Philippine’s Teodoro reads letter from Beijing

At a security conference in Seoul this week, Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr was handed a note, apparently from a Chinese military attache, restating Beijing’s position on the 2016 South China Sea arbitration. Teodoro did not pocket it. He read it aloud to the room, commenting on it line by line, then thanked the sender for the gift and added, in Tagalog, that China should show some shame and decency. The audience applauded.

The note itself is worth more scrutiny than the theatrics it produced.

“China’s position on the South China Sea arbitration is clear, consistent and firm,” it declared, four words asserting nothing, followed by a claim that the 2016 tribunal ruling was “illegal, null and void.” This is the same tribunal established under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a convention China ratified in 1996 and then simply refused to accept the results of once it lost. The ruling found the “nine-dash line” has no basis in international law, and that Beijing’s claims to historic rights inside it were extinguished once UNCLOS took force. The note did not contest this, because no counterargument exists in the convention. Instead it called the ruling a violation of “fundamental principles of international law,” a phrase doing the work a citation would do. It named no principle, cited no article and engaged no part of the tribunal’s text, because the verdict was “illegitimate.”

Within a day, Guancha, a nationalist outlet fluent in saying what the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs cannot say on the record, accused Teodoro of “putting on a show.” Prominent nationalist commentator Hu Xijin (胡錫進), a former editor at the state-backed Global Times newspaper, who has built a second career performing outrage on cue, decided the Philippines had “become so arrogant” because China had “treated the Philippines as an equal.” That is, a former state propagandist argued that Manila’s offense was insufficient gratitude for being treated as a sovereign country.

This is the standard playbook, and it barely varies by target: Whoever objects to Beijing’s territorial claims is reframed as rude, insolent or ungrateful, so the actual dispute, a binding ruling China has ignored for a decade, never has to be argued on its merits. Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Mao Ning (毛寧) supplied the closing note, telling reporters she was “not sure what exactly happened,” before pivoting to the approved line that the Philippines had “unilaterally initiated” and “abused” the arbitration process. A ministry precise enough to sanction Teodoro by name in June, as it did, does not lose track of its own attache’s paperwork by accident.

The pattern extends well beyond one shoal. Lithuania opened a trade office bearing Taiwan’s name and had its exports to China cut off entirely. Taiwan is told its elected government’s claim to sovereignty is itself the provocation. Japan and Australia get the same treatment whenever they decline to defer. In each case Beijing behaves as though it alone gets to certify which entities qualify as states, where their borders run, and how much sovereignty they may exercise before that exercise becomes an insult.

Teodoro’s contribution was not defiance so much as refusal to perform the usual diplomatic evasions. He read the note exactly as written and let it indict itself. Unaccustomed to having its talking points repeated back to it in front of an audience that could see through them, Beijing did what it always does: called the honesty a performance, and hoped nobody asked what was actually being performed.

Clive Hazell is a Kaohsiung-based writer and educator. A 30-year-resident of Taiwan and Japan, he writes on geopolitics, culture and East Asia.