Beijing’s real red flag

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

In October 2025, journalist Regine Cabato published an investigative report for the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism outlining five red flags for spotting pro-China propaganda on social media. It was solid, sourced work — drawing on a 2024 study by political economist Alvin Camba and a confidential report obtained by former Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio, among other materials. PCIJ released a video version of the piece on Feb. 21 this year. Philippine Coast Guard Commodore Jay Tarriela, the military’s most outspoken critic of Chinese maritime aggression, shared it on social media and praised the reporting.

That was enough. Within days, the Chinese Embassy in Manila went on the offensive. Deputy spokesperson Guo Wei issued multiple public statements attacking PCIJ’s credibility, questioning its funding sources, and singling out Cabato by name. The embassy zeroed in on PCIJ’s past grants from the National Endowment for Democracy, a Washington-based nonprofit, framing this as proof that the outlet serves American interests. “People can’t help asking: whose interests do they serve?” Guo wrote on the embassy’s Facebook page on Feb. 25. Two days later, he escalated further, accusing PCIJ of “blatant double standards” and demanding full transparency about its NED funding.

The irony is staggering. Beijing demands transparency from PCIJ while running its own influence pipeline in the opposite direction — with far less disclosure.

In March 2025, former Presidential Communications Secretary Trixie Cruz-Angeles admitted before the House tri-committee on disinformation that China’s National Radio and Television Administration had sponsored a two-week training program in Beijing for Filipino vloggers and media personalities in 2023. Cruz-Angeles confirmed that China covered the participants’ travel, accommodation, and other expenses.

Among those she identified in a group photo taken at Tiananmen Square were bloggers Mark Lopez and Tio Moreno, Philstar.com columnist Pia Morato, and lawyer Ahmed Paglinawan — several of them prominent pro-Duterte influencers who have since pushed narratives downplaying Chinese aggression in the West Philippine Sea. Cruz-Angeles also revealed these NRTA seminars are conducted regularly.

A 2024 AidData study documented how Beijing has paid local influencers to tour China and share positive stories, and found as many as 10,000 fake accounts spreading pro-China narratives in Philippine social media. None of this was voluntarily disclosed by the participants or by the Chinese government.

PCIJ, by contrast, publicly lists its funding sources and has done so since 1989. So when the embassy asks “whose interests do they serve,” perhaps it should look at the influencers it has been quietly cultivating first.

What followed the embassy’s attack on Cabato was predictable in the worst way. She was hit with a torrent of sexist abuse and coordinated online harassment. She told the Committee to Protect Journalists that the attacks began shortly after the embassy’s statements. “I have never taken a centavo of dark money in my life, and I never will,” Cabato wrote on LinkedIn. “This moment is a test for how much China can say about our free press without consequence.”

A word about who Beijing decided to pick a fight with. Cabato spent over five years as the Manila reporter for The Washington Post’s Southeast Asia Bureau. She worked at CNN Philippines. She was a fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, where her research focused specifically on how journalists can better cover and protect themselves from malign influence campaigns. She was a finalist for a Livingston Award and a Society of Publishers in Asia Young Journalist Award for her coverage of how disinformation shaped the 2022 Philippine elections. She was the first Filipino reporter to gain firsthand access to a troll farm. She holds a Palanca Memorial Award — the country’s highest literary distinction — for poetry. This is not someone who stumbled into the disinformation beat. She has been doing this work, rigorously and at personal cost, for years.

Full disclosure: The Daily Guardian has worked alongside Cabato in workshops and fellowships focused on disinformation and foreign information manipulation and interference, or FIMI. We know her work. We know its quality. And that is precisely why Beijing’s attempt to reduce her to a NED-funded operative is not just dishonest — it is an insult to anyone in Philippine journalism who has shared a byline, a training room, or a reporting trip with her.

The press freedom community responded in force. The CPJ called on the embassy to stop. The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines, the International Association of Women in Radio and Television-Philippines, and the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility all issued statements of solidarity.

PCIJ itself hit back: “We are nobody’s tool. The virality of the embassy’s message within a few hours attests to the coordinated nature of this online attack.” PCIJ has been around since 1989 and has investigated every administration from Aquino to Marcos. It receives funding from UN organizations, European foundations, and yes, NED — like hundreds of independent media outlets worldwide. The idea that a single donor determines editorial output is the kind of lazy conspiratorial thinking that Beijing counts on people not questioning.

But the PCIJ attack didn’t happen in isolation. It is part of a much broader pattern of Chinese state interference in Philippine media. Just weeks earlier, the same Guo Wei issued multiple statements attacking Stanford University’s SeaLight Foundation after it documented something extraordinary: the Chinese Embassy in Manila had been directly coordinating editorial policy with local Chinese-language media outlets.

