A Filipino minister reads out Beijing’s lies live on air – and not just about the South China Sea

 The scene took place last Tuesday and is one to remember: Gilberto Teodoro Jr., the Philippine Secretary of Defence, with his impeccable English and friendly demeanour, was a guest on a panel discussing the South China Sea at the Seoul Defence Dialogue. At one point, a forum official approached him, interrupting him whilst he was speaking and handing him a sheet of paper written in pen. There is a message for him: “I think it comes from China,” he says, addressing the audience. The note contains Beijing’s well-known position on the 2016 international arbitration ruling: China neither accepts nor recognises the ruling that had rejected its claims over much of the South China Sea.

Teodoro, a lawyer, former MP and ex-Secretary of Defence from 2007 to 2009, who has been subject to sanctions by Beijing since last June, begins to read the text of the leaflet aloud, commenting on it sentence by sentence. When the note claims that the ruling is “illegal, null and void”, Teodoro replies: “So you’re saying that UNCLOS (the UN convention governing the law of the sea, ed.) violates international law? Is that what you mean?”, and then, when he reads that the ruling is not legally binding, the secretary says: “That’s because you don’t want to be subject to UNCLOS. Obviously, because you’ve lost.” This real-time rebuttal of Chinese manipulation has a significant communicative impact, and Teodoro goes further, stating that the Chinese delegation present at the conference showed a lack of respect towards the South Korean organisers: how can one deal civilly with a country that behaves in this way, he asks the audience, with “coercion, bullying and aggression”, and says he will keep the document as “a reminder of just how desperate China is”. He then turns to the person who had handed it to him a moment earlier and says: “You have just done your country a great service. Thank you, and I hope you don’t end up in a gulag for this.” Applause from the audience.

According to the South Korean news agency Yonhap, the note had been handed over by a military attaché at the Chinese embassy in Seoul to a member of the forum’s staff, with a request to pass it on to Teodoro. He seized the moment like a true communicator. Yesterday, China was forced to respond, as the video of the Philippine secretary went viral: online, many users sympathetic to Beijing accused the Philippines, South Korea and even the CIA of having orchestrated the whole thing, because the note did not come from the Chinese delegation, and the spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mao Ning, accused ‘certain Philippine officials’ in general terms of ‘putting on a show and lying’.

But it is actually China that is manipulating the truth; despite a ruling under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, it continues to lay claim to a large part of the South China Sea, adopting an increasingly aggressive stance towards the Philippines. But that part of the Pacific Ocean is not the only place where the Chinese Communist Party is seeking to impose its own rules, bending to its will anyone slightly weaker than the government in Manila. China has long sought to increase its influence within the organisations that set the rules for navigation – and thus for maritime trade, which accounts for 80 per cent of international trade. In 2023, Beijing put forward Zhang Xiaojie as a candidate for the post of Secretary-General of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), the UN agency responsible for navigation. Although Arsenio Dominguez of Panama won the election, the nomination demonstrated China’s interest in leading the organisation. A year ago, Beijing formalised its permanent mission to the IMO in London, and Lloyd’s List described the decision as proof that China is the main power broker within the institution and that its representation has attained a level of influence surpassing that of other maritime nations.

Whilst Beijing seeks to rewrite maritime rules in its favour, the rest of the world is concerned – and not just because of China, but because of the system of global destabilisation that is eroding the rules-based trading system. Last Tuesday, the Consultative Shipping Group – which brings together 18 maritime nations including Greece, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and Denmark – warned that wars, attacks on commercial vessels and the rise in shadow fleet operations, mostly Russian but also North Korean, are no longer isolated incidents. A “structural shift” is underway in the conditions governing global maritime trade, and according to estimates cited by the Financial Times, more than 1,500 oil tankers are now operating outside the traditional Western insurance systems. As trade routes face growing political and military pressure, and there are threats to introduce a toll for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, shipowners fear that the Iranian model could be replicated in other strategic maritime chokepoints, paving the way for a new, uncharted world of maritime trade where the rules are written by China and its partners. This is why Teodoro’s clear and strong words, spoken the day before yesterday in Seoul, serve as a warning to all.