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 on stage. 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. 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.
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. 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.
You’ve just done your country a great service. 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.
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