Gentlemen?

Gentlemen? | Daily Tribune

Now is a good time to remind our noisy “guests” over at the Chinese embassy what the sage Confucius said about what makes for a gentleman, or “junzi” in Chinese.

In the Analects, Confucius said: “If simplicity prevails over refinement, you have a bumpkin. When refinement prevails over simplicity, you have a bore. Only when simplicity and refinement are in balance, then you will have a junzi.”

Confucius here generally means a “junzi” is one who balances words and substance.

Our loudly complaining Chinese guests, however, may abhor Confucius. But we simply lacked the time to look up a similar quote from Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping or Xi Jinping.

Be that as it may, Confucius’ advice is apt insofar as the informal, colorful, provocative, and aggressive posts that our Chinese embassy guests escalated in recent days against Filipino officials and lawmakers on Facebook and X.

So, why “junzi”? Because scores of Filipino officials and lawmakers generally perceive the recent nasty words of “gentlemen” officials over at the Chinese embassy as crude and boorish.

By the way, boorish language is what outspoken Coast Guard spokesman Jay Terriela often endures, who, at last count, has been subjected to at least 27 offensive social media posts including bizarre memes, many of which were highly personal.

Speaking of which, another recent irregular post would have to be that of a Chinese embassy spokesman—whose country ranks 178th out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index — lecturing on free speech to officials and lawmakers of a country that ranked 116th in the same index last year.

Anyway, it’s important to first get a firm grip on our guests’ pronounced garish informal voices, rather than the usual diplomatic tones, on social media platforms.

Their tones appear, as the BBC reports, “to show a new trend of the embassy tailoring its external messaging in English to the Philippines and the wider world rather than using more circumspect, staid, and formal language aimed at domestic audiences in China.”

That immediately means their somewhat marked “arrogance” is meant to provoke strong reactions from us.

Nonetheless, there are many other nuances and implications to the Chinese embassy’s changed tones, too many to tackle here.

But the striking nuance for us seems to be that Chinese embassy officials are speaking out of two sides of their mouths at the same time.

In such cases, it raises a suspicious intent to deliberately confuse us as to how we are supposed to respond to their true intentions on the tense Philippines-China relations.

Which provokes the stink of an entrapment operation, of provoking us into taking wrong diplomatic turns if we aren’t sufficiently careful.

Those suspicions become clearer by the distinctive fact that Chinese embassy officials exclusively confine their new-found notoriety for going off-script solely on anything goes social media, while Chinese Ambassador Jing Quan calls for dialogue, for formal sitdowns, and talks on the usual diplomatic channels.

Such engineered confusion thus raises the question: Who do we take seriously? The seemingly “wolf warrior” spokespersons of the embassy or the Chinese ambassador?

Despite the dilemma, however, it also can be a case of two sides of the same coin — that which says coarse representatives of our big neighbor are steering us into junking our brave stand of “you’re stealing our territory and you want us to shut up,” as military historian Jose Antonio Claudio put it.