Teodoro blasts China over criticism of drills with Japan
Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. on Friday slammed China for its hypocrisy and bullying of neighbors when it criticized Japan’s participation in the just-concluded “Balikatan” (shoulder-to-shoulder) exercise.
Teodoro said China’s bullying of its neighbors is the greater threat to the stability of the Southeast Asian region and this has been shown by Beijing’s actions in the West Philippine Sea and elsewhere in the region.
“What are they doing in the West Philippine Sea and in other places? They are doing the same thing to Vietnam. Recently, they also did it to Malaysia and Indonesia,” Teodoro said.
The defense chief also accused China of engaging in espionage, cybercrime, human trafficking and industrial espionage activities in several Southeast Asian countries, while criticizing the quality of Chinese-made products entering the region.
Teodoro dismissed China’s objections to Japan’s firing of Type 88 surface-to-ship missiles during the Balikatan Exercise in Ilocos Norte.
“It is surprising coming from China, which is a dictatorship and whose military suppresses its own people,” Teodoro told reporters on the sidelines of the Exercise Balikatan 2026 closing ceremony.
“The messages China is putting out, nobody listens to them or believes them anymore. These are messages intended to deceive their own citizens.”
China’s foreign ministry earlier criticized the missile drill, saying such activities threatened regional peace and stability.
Coersive activities
But Adm. Samuel Paparo, chief of the US Indo-Pacific Command, said that Southeast Asia indeed faces a “dangerous environment” marked by coercion and territorial disputes.
“We’ve seen coercive activities. We’ve seen the penetration of territorial waters. We’ve seen unilateral announcements of excessive claims … We see that backed up with force,” Paparo said.
“I think the signs are there that we do live in dangerous times in the Indo-Pacific,” he said, adding that “active coercion” was ongoing in the region.
At the same time, Armed Forces chief Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr. said many members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) were already participating as observers, even if their involvement was limited to humanitarian assistance and disaster response
“If you notice, most of the Asean countries are participants in the international observer program,” Brawner said in the same briefing. “We have the Phil-Indo arrangement between the Philippines and Indonesia. We also have Indomalphi—Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines,” Brawner said.
“We are not excluding anyone from the Balikatan exercise. We welcome as many countries as possible,” he added.
