China's 'unfriendly act': Why the ban on Teodoro tests Marcos' WPS policy
How should we read China’s travel ban on the Philippines' defense secretary, Gilberto Teodoro Jr.? Four things stand out.
First, the act is unprecedented.
China has barred Filipinos over the West Philippine Sea before, but they were officials already out of office, such as former foreign secretary Albert del Rosario and retired associate justice Conchita Carpio-Morales in 2019, and former senator Francis Tolentino in 2025, or local officials, such as those of the municipality of Kalayaan, Palawan, last February.
A targeted travel ban is also a far cry from the banana and tourism restrictions Beijing imposed after the 2012 Scarborough Shoal standoff, or its freezing of top-level meetings after Manila initiated arbitration in 2013.
For the first time, China has punished a sitting Cabinet member.
Teodoro, being an alter ego of the president in Philippine constitutional jurisprudence, is as close as Beijing can get to the chief executive and commander in chief without touching Ferdinand Marcos Jr. himself.
This is not restraint. The Department of Foreign Affairs has rightly called it an "unfriendly act."
Second, Teodoro has hit a nerve.
He has been the administration's most vocal advocate of a firm posture on the West Philippine Sea issue and has often commented freely on maritime incidents, military modernization and security cooperation, usually at China's expense.
The last straw for Beijing appears to be his May 31 speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, where he told an audience of defense officials, military officers, diplomats and security experts that, in the Philippine experience, negotiating with China was "not a path to conflict resolution but a means of gaining advantage."
That Beijing sulked at those remarks is revealing.
The Philippines has won diplomatic and material support from the West, including the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia and much of Europe, but not from Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia or the Middle East, regions also represented at the forum and regions precisely where China means to lead.
Through the ban, Beijing is showing where it feels exposed.
The lesson is not to speak more softly or even louder, but to aim better: at senior officials and thought leaders in ASEAN and the wider Global South, not at domestic publics or at Western capitals already persuaded.
Third, the timing is suspicious.
The sanction has split media attention between the measures against Teodoro and reports of a new Chinese structure at Scarborough Shoal.
It is a familiar method: pairing coercion in diplomacy with coercion at sea.
Fourth, China is capitalizing on our divided messaging.
For months now, President Marcos' own alter egos have been bickering in public over how to respond to China. Whether or not the discord is deliberate, it has signaled an opening for Beijing.
Punishing Teodoro is meant to widen the split: to isolate Teodoro's sympathizers, tempt Manila into trading his silence for the appearance of good neighborliness and warn every other official that candor carries a personal price.
The real audience is not Teodoro. Indeed, he has shrugged off the ban. It is everyone else in government who might now think twice before speaking.
As the old Chinese saying goes, "Kill the chicken to scare the monkey."
A wedge or a rallying point?
Whether the wedge works is another matter.
Coercion can consolidate as easily as it divides. Bullying a plain-spoken secretary may rally the bureaucracy, the military and the public behind him.
It also lends weight to Teodoro's very argument: Beijing treats negotiation as leverage and, with the sanctions, hopes to coerce the whole of government into backing quiet diplomacy.
The ban could force Marcos to make a choice he has so far tried to avoid.
The president has kept his own rhetoric deliberately tamer than that of his Cabinet, pairing each assertion of maritime rights with openness to dialogue.
That ambiguity once bought maneuvering room. Now it is a liability because it gives Beijing a split to exploit.
The timing compounds the difficulty. The Philippines holds the ASEAN chair this year and is taking an active part in negotiations on a South China Sea code of conduct.
If Teodoro keeps speaking, as he should, China may punish others in the Philippine government or move from targeted to more comprehensive sanctions until the protests stop.
The Philippines' divided messaging is proving untenable. Marcos must soon choose.
Backing Teodoro would mean owning the substance of his Shangri-La message, not just backing the man.
Folding would mean trading candor for calm in the West Philippine Sea, which may or may not come, depending on whether Beijing reduces its maritime presence and aggression.
As Chinese Embassy in Manila deputy spokesperson Guo Wei put it, "People are known by the company they keep."
The president can stand behind his defense secretary, fold or, as his father did, pass the burden to the next administration.
A two-faced foreign policy will not survive the test.
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Edcel John Ibarra is an assistant professor of political science at the University of the Philippines Diliman.
Deryk Matthew Baladjay is a lecturer at the International Studies Department of De La Salle University.
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