In Seoul, during an international security forum, a Chinese official had a note delivered to the Philippine Defence Minister, Gilberto Teodoro, setting out Beijing’s official position on the South China Sea.
Teodoro read it out loud, picked it apart point by point, and received a standing ovation.

What happened

On Tuesday 8 September, during the Seoul Defence Dialogue 2026, one of the most widely followed security forums in the Asia-Pacific region, Philippine Defence Secretary Gilberto “Gibo” Teodoro Jr. was answering a question on grey-zone coercive tactics in the South China Sea.
A man in a white sports jacket approaches from behind him, places a piece of paper on the table and runs off. Teodoro pauses: “I’ve got a note here. I think it’s from China.”

The text, read out loud in front of the audience, echoes Beijing’s official line: the 2016 international arbitration ruling on the South China Sea allegedly violated the “fundamental principles of international law”, and China rejects it outright.

Teodoro doesn’t waste a single second. He raises the sheet of paper, shows it to the room, and brands it as clear-cut proof of a “desperate and ineffective” position.
Then he drives the point home: “Perhaps it is precisely basic decency and civilised behaviour that China needs.”
Applause.
“This is no longer a grey area. This is outright coercion, bullying, aggression.”

It doesn’t stop there. Teodoro points out that handing over a note like this to a minister who is answering a question on stage, during a forum hosted by South Korea, is an affront that goes far beyond him: “If this is the Chinese position conveyed to me in this way, not only does it trample on international law, casting UNCLOS (the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea) aside and dragging it through the mud — but it also lacks the basic respect due to our most generous hosts, the Republic of Korea, and to the entire audience present here.”

It is the passage that triggers the longest ovation of the evening: a foreign official who, even before championing his own national cause, defends the respect due to the country hosting the meeting.

He concludes by addressing, with a mixture of irony and contempt, the person who handed him the note — a Chinese assistant or military attaché in Seoul, according to reports: “You have done your country a great service. Thank you, and I hope you don’t end up in a gulag for this.”

A story that goes beyond a simple afternoon in Seoul

Anyone following developments in the South China Sea knows that the incident in Seoul was not an isolated one, but the latest chapter in a long-running personal and institutional dispute.

In June, China imposed direct sanctions against Teodoro, his wife and his son — the first serving member of the Marcos cabinet to be targeted in this way — after the minister had described Beijing as a “serious threat” to the territorial and political integrity of the Philippines. In response, Teodoro described China as “wicked”.

In August, the dispute flared up again with great intensity, when the spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mao Ning, first, and then spokesperson Guo Jiakun, accused Teodoro of ‘systematically attacking and defaming’ China, claiming that his statements harm not only bilateral relations but ‘the very interests of the Philippine state and people’ — an elegant way of insinuating that Teodoro was acting against his own country’s national interest. Teodoro responded by dismissing the accusation as a “squid tactic” – disinformation through evasion – and described China’s actions against Filipino citizens as “pure and simple extortion and blackmail”.

This is not the first time that Teodoro has publicly debunked Chinese propaganda before an international audience. At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in June 2025, responding to two colonels from the Chinese National Defence University who asked him whether the Philippines were acting as a ‘proxy’ for external powers, he began his reply by thanking them “for the propaganda rants disguised as questions” — amid laughter and applause from the audience.

How Beijing is trying to discredit him, and why Marcos is the real target

The most interesting aspect, for an outside observer, is to understand why China is investing so much energy, rhetoric and resources in a single defence minister of a country with a population of 115 million.

The answer is simple: targeting Teodoro is a way of indirectly targeting the entire Marcos administration, which, since 2022, has abandoned the conciliatory approach of its predecessor, Duterte, to realign itself with Washington, Tokyo and Canberra in defence of international law in the South China Sea.

China’s strategy of delegitimisation follows a recognisable pattern: portraying Teodoro as an obsessive figure, “systematically anti-China”, capable of dragging the entire country into an irrationally hostile stance that would harm the Philippines’ economic interests.

It is the same pattern used against anyone in South-East Asia who chooses not to fall quietly into line with Beijing: first, aid and public cordiality are offered — China donated over $2.4 million to the Philippines following Typhoons Tino and Uwan last autumn — then those who resist are isolated, portrayed as a personal obstacle to an otherwise harmonious relationship.

President Marcos himself, for his part, described the sanctions against his minister as “completely pointless” , without, however, ever refuting his minister’s stance or distancing himself from it politically: a detail which shows that the attack on Teodoro did not have the desired effect of splitting the Philippine domestic front.

This story is relevant to Europe too

There is a lesson to be learnt from all this that goes beyond Manila and Seoul.

The Philippines is a country that is vastly smaller and economically more fragile than China, yet it chose – through the words of a single minister and in the space of a single afternoon in Seoul – not to bow to a propaganda leaflet delivered live on air.

They did not dismiss the incident as something to be ignored.
They addressed it, in public, by naming names, in front of a large international audience, and were met with a standing ovation.

This is precisely the lesson that Europe, all too often, struggles to learn.
When it comes to responding to Beijing — on territorial claims, state-sponsored disinformation, and economic pressure disguised as diplomatic courtesy — the continent that is the cradle of democracy and international law almost always ends up opting for caution, watered-down language, and the classic ‘we do not want an escalation’.

The Philippines, which every week suffers the most direct and tangible consequences of that pressure — ships rammed, soldiers beaten with sticks, shoals annexed by force — show us that it is possible to respond firmly without plunging into conflict.

Beijing is not the master of the world.

The Philippines said so loud and clear, in a packed hall, and were applauded.
Perhaps it is time for Europe to learn to do the same, or at the very least to have the courage to act in this way.