MANILA – The Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs has summoned the strongest diplomatic language it uses for China, calling on Beijing’s state-run outlet China Daily to take down an AI-generated video that portrayed Filipinos as monkeys being directed by the United States and Japan, dumped into the sea, and blasted by a water cannon. The demand landed Thursday, three days after the clip appeared on China Daily’s Facebook page, in timing Manila described as deliberate: the upload date coincided with the tenth anniversary of an international tribunal ruling that Beijing has refused to accept.
The video, 58 seconds of computer-generated animation uploaded on July 10, depicts a monkey wearing Filipino attire at a karaoke stage aboard a boat. Arms extending from figures holding American and Japanese flags push and direct the animal on what to perform. When scolded for singing the wrong song, the monkey produces a sheet bearing the words “South China Sea arbitration award.” It is then thrown into the sea and blasted by a water cannon from a passing vessel.
“Disagreement over legal and political issues does not justify resorting to disturbing imagery, which has no place in the civil public discourse of a responsible state,” the Department of Foreign Affairs said in its formal statement Thursday. “Such imagery and misinformation only serve to widen the distrust between the Philippines and China.”
The choice of July 10 for the upload was specific. A decade ago on that date, the Permanent Court of Arbitration issued its ruling in the Philippines’ case against China, finding that Beijing’s sweeping nine-dash-line claim over most of the South China Sea had no valid basis under international law. China declared the decision null and void the day it was issued, has never altered its maritime behavior in response to it, and on the anniversary uploaded this animation. The video remained on China Daily’s Facebook page as of Thursday.
Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro was considerably less measured than the foreign ministry. He called the clip “contemptible propaganda” that “exposes the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of China’s propaganda machine,” and connected it to what he described as “the recent spate of schizophrenic behaviour of the Chinese Communist Party.” The defense secretary’s language marked a shift from diplomatic complaint into direct public characterization of China’s political conduct, an unusual posture for a sitting cabinet official to put on record.
The visual choices in the video borrow from documented incidents. Chinese coast guard vessels have used water cannons against Philippine supply boats approaching contested features in the South China Sea; the animated weapon at the clip’s end mirrors equipment deployed in real encounters. The portrayal of Manila as a creature manipulated by Washington and Tokyo reflects a propaganda line Chinese state media have sustained for years, framing Philippine territorial assertiveness not as sovereign policy but as proxy behavior directed by outside powers. What changes here is the reduction of Filipinos from a rival government to a performing animal.
Beijing has not responded to Manila’s demand. China’s foreign ministry has consistently treated South China Sea statements as attempts to internationalize a dispute it considers settled in China’s favor. Xinhua’s official framing of the 10th anniversary of the PCA ruling cast the verdict as a politically motivated “farce” without legal standing, a position the Chinese government has maintained since 2016 and which this video translates into animation.
Under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the Philippines has chosen to handle South China Sea incidents in public rather than through back channels, releasing footage of Chinese forces using lasers and water cannons against Philippine vessels and expanding defense arrangements with the United States, Australia, and Japan. That posture has not changed access to Philippine fishing grounds. Philippine fishermen from Masinloc remain locked out of Scarborough Shoal a decade after the ruling affirmed their right to those waters. It has, however, created a diplomatic environment in which a propaganda video of this kind functions as escalation rather than background noise.
China Daily publishes in English and targets an international readership. The clip is therefore not addressed to domestic Chinese audiences but to the broader world, and its imagery is its argument: that the Philippines’ legal position is a performance staged for American and Japanese benefit, not a sovereign territorial claim. The DFA labeled that imagery racist and demanded removal. Whether Beijing treats the demand as worth accommodating will indicate how it weighs the video’s propaganda value against the diplomatic cost of defiance, and whether it is concerned that content of this kind complicates China’s recent gains in global favorability surveys by supplying its critics with evidence of the behavior they have accused it of.
As of Thursday evening, the video remained on China Daily’s Facebook page and no Chinese government official had commented publicly. Manila has not announced steps beyond the takedown demand. What happens next remains, like the arbitration ruling itself, a question without an answer Beijing has chosen to supply.
