Manila Protests Chinese Videos as Southeast Asian Ministers Gather

The Philippines lodged a formal protest over videos published by the Chinese state outlet China Daily that Manila said depicted Filipinos as monkeys, Al Jazeera reported, a dispute that comes amid continuing confrontations between the two countries in the South China Sea. Beijing and Manila contest overlapping claims to waters and features that Manila says lie within its exclusive economic zone.

The friction comes as Manila prepares to host a series of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) foreign ministers' meetings. The Philippines expects to welcome Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio, among others, the Russian state agency TASS reported.

The contrast is telling. A bilateral dispute over a set of videos sits within a much larger contest over who sets the terms of order in maritime Southeast Asia, and the gathering will bring the major powers competing for influence in the region into the same meetings.

For Southeast Asian states, the meetings are an exercise in balancing. They rely on China for trade and on the United States for security, and each maritime incident sharpens the pressure to choose sides they would prefer to avoid choosing.