SeaLight’s Ray Powell laid out the evidence in detail. Embassy officials summoned editors from Mandarin-language outlets for meetings on “cooperation.” Editors received awards from the embassy for advancing Beijing’s interests. One outlet, Chinese Commercial News, ran a front-page story parroting the embassy’s talking points the day after SeaLight’s findings went public — a newspaper accused of echoing the Chinese government, responding by echoing the Chinese government’s denial that it echoes the Chinese government. You couldn’t make it up.

Even Malacañang took notice. Palace Press Officer Clarissa Castro condemned what she called disinformation and confirmed that authorities were coordinating with the Department of Information and Communications Technology and the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordination Council.

Fifteen senators from both majority and minority blocs filed a resolution condemning the Chinese Embassy for “improperly” criticizing Philippine officials and institutions.

The Department of Foreign Affairs lodged “firm representations” with the embassy. That’s a lot of institutional pushback. And yet Beijing’s embassy hasn’t stopped. It has, in fact, promised not to. Guo warned that “any slander, attacks, or deliberate attempts to undermine China-Philippines relations … will be met with a firm response from China, without hesitation.”

This is textbook information warfare: attack the messenger to distract from the message. The embassy has not once offered a substantive rebuttal of anything PCIJ or Cabato reported. Not one factual correction. Not one sourced counter-argument. Instead, they went after funding. It’s the same tactic used against SeaLight, against Rappler, against anyone who documents Chinese influence operations anywhere in the world. You don’t refute the evidence. You discredit the institution. Then you wait for the troll armies to do the rest.

Credit to the NUJP for threading a needle that not everyone will appreciate. In their statement of solidarity, they noted that they have “reservations on how reports and research on disinformation may be used to minimize legitimate criticism of the US, which has its own influence operations.” That’s an honest and necessary caveat. The United States is not an innocent actor in global information dynamics — Reuters itself revealed that the U.S. ran a covert campaign during the pandemic, creating hundreds of fake social media accounts impersonating Filipinos to discredit China’s Sinovac vaccine. Any serious conversation about foreign interference in Philippine public life has to include that reality.

But NUJP was equally clear: “When a government does it, especially when done in apparent coordination with partisan social media networks, that is an attempt at intimidation and harassment.” Both things can be true. The Philippines can scrutinize all foreign influence operations — American, Chinese, or otherwise — without granting any of them a pass.

The deeper problem is that the Philippines still has no comprehensive legislation addressing foreign interference. Australia faced a similar reckoning in 2018 when evidence of Chinese influence operations triggered the passage of counter-interference laws, including a Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme requiring organizations receiving foreign government funding or direction to register and disclose those connections. It wasn’t perfect — a parliamentary review later found weak enforcement and low registration numbers — but it gave the Australian government tools it didn’t have before.

The Philippines has nothing comparable. The Diplomat reported in January on Beijing’s “invisible network” of United Front operations here, documenting how CCP-linked civic groups and media outlets operate with direct ties to the United Front Work Department. The challenge is doing this without stoking anti-Chinese Filipino sentiment — a distinction that matters enormously in a country where ethnically Chinese citizens have contributed deeply to national life.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. The Philippines ranked 116th out of 180 countries on the 2025 RSF World Press Freedom Index — an 18-place improvement and its best showing in 21 years, but still classified as a “difficult situation.” The political indicator scored 39.62, classified as “very serious.” The economic indicator was worse at 39.58, reflecting newsrooms that are financially fragile and journalists who are poorly paid.

Cyabra, a disinformation analysis firm, found that as much as 45 percent of online discussions during the 2025 elections came from inauthentic accounts. That’s the environment into which the Chinese Embassy is pouring its attacks on credible journalism. The ground is already soft.

For community newsrooms like this one, the implications are direct. If a foreign embassy can attack one of the country’s most established investigative outlets and face no meaningful consequence beyond diplomatic language, what does that signal to a reporter in Iloilo covering Chinese-owned POGOs, or to a stringer in Palawan writing about maritime incursions? The chilling effect doesn’t require a formal threat. It just requires the perception that the cost of this kind of reporting is higher than the benefit.

CPJ’s Shawn Crispin got it right: “Sustained diplomatic pressure of this type sends an intimidating message to every newsroom in the Philippines against critical coverage of China.”

PCIJ got it right, too: the embassy’s reaction only lends credence to the story. If the reporting were baseless, Beijing would have ignored it. Instead, they mobilized. That tells you everything.

The Philippines needs more than statements of solidarity — though those matter. It needs foreign interference legislation with teeth, a serious public conversation about information sovereignty that covers FIMI from all directions, and newsrooms willing to do the work even when the cost is personal and ugly. Cabato did that work. She shouldn’t have to do it alone.