AT a high-level security forum in Seoul last week, Defense Secretary Gilberto “Gibo” Teodoro Jr. was interrupted on stage by a man wearing a white sports jacket who dropped a handwritten note on his table while he was answering a question on China’s gray-zone tactics in the South China Sea.
Teodoro paused his remarks, read the unsolicited message to the audience and condemned China’s actions.
Forum organizers and South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency said the note, which reiterated Beijing’s longstanding position rejecting the 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling as a violation of “fundamental principles of international law,” was written by a Chinese military attaché posted at the Chinese Embassy in Seoul. The attaché had instructed an event staff member to hand it to the defense chief.
Instead of ignoring it, Teodoro asked the crowd: “May I read it?” After reading the note and countering it point by point, he denounced the gesture, calling it an act of “actual coercion, bullying, and aggression.”
He added that the stunt trampled upon the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) and lacked the “basic decency” that should have been shown to the South Korean hosts.
“If this is a Chinese position sent to me, it not only disrespects international law, throwing Unclos to the floor and trampling upon it, but it also disrespects the basic decency that should be accorded to our gracious host, the Republic of Korea, and the rest of our audience here,” Teodoro said.
He later urged the Chinese side to show “a little decency” and “have more shame,” drawing applause from the audience that included defense officials, diplomats and security experts from nearly 70 countries and international organizations.
Teodoro said he would keep the note as a “memento” of how desperate China is, mockingly thanking the person who delivered it: “You have done your country a great service... and I hope you don’t suffer in a gulag for it.”
Did Teodoro overreact?
Adolfo Quizon Paglinawan, an analyst at the Asian Century Philippines Strategic Studies Institute (Acppi), suggested that Teodoro could have defended the Philippines’ position on the 2016 South China Sea arbitration award without turning his exchange into a personal confrontation.
The defense chief should have maintained a firm legal position while avoiding language that could unnecessarily escalate tensions, Paglinawan said.
He proposed that Teodoro could have acknowledged China’s position while reiterating Manila’s own position that it participated in the arbitration under Unclos and considers the tribunal’s 2016 award legally binding.
“China, however, disagrees,” Paglinawan said in his suggested response, adding that countries with profound disagreements must continue communicating, exercise restraint and avoid actions that could lead to miscalculation.
Paglinawan said such an approach would have allowed the Philippines to criticize China’s position without humiliating the Chinese delegation or closing the door to future diplomatic engagement.
He criticized Teodoro’s reference to China having “lost” the arbitration case, calling the language counterproductive. He also cautioned Teodoro against something he has been very careful not to do: allowing legitimate criticism of the Chinese government to spill over into hostility toward Chinese people or Chinese-Filipino communities.
While Paglinawan offers some useful suggestions on diplomacy, his advice ought to be weighed against his organization’s long history of echoing Beijing’s talking points.
For instance, following incidents where the China Coast Guard used high-pressure water cannons against Philippine resupply vessels, the Acppi leadership publicly defended China’s actions on television, describing the use of water cannons as “benign.”
It has also consistently played down the import of the 2016 arbitral award and rejected the widely held view that it was a significant victory for the Philippines.
If all this sounds familiar, that’s because these were the same views espoused by former president Rodrigo Duterte, who has bent over backward to appease Beijing.
In May 2021, he publicly declared that the arbitral award was “just a piece of paper” and said he would “throw it in the wastebasket.”
In June 2019, when a Chinese fishing vessel rammed and sank an anchored Philippine fishing boat near Reed Bank, leaving 22 Filipino fishermen stranded at sea before they were rescued by a Vietnamese ship, Duterte dismissed the event as a “little maritime accident” and “a simple bumping of boats,” and urged Filipinos not to make a fuss or risk angering Beijing.
When hundreds of Chinese maritime militia vessels swarmed Whitsun Reef (Julian Felipe Reef) inside the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in 2021, Duterte publicly defended China’s refusal to leave, declaring that “China is in possession” of the West Philippine Sea and that the Philippines had no physical control over its own EEZ.
Against this backdrop of the obsequiousness of our past leaders, a little passion in defending what is ours isn’t such a terrible thing.
