🇨🇳China's Imperial Proconsul Speaks: 🇵🇭Filipinos should feel "fortunate" because, "If we want to use force, we may easily win." #China's ambassador to the #Philippines, Jing Quan, told Filipino journalists yesterday that they should "feel fortunate that you have a neighbor like China," explaining that "if we want to use force, we may easily win, but no, we will not choose to use force." This is not the language of a diplomat sent to respectfully negotiate with a sovereign nation, but of a proconsul sent to pacify an unruly colony. In the Roman Empire, a proconsul governed a conquered province, and his job was "pacification"--the Latin word for peace. The empire meant it literally: a province was only "at peace" only when its people stopped resisting imperial rule. A pacification campaign follows a familiar pattern: remind the people how much force you have and present your "restraint" as a gift; demonize those who resist as "troublemakers"; praise and reward the "grateful" locals who cooperate; blame unrest on outside "agitators"; and preach the virtues of accepting the imposed "peace." Observe how Beijing is following its pacification program for the West Philippine Sea: ✅ Threats of force: China says it "will not choose" to use force, yet its coast guard and militia routinely do so. Last October a coast guard ship water-cannoned and rammed a Philippine fisheries vessel anchored off Pag-asa, an island with a civilian population. In July, a Chinese officer struck a Philippine Navy sailor on the head with a baton near Ayungin Shoal. Last month a coast guard ship rammed another fisheries vessel delivering fuel to fishermen just 54 nautical miles off Palawan. Beijing calls this "law enforcement", but the message is explicit: be grateful we're *only* injuring your sailors and damaging your ships. In this narrative, you see, restraint is not a duty under the UN Charter or even the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, but a favor the imperial power grants and can punitively withdraw from ungrateful subjects. ✅ Blaming the troublemakers: Every pacification campaign needs a few rabble-rousers to demagogue and discredit, so it picks a vocal few and makes silencing them the price of “peace.” Foreign Minister Wang Yi laments how "certain forces ... deliberately stir up trouble". The embassy calls Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro the "real troublemaker" and accuses Rear Admiral Jay Tarriela of "poisoning public opinion," even asking whether he has "something wrong with his head." The Global Times dismisses them as "a handful of buffoons" and wants Manila to "exercise stricter discipline" over their remarks. ✅ Naming the outside agitators: Empires routinely attribute indigenous resistance to nefarious foreign forces. Moscow called Hungary's 1956 uprising a Western imperialist plot. Beijing blamed Tibet's 2008 protests on the "Dalai clique" and Hong Kong's 2019 protests on America's "black hand." The charge turns patriotic citizens who resist colonial rule into foreign agents & their legitimate grievances into foreign schemes. In the West Philippine Sea, the colonial troublemakers are "parroting external talking points" to "serve the interests of their masters" and "act on the instructions of external forces." ✅ The cooperative locals: A benevolent proconsul rewards “friends” who help pacify the resistance. "Friends of the Chinese Embassy" awards honor cooperative local media figures as well as other civic, business and education leaders. Last year, officials of the Federation of Filipino-Chinese Associations of the Philippines took their oaths of office directly from China's previous ambassador. His successor, Jing Quan, summoned executives from 8 Chinese-language news outlets to the embassy just after arriving, where they pledged to "cooperate closely" with the embassy. At Ateneo University just days ago, Ambassador Jing urged the assembled representatives of universities, Confucius Institutes, Chinese-language schools and community groups to "resolutely do the right thing". ✅ The promised peace: "We love peace," Jing proclaimed, just a week after his coast guard spent nearly 10 hours forcibly obstructing a medical evacuation from Ayungin Shoal--before graciously giving the Philippines "permission" to evacuate its own sailor from its own outpost inside its own exclusive economic zone. Beijing has long pledged to make the South China Sea "a sea of peace, friendship and cooperation," and now calls for a "new narrative" of peace. But peace, in the new-narrative imperial vocabulary, means exactly what it meant for Rome: Philippine waters will be "at peace" when Filipinos stop resisting China's claims to its waters and the legions deployed to pacify them. A diplomat seeks to persuade a sovereign government through respectful negotiation. A proconsul pacifies a population under the ever-present threat of violent action. The Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs noted that the ambassador's "poor choice of words" would "seem to convey a thinly veiled threat of the use of force." The DFA was being very diplomatic. Jing's words were hardly a one-off slip of the tongue. In January, the embassy warned Filipinos to "think about Ukraine, Venezuela, Gaza, and Greenland," and said "the Philippines should feel fortunate to have a neighbor like China." In May, Jing himself made the same argument in print, and this month he said it on camera. That's because in a pacification campaign, the threat of force is central to the message. Pacification follows occupation, and China's occupation of the West Philippine Sea is real and accelerating. The attached maps clearly show the China Coast Guard's sovereignty assertions blanketing the sea across the West Philippine Sea, and now even enveloping the Philippines' northernmost province of Batanes. Beijing is turning to the population on shore to persuade them to accept this maritime occupation as permanent, and to be grateful it isn't even more violent. The Philippines is a sovereign country with its own internationally recognized exclusive economic zone and a binding UN-sanctioned arbitration ruling that upholds its maritime entitlements. Officials who defend these rights are not troublemakers, and Filipinos owe no gratitude to the imperial power that stole their sea. "The Chinese Embassy is not a guest," the embassy wrote this week. "It is the representative of China." I’ve worked in embassies, and we always understood that we were always to speak and behave accordingly, as guests of the countries that accepted our credentials. President Marcos accepted Jing Quan's credentials last December. He was accredited as ambassador to a sovereign nation, not appointed as imperial proconsul to pacify a renegade province.