When Beijing Ran Out of Arguments, It Resorted to a Racist Monkey Cartoon

Screenshots from the controversial AI-generated video “The Philippine Politicians Karaoke Show,” published by Chinese state media outlet China Daily on July 10, 2026. Released to mock the 10th anniversary of the 2016 Arbitral Award, the video resurrects archaic colonial-era racial slurs by depicting a Filipino in a Barong Tagalog and salakot as a monkey being controlled by foreign powers before being blasted by a water cannon. Photo: PhilStar Global

July 17, 2026 – Quezon City, NCR, Philippines

Article by Whesley Samar

Governance and International Relations | Editorial | West Philippine Sea

When a global superpower runs out of historical evidence, exhausts its international law, and has no logical arguments left, it resorts to a racist cartoon monkey.

On July 10, 2026, days before the tenth anniversary of the landmark arbitral ruling that invalidated its sweeping South China Sea claims, Chinese state outlet China Daily posted an AI-generated video depicting a Filipino as a monkey, forced by cartoon hands labeled "USA" and "Japan" to defend the ruling, then thrown into the sea and blasted with a water cannon. The Department of Foreign Affairs condemned it as racist and dehumanizing and demanded its removal. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Jay Tarriela called it what it is: an attempt to belittle an entire people, dressed up as satire.

It is crude, it is offensive, and above all, it is revealing. This is not the behavior of a confident regional power. It is the reflex of a government that has lost the legal argument and knows it.

To the international observer, the South China Sea dispute is often framed in dry, legalistic terms: exclusive economic zones, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the 2016 Arbitral Award. But behind the diplomatic handshakes, Beijing's state media has now put its actual attitude toward Filipinos on public display.

Before you steal a neighbor's backyard, you must first convince your public that the neighbor is sub-human. By portraying Filipinos as mindless primates, state-sanctioned media aims to desensitize the Chinese domestic audience. It prepares them to cheer when real-world Chinese coast guard vessels aggressively ram wooden boats or blind Filipino sailors with military-grade lasers.

There is also a specific cowardice in the choice of medium. Generative AI gives propagandists a shield: if the backlash is severe enough, the material can be waved away as an algorithmic misstep rather than an editorial decision made by a state-run outlet with an editorial staff. It is 21st-century technology deployed to launder 19th-century colonial caricature, the "brute" and "monkey" tropes long used across Asia and the Pacific to dehumanize colonized peoples, with a plausible-deniability coat of paint.

Faced with something this crude, the instinct to answer in kind is understandable. It is tempting to let anger write the response, to meet a racist caricature with a racist caricature of our own.

We should not.

If a petulant neighbor slaps you on one cheek, turning the other is not submission. It is refusing to hand him the fight he came for.

Reciprocal racism does not embarrass Beijing. It hands its propagandists exactly the narrative they want: two Southeast Asian neighbors slinging slurs, moral equivalence restored, and the actual legal record, the one China keeps losing, pushed out of the frame. Restraint here is not weakness; it is the discipline that keeps the argument on the ground where the Philippines is strongest.

So what does an effective response look like, beyond a diplomatic statement?

First, the DFA and the Department of Information and Communications Technology should press platforms, Meta, TikTok, X, to enforce their own hate-speech policies against the video's continued circulation, on the narrow, content-specific grounds already articulated: dehumanizing racial caricature, not political criticism of Chinese policy. That distinction matters. A government pushing to remove content because it is racist is on defensible ground; a government pushing to remove content because it is critical is not, and Manila should be careful not to blur the two, since the precedent it sets will eventually be invoked against Philippine state media as well.

Second, Manila should raise the video at ASEAN and the UN, not merely as a bilateral grievance but as an instance of a colonial-era racial trope, the same one long used to demean Southeast Asians generally, being revived by a regional power against a neighbor. That framing is more likely to generate regional solidarity than a purely bilateral complaint.

Third, and most durably: the Philippines' actual advantage in this dispute is the 2016 ruling and the record of Chinese conduct since. The cartoon does not change either. The proportionate response is not louder outrage but a steady, well-evidenced public record, the ruling, the water-cannon incidents, the lasing of Filipino sailors, that makes Beijing's video look exactly like what it is: a state running out of arguments and reaching for a slur instead.

No AI-generated cartoon redraws the coordinates of the West Philippine Sea. The ruling stands. The record stands. A caricature does not undo either. It just tells us, plainly, what Beijing thinks it can get away with.