This time, the Chinese embassy in Manila trains its guns on journalists

The Chinese embassy’s new-found rigor in launching tirades against Philippine institutions seems to have found a new target: a long-running independent news organization, after it released a video version of a months-old report on Chinese propaganda and China’s influence operations in the country.

In a statement on February 26, the embassy’s deputy spokesperson Guo Wei first assailed the embassy’s usual target: Commodore Jay Tarriela, the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG)’s spokesperson for the West Philippine Sea for “[echoing] the so-called exposing ‘pro-China propaganda’ (sic).” 

Tarriela had shared a video report by journalist Regine Cabato for the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) where she outlined “5 Red Flags to Watch Out For” to determine if a social media post is pro-China propaganda. 

Guo didn’t address any points Cabato raised in the video, which includes critiques of influence operations of other countries like the United States. Instead, the embassy mouthpiece said it was “worth noting” that the PCIJ had received funding from the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Curiously, neither Guo nor the embassy seemed to have reacted in October 2025 when a text article and investigative report also by Cabato — from which the video is based on — was first released. 

Funding from NED is not covert. Since it’s sourced from US federal funds, grants are public and made available on its official website. Grants that the PCIJ received are also not new — the screenshots posted by the Chinese embassy indicate funding from 2015 until 2021. 

So why bring up NED at all? 

Beijing and superpower competition

NED, as well as NED-funded projects and organizations, is a sore point for Beijing.

A page on the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ (MFA) official website is dedicated to a discussion of NED, where it claims that it’s the US government’s “white gloves,” which Beijing characterizes as engagements “in subverting state power in other countries, meddling in other countries’ internal affairs, inciting division and confrontation, misleadingpublic opinion, and conducting ideological infiltration, all under the pretext of promoting democracy.” 

Under the Philippines, the same 2024-published MFA FAQ page mentions NED’s grants to Rappler and what it terms as a “lobby” to the Commission on Elections (Comelec) “for access to internal information including election trends and campaign spending.” Campaign spending in the Philippines is public information, released once elections are over. Election trends, if the MFA meant polling, is not conducted by the Comelec but by independent polling firms either for public release or for internal use by private groups such as political parties.

The underlying dynamics here, of course, is the competition between the only superpowers in the world – the United States and China. It’s a competition that’s felt not only in military supremacy and economic dominance, but in either countries’ attempts to exercise influence across the world. 

But back to the Chinese embassy in February 2026. 

In various statements, be it in response to statements by legislators or by Tarriela himself, the Chinese embassy has repeatedly said it would defend China from what it called “slander” — as if to broadcast that they have no plans on relenting.

Attacking independent media 

In addressing the PCIJ report, the embassy focused on attacking Tarriela and the PCIJ’s funding, implying that since the organization gets funding from NED, its integrity is compromised.

“People can’t help asking: whose interests do they serve?” said Guo. Who those “people” are, the embassy did not say. 

In another February 26 statement, Guo went further in attacking PCIJ, after the independent news organization issued a statement expressing “regret” and “alarm” over the Chinese embassy’s allegations against both the organization and Cabato. 

“We have zealously guarded our independence since our founding in 1989. We are nobody’s tool. And yet, we have watched as pro-Duterte partisans amplified the Chinese Embassy’s allegations, posted at 11:34 PM Manila time on Facebook and X. The virality of the Embassy’s message within a few hours attest to the coordinated nature of this online attack,” said the PCIJ, which also noted that it “receives funding from multiple sources, including from UN organizations.” 

The PCIJ added: “We are alarmed that the Chinese Embassy is attacking independent reporting by Filipinos. Their actions only lend credence to our story.”

The embassy, through Guo, meanwhile claimed the “coordinated nature of anti-China rhetoric in the Philippines,” linking PCIJ’s video version of a month-old report to Tarriela’s separate statements.  

Cabato has done extensive reporting and research on influence operations and disinformation in the Philippines — covering the Rodrigo Duterte administration’s drug war and China’s disinformation on its South China Sea claim, among others. The PCIJ, meanwhile, has a long history of investigative reportage across different administrations, covering a myriad of topics from local politics, geopolitics, and corruption in Philippine government. 

The Chinese embassy’s arguments against PCIJ — of it having a bias based on where it gets grants, that its conclusions were supposedly baseless, or its affiliations, among others — seems straight out of foreign or domestic information manipulation playbooks to erode trust in the media. 

The embassy, at least, bothered to deny information manipulation allegations. “For years, China’s position in the Philippines has been misrepresented and distorted. It is therefore the responsibility of the Embassy to continue presenting facts and clarifying misunderstandings, no matter how inconvenient that may be to some people here in the Philippines,” Guo said. 

In a statement, the National Union of Journalists in the Philippines (NUJP) said it stands with both Cabato and PCIJ “against what appears to be a coordinated attack on their credibility by the Chinese Embassy and by social media users sympathetic to it.” 

“Readers are free to engage with, disagree with, and criticize media output, but when a government does it, especially when done in apparent coordination with partisan social media networks, that is an attempt at intimidation and harassment,” NUJP said. 

It added: “NUJP has reservations on how reports and research on disinformation may be used to minimize legitimate criticism of the US, which has its own influence operations, but we are unequivocal on support for colleagues and fellow media workers.” 

Different news organizations — PCIJ and Rappler, among them — have done extensive reporting on foreign disinformation and influence operations. 

The embassy on hyperdrive 

It has been close to two months of intense and, sometimes, inflammatory statements from the Chinese embassy in Manila against different institutions in the Philippines — from Tarriela, members of Congress, and inter-government agencies, to name a few. 

The tempo and intensity of statements started picking up in December 2025, or around the time Beijing’s new envoy to Manila, Jing Quan, took over. But things went on hyperdrive in January 2026, after Tarriela posted a photo from a lecture he delivered to a university. In that photo, the presentation slide behind the PCG commodore depicted a satirical, digitally-altered image of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The Chinese embassy has hit Tarriela and filed a protest before the Philippine government over that presentation. It has been consistent in criticizing Tarriela, even as the PCG official said he won’t be standing down, nor are they orders for him to stand down. 

Long before that university lecture, the PCG official has long been a target of the embassy. He is, after all, among the progenitors of the “transparency initiative” or the Philippines’ efforts to expose China’s aggressive and dangerous actions in the West Philippine Sea, in waters that are part of the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and near features that the Philippines occupies.  

The West Philippine Sea is part of the larger South China Sea that includes the Philippines’ EEZ and features that it claims. Beijing claims almost all of the South China Sea, despite a 2016 Arbitral Award that found their claim to be invalid. — Rappler.com