The memory China fears

On June 16, the Cebu City Council passed a resolution declaring every July 12 as West Philippine Sea Victory Day. To be clear, a resolution is generally a formal expression of the opinion, position, sentiment, request, or decision of a legislative body. It does not, by itself, create a binding rule of conduct or impose penalties.

In this case, the resolution was meant to commemorate the 2016 arbitral award, the ruling that rejected China’s sweeping nine-dash line claim. It was a modest act by any standard, the kind of instrument used to express a position and formalize what is already widespread public sentiment.

Six days later, on June 22, the Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China in Cebu sent a formal diplomatic note to the Cebu City Council. It expressed its “gravest concern and firm opposition,” called the resolution a “blatant political provocation,” and demanded that the Cebu City Council “immediately revoke” it.

Read that again.

A permanent member of the United Nations Security Council sent a diplomatic note to a city council over a commemorative resolution. More tellingly, a foreign government, operating through a consulate on Philippine soil, told a local legislative body to undo a resolution passed by elected city councilors about a Filipino commemoration.

For 10 years, China has ignored the arbitral award itself, even if the ruling is final and binding under the same convention China ratified. It has brushed aside Philippine protests. It has dismissed statements from the European Union, the United States, Japan, Australia, and other governments recognizing the ruling.

Yet here it was, strongly reacting to a city council resolution in Cebu.

It is hardly surprising. The arbitral award needs our collective memory to keep it alive. The Cebu City Council resolution understood this exactly. It reminds our people that the arbitral award exists, and that no pro-Beijing Filipino politician or future government should be allowed to quietly bargain it away.

That is why the reaction from the Chinese Consulate is revealing. It treats a city resolution as a provocation, as if a city council were a foreign ministry. The size of the reaction reveals the insecurity behind it.

Yet none of this is really new. A 2021 study by the Oxford Internet Institute entitled “China’s Public Diplomacy Operations” mapped how Chinese diplomats and state-backed media operated abroad. What it found was not mere public diplomacy, but a sustained and well-resourced effort to shape opinion inside other countries.

The study noted that across at least 126 countries, more than 270 diplomatic accounts push a single narrative into local feeds, day after day. It even comes with a euphemism, “external publicity”, which is a friendlier name for what it really is: external propaganda.

And here lies the hypocrisy. China uses diplomatic notes, protests, Facebook, Twitter, and other means to influence people abroad, even as it denies its own citizens ordinary access to contrary views from other governments and independent media. China enters our information space while keeping its own sealed.

A state confident in the facts and the law would not need to manage what others say from inside the very country hosting its consulate. It would not need to tell a city council to revoke the latter’s resolution, then warn that refusal would “inevitably” damage relations between the Philippines and China.

Still, the threat did not work. Except for Cebu City Mayor Nestor Archival’s careful “let me study it first” approach, which was exactly the hesitation the diplomatic note was designed to produce, the Cebu City Council did not budge.

Nor was it alone. Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. lauded the Cebu City Council and reminded the country that the 2016 arbitral award is a victory we must continue to defend. “Hindi tayo pasisiil (We will not be cowed),” he said, echoing a line from our national anthem.

And on July 12, some universities committed to putting up tarpaulins bearing a date and a phrase. West Philippine Sea Victory Day. From there, let us ask Congress to make the commemoration a national one, as the resolution urges. Let us push to include the West Philippine Sea issue in the school curriculum, so that the young can be taught why July 12 matters.

We should be the first to remember, even as the rest of the world remembers with us.