South China Sea tensions are turning Chinese-language education into a security issue in the Philippines, straining civilian ties and exposing schools’ dependence on foreign teaching support, analysts told Radio Free Asia.
At the beginning of this month, reports surfaced that around 150 teachers, mostly instructors of Mandarin Chinese who worked in schools that serve the Philippines’ Chinoy, or ethnic Chinese, communities, were returning to China after Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. and other officials cautioned that educational exchanges with Beijing could potentially lead to national security threats.
The exodus was the result of the teachers’ families requesting that they return to China according to the Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry, a commercial organization serving ethnic Chinese communities in the Philippines. The federation and the Chinese Embassy approved the requests.
In a report on the SeaLight webpage, the maritime transparency project’s executive director Ray Powell characterized the exodus as an organized recall by Beijing that uses “Filipinos of Chinese heritage” as “a card to be played.”
China and the Philippines have become increasingly at odds over their territorial disputes in the South China Sea, and Beijing has been known to use “gray zone” tactics – pressure that can include anything except armed conflict – to advance its claims.
“China’s gray-zone pressure at sea and its political warfare ashore are intertwined, and this episode shows the connective tissue,” Powell told RFA.
The number of affected teachers could be higher than initially disclosed. China’s Ambassador to the Philippines Jing Quan put it closer to 180 while delivering an address to the 20th anniversary celebration of the Confucius Institute at Ateneo de Manila University.
Jing also rejected allegations that Chinese-language education amounted to political infiltration, calling them “baseless and absurd.”
But Powell said in his report that he and Teodoro had concerns about China-linked education programs being tied to China’s United Front Work Department – the strategy and network by which Beijing projects its political influence overseas.
Reports and rhetoric
Maritime confrontation provided the backdrop, while specific developments involving a Chinese university helped trigger the scrutiny of the programs, Aniello Iannone, a lecturer in international relations and general secretary of the ASEAN Studies Center at Indonesia’s President University, told RFA.
“The spark came from a university symposium and a think-tank report,” he told RFA.
Iannone was referring to the symposium hosted in late June at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China, where scholars advanced a claim that Batanes, the Philippines’ northernmost province, belonged to China through Taiwan.
In July, Powell published a report on the SeaLight website that provided evidence linking Jinan University to training teachers for Chinese-language schools in the Philippines – 43 of 56 Filipino teacher trainees sent to China in 2024 through the Philippine Chinese Education Research Center, he said in the report.
The Filipino trainees were not the mainland Chinese teachers who were recalled, Powell told RFA.
“I haven’t found these programs directly teaching Beijing’s South China Sea claims, and I won’t allege it,” he said.
Instead, he argued that affiliated organizations can support Beijing’s objectives through broader political messaging, including appeals for peace and dialogue that he interprets as encouraging acceptance of Chinese pressure at sea.
Powell views the teacher recall as political pressure that directs anger over disrupted lessons toward Beijing’s critics. But he said he had not seen the teachers’ return linked to any Philippine concession over the South China Sea.
Iannone said the available evidence required more careful distinctions.
“Before acting, authorities should separate a structural link, such as who trained a teacher, from conduct, such as what was taught, and publish what they find,” he said.
Lessons from the U.S. backlash
The controversy in the Philippines echoes concerns that drove a backlash against Confucius Institutes in the United States, but the mechanisms differ.
Confucius Institutes are Chinese government-backed partnerships with overseas universities that provide Chinese-language teaching and cultural programs. Their funding arrangements and ties to Beijing raised concerns in the United States about transparency, academic freedom and potential political influence on campuses.
A 2023 U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that the number of institutes at American universities and colleges had fallen from about 100 in 2019 to fewer than five today. Schools most commonly cited potential losses of federal funding and external pressure as contributing to closures. Many also reported reduced language-learning opportunities afterward.
The Philippine teacher-placement programs involved in the recall are distinct from Confucius Institutes.
Iannone said the American experience can be seen primarily as a warning about how funding pressure and governance concerns can drive decisions even when allegations of misconduct remain unresolved.
He proposed a public register of educational agreements, funding and staffing covering every foreign government supporting Philippine education, alongside full local control over curriculum and hiring.
Funding alternatives would also be necessary, he said. Greater scrutiny alone would not solve schools’ dependence on overseas teachers.
“A more durable setup would train Filipino Mandarin teachers at home, draw on more than one partner – Taiwan included – and put every agreement on the public record,” he said.
Communities caught in the middle
The consequences could extend beyond disrupted classes.
Iannone warned that public debate could blur distinctions between Chinese state institutions, Chinese-language schools and people of Chinese heritage.
“What worries me more is how quickly the language slides, from PRC state bodies to ‘Chinese schools’ to ‘the Chinese,’” he said.
Teodoro, the most well-known Philippine government official who expressed concerns over the educational exchanges, prefaced them with a warning against xenophobia and said that the information the government had on the exchanges did not necessarily constitute wrongdoing.
But prolonged suspicion of China or Chinese could affect Filipinos who earned degrees in China, potentially damaging their careers if employers or institutions began treating their education as evidence of disloyalty,” Enrico Cau, a Taipei-based independent security researcher, told RFA.
He cautioned against assuming that changes in outlook after studying abroad necessarily resulted from organized political influence.
“Mindset shifts in those cases can result from spontaneous changes of mind, rather than from deliberate attempts to influence them,” he said.
Cau nevertheless considers a broad rupture unlikely. Educational exchanges form only one part of a relationship sustained by business networks, institutional connections and extensive personal ties, he said.
He described competing approaches within Philippine policy: a confrontational effort to check Chinese assertiveness and quieter diplomacy seeking to preserve economic and civilian relationships.
“These two souls seem to coexist in some way, producing a mix of constructive and dissonant results,” he said.
Powell said the recall could discourage oversight or prompt schools to seek different partners. He would not predict which outcome would prevail.
Iannone argued that preserving educational ties required arrangements able to withstand continued maritime confrontation.
“The influence concerns should be investigