Beijing is losing its diplomatic composure

While discussing the South China Sea and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) at the Seoul Defense Dialogue on Tuesday, Philippine Secretary of National Defense Gilberto Teodoro Jr received a memo from a military attache at the Chinese embassy in Seoul.

The note reiterated China’s position on the 2016 arbitration ruling — an international legal decision that said China’s “nine-dash line” claim had no legal basis under UNCLOS — that it is “illegal,” “invalid” and nonbinding.

Rather than pocketing the memo, an exasperated-looking Teodoro read it aloud line-by-line to the audience and rebutted each point.

China perhaps hoped to use the memo to force its position into an international forum. Instead, Teodoro put it on display and criticized the move as indecent.

“This is not gray zone anymore,” but rather “coercion, bullying and aggression,” he said.

If a country that calls itself a “great power” truly had sufficient confidence and international influence, why would it feel the need to interrupt someone’s remarks with a memo at a multilateral security forum held in another country? A truly great power relies on institutions, arguments and the power of persuasion; a nation with true substance has no need for petty tactics to prove its strength.

Viewed from this perspective, what that memo revealed to the world was not China’s power, but its deep concern and anxiety over others discussing the South China Sea.

Diplomacy has never been about deriving power from the volume of your voice, nor does a more hardline stance necessarily earn greater respect. Particularly in multilateral settings, true strength often lies in exercising restraint. You may disagree with others, lodge stern protests or present legal arguments, but if you cannot even exercise basic judgement over what is appropriate in a given setting, what would ultimately suffer is your own image.

What is all the more intriguing is that Teodoro chose not to handle the matter privately. He instead made the memo public, turning what China had intended as a behind-the-scenes pressure tactic into a diplomatic lesson shone under the full glare of public scrutiny.

This might have well been the memo’s greatest backfire. If China truly wished to become a great power respected by others, it should understand that true greatness lies not in the number of warships a state possesses, the size of its economy or its ability to silence others — rather, it lies in whether, when confronted with dissenting views, it can maintain sufficient confidence and magnanimity.

Although a piece of paper might be small, it can reveal the scale of the diplomatic landscape. This time, China might have intended to put the Philippines in its place, but it instead put Teodoro in the international spotlight and allowed him to turn the memo into a “souvenir” of China’s diplomatic posture, for all to refer to.

By attempting to use a petty gesture to establish the dominance of a great power, China showed the world a level of immaturity and loss of composure that no “great power” should display.