Beijing’s credibility crisis (3)

Public opinion polls from the past three years indicate that Filipinos do not trust Beijing and have shifted away from perceiving China as a positive influence and model, according to Beijing’s Global Media Influence report that Washington-based conservative think tank Freedom House released recently.

In July 2020, polling company Social Weather Stations found that Filipinos’ trust in China fell from “poor” to “bad,” representing the lowest level reported since April 2016 and a decrease of nine points from survey responses recorded in December 2019.

Among the revelations in the poll was that three out of five Filipino respondents believed that Chinese officials withheld information on Covid-19 from the world, and 70 percent of respondents believed China should be held accountable for the pandemic.

In 2022, a survey conducted by the Singaporean ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute found that 76 percent of Filipino respondents expressed concern over China’s economic influence in Southeast Asia, and only 1.5 percent viewed it as a “benign and benevolent power.”

Multiple surveys confirmed that Filipinos had greater trust in and preferred the United States and other countries over China as a bilateral partner.

An SWS survey from September 2018 found that 87 percent of Filipinos considered it important for the country to regain control of the Chinese-occupied reefs.

More recently, a Pulse Asia survey indicated that Filipinos believe the Marcos administration should work with the United States, followed by Australia and Japan, amid the continuing tensions in the West Philippine Sea.

The survey conducted from 3 to 7 December asked 1,200 respondents about the countries or organizations they want the Philippines to work with, considering the implications of the tensions in the WPS on the country’s security and economy. Only 10 percent favored working with China.

An earlier poll showed that 80 percent of the people surveyed agreed that alliances should be formed over the maritime friction.

Surveys showed on average, nine in 10 Filipinos trust the United States.

A June 2021 SWS survey showed that such sentiment remained strong: 69 percent of the population supported the move to build structures on disputed territory to counter China’s influence.

However, that particular survey also indicated that 40 percent of the population remained undecided as to whether Beijing’s relationship with former President Rodrigo Duterte was beneficial.

“Public distrust of China has led to some xenophobic backlash, creating an atmosphere of fear for some in the Chinese-speaking community, as well as reducing the availability of Chinese cultural products in the Philippines,” the Freedom House report stated.

Potential developments related to Beijing’s media influence in the Philippines that must be closely monitored include increasing the Chinese state media footprint on social media.

Filipinos tend to be highly skeptical of China, and China’s Communist Party, which Freedom House suggested, was rooted partly in the legacy of the US influence in the Philippines.

“The Chinese embassy’s music video ‘Iisang Dagat’ (One Sea), which promoted Chinese medical assistance and bilateral friendship amid the pandemic, also drew criticism from Filipinos on social media who saw it as blatant propaganda for Beijing’s stance on the territorial dispute,” Freedom House indicated.

The video was released on 23 April 2020 via the social media accounts of the Chinese embassy and several Philippine state-owned media outlets, earning 100,000 dislikes on YouTube in less than a week.

In April 2021, the same agency that helped produce the video entered into an agreement with mainstream cable channel ABS-CBN News for a trilingual (Filipino, Mandarin, English) daily newscast. Still, the agreement was canceled after a public outcry.

A poll by Reuters and Oxford University found that only 32 percent of news consumers in the Philippines trust the news, one of the lowest figures among the 40 countries examined.

“This lack of trust can be a double-edged sword, as it provides both resistance to Chinese state narratives and vulnerability to disinformation,” Freedom House pointed out.

China’s leveraging of the economic bonanza that cooperation and coopting could bring only serves to further degrade the confidence of Filipinos in its closest neighbor on the continent.