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By John Feng
China Editor
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Philippines defense chief Gilberto Teodoro Jr.’s public response to a Chinese attempt to heckle him with a handwritten note has gone viral this week and was an instant reminder to America of the lost art of telling it like it is.
Teodoro was speaking at an international forum in South Korea when one of the organizers handed him a piece of paper onstage. Cameras captured his puzzled reaction before he calmly picked apart Beijing’s intervention and criticized its conduct, leading to laughter and applause.
A moment that was meant to embarrass one of China’s toughest critics instead turned into three minutes of public humiliation for Beijing. But it also stood out because the senior official from the Philippines appeared to channel the Donald Trump of old, from a time when the U.S. president wasn’t afraid to call out America’s adversaries in public, whether they had “the bomb” or not.
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Trump may not want to upset his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping before his state visit later this month or risk jeopardizing delicate U.S. trade talks with China, but his deference to the world’s authoritarian powers is jarring, as some U.S. allies are refusing to do the same.
Who Dares Bash Beijing?
Teodoro is no stranger to wars of words with China. Like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the straight-talking Philippines defense chief was sanctioned for openly rebuking the Chinese government and wears his ban like a badge of honor.
On Tuesday, the official from Manila was telling the Seoul Defense Dialogue that countries in the region should band together and collectively push back against the increasingly assertive Chinese maneuvers in the South China Sea when he was interrupted by the alleged Chinese protest scribbled on a piece of A4 hotel stationery.
The note was a response to Teodoro’s call for all nations to jointly uphold a 2016 arbitration ruling that concluded China had no legal basis to claim sweeping maritime zones under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which the Chinese government ratified in 1996.
A confident Teodoro read each sentence of the note aloud and responded to each point. Philippine Defense Department footage of the moment has been viewed over 15 million times on X.
“‘China neither accepts nor recognizes the award.’ Of course, because you lost,” Teodoro said, referring to the case in The Hague now known as the South China Sea arbitration.
“These are words slipped to me. There is a legal principle called res ipsa loquitur—the thing speaks for itself,” he said.
He added: “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 most gracious host, the Republic of Korea, and the rest of the audience here.”
“So perhaps basic decency and behavior is what China needs to do,” Teodoro said, later describing the note as “actual coercion, bullying and aggression.”
“I will keep this paper as a memento of how desperate China is, and how ineffective its position is in the face of a free audience,” he said.
“Thank you very much for the person who gave me this piece of paper. You’ve just done your country a great service. Thank you. And I hope you don’t suffer in a gulag for it,” he said finally to a second applause.
Michael Sobolik of the Hudson Institute said: “Remarkable. Never heard a Southeast Asian diplomat lay into China like this. The Trump admin should back him up on every single word.”
“This is what it sounds like when Asia speaks for itself and has reliable cooperation within Asia. Bad for the CCP. Good for the US. Salute to Secretary Teodoro,” wrote Steve Yates of the Heritage Foundation.
It was unclear who among the Chinese delegation wrote and approved the note to be delivered onstage. China’s Foreign Ministry said it wasn’t aware of the incident but accused Teodoro of “provocations and theatrics,” without mentioning him by name.
Hu Xijin, the former editor of China’s nationalistic tabloid the Global Times, didn’t dispute Teodoro’s account of the interaction but suggested the Philippine official had broken “diplomatic etiquette” by reading out a note apparently meant for his eyes only.
Has China Tamed Trump?
Trump watchers will have to go back to 2016, to his first campaign, to hear the then-presidential candidate’s real tough talk on China, which he accused of exploiting the American economy for years.
His second term in the White House has been marked by much milder language on China and Xi, whom he showered with compliments in Beijing in May, after backing down from a monthslong tariff war that threatened U.S. access to the rare earth mineral supply chain dominated by China.
And since he launched the Iran war, Trump has reserved his most inflammatory social media posts only for Tehran, dismissing the nuclear ambitions of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and ordering his envoy to kowtow to Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
But the U.S. government keeps sounding the alarm on the China threat.
On Wednesday, the State Department warned Americans about the growing possibility of being arrested at random in China, after it recently declared that Chinese authorities had wrongfully detained U.S. citizen Min Zin, a Myanmar researcher, in June.
“The risks outlined in the China Travel Advisory are not hypothetical,” said a statement by the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs. “Hostage diplomacy has no place in the U.S.-China relationship.”
Also this week, a joint advisory issued by the National Security Agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation warned that China’s artificial intelligence companies were stealing trade secrets from America’s top AI firms.
The practice likely has Beijing’s tacit approval and has targeted Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and SpaceXAI, the U.S. intelligence agencies said.
As Xi prepares to make his first official state visit to the U.S. in over a decade, some fear he will arrive with the upper hand, with Trump having already paid his respects in Beijing and now apparently looking for Chinese assistance to help end his war in the Middle East.
China has learned to drip-feed the U.S. some of its long-time asks, such as finally agreeing to a meeting earlier this month between Adm. Samuel Paparo, head of the U.S. Pacific Command, and his Chinese counterpart.
In a speech in Asia this spring, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted the U.S. would be “confident enough to speak and walk softly while carrying a big stick.”
But China seems to have tamed America by knowing when to throw it the odd bone.
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