any conflict would inevitably damage long-term relations between our neighboring countries,” he said in January. “Therefore, the most effective approach is to engage in dialogue.”
At receptions, cultural galas and meetings with cabinet secretaries, Jing projects warmth, patience and statesmanlike reasonableness. “The best option is to sit down for talks and solutions in a diplomatic way,” he said in January. “At present, the diplomats on the two sides are working toward this goal, and have already reached preliminary consensus on a road map for the next stage [of] dialogue and negotiation.”
At the same time, however, his spokesman’s office had already begun raging against its chosen foils, targeting certain disfavored Philippine government officials with slurs like “ignorant,” ”arrogant” and “disgraceful.”
While the smiling good cop was working the room, the angry bad cop was waging an unrestrained rhetorical assault on Philippine officials and institutions. In particular, deputy spokesman Guo Wei has relentlessly targeted Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Rear Adm. Jay Tarriela by name, while also denouncing individual Philippine senators and dismissing the role of the National Maritime Council. He has accused officials of “smearing China’s dignity” and warned that those who challenged Beijing’s narrative would “pay the price.”
Guo’s boss, embassy spokesman Ji Lingpeng, also penned his own official, 2,000-word statement — a sprawling broadside that invoked the Vienna Convention, questioned the authority of Philippine officials, catalogued Chinese economic aid as though presenting a bill for services rendered, and chided Filipinos that they “should feel fortunate to have a neighbor like China.” It was named Tarriela over a dozen times and closed with an ominous warning: “Pace yourselves. The road ahead is long.”
These are not contradictory impulses from a disorganized mission, but coordinated tracks of the same strategy: The ambassador opens a door while his underlings demand that every other Philippine voice shut up and walk through it. The end goal of each cycle is the same: to establish the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) as the sole legitimate voice on West Philippine Sea affairs, and to delegitimize every other Philippine agency that documents China’s aggressive and expansionist agenda at sea.
There is one crucial detail that exposes the entire performance as a fraud.
The embassy consistently frames China’s position as one of reasonable dispute resolution — one sovereign nation asking another to manage differences quietly and diplomatically, through dialogue rather than public confrontation. That framing underpins its insistence that other Philippine agencies stop talking and let the DFA handle things as the designated dispute-resolving department.
Yet simultaneously, Beijing maintains — with absolute consistency, zero qualification and backed up by brutally hard power at sea — that it possesses “indisputable sovereignty” over virtually the entire South China Sea.
Not contested sovereignty. Not negotiable sovereignty. “Indisputable” sovereignty.
If Beijing’s vast claims over the West Philippine Sea are truly indisputable, then the Philippines has no sovereign rights there to assert, no actual violations to document and no true grievances to raise. In fact, the entire concept of a “dispute” is, in Beijing’s framing, fundamentally illegitimate. There is nothing to resolve because, in China’s view, the matter is already settled.
So, when embassy officials call for quiet diplomacy, they are not proposing real negotiations between equals. They are demanding that the Philippines accept, in private and without public record, the terms of its own dispossession.
The good cop is not offering a deal, but rather a face-saving way to sign a confession while he keeps that nasty bad cop out of the room.
With that contradiction in mind, the embassy’s specific targeting of the DFA makes sense. Beijing’s gray-zone campaign at sea and its political warfare campaign ashore are not separate operations, but two fronts of a single strategy — one I described before a United States Senate subcommittee last October. The goal on both fronts is the same: the steady erosion of collective will to contest China’s ever-expanding ambitions, and the gradual acceptance of a new normal — one of Chinese regional supremacy. What the Chinese Embassy is doing in Manila right now is the political warfare front of that strategy, designed to advance the same fait accompli that China’s coast guard is enforcing at sea.
The target is the Philippines’ will to resist, and the instrument is division.
To be concluded on April 10, 2026
Ray Powell is the executive director of the SeaLight Foundation, a nonprofit maritime transparency initiative based in California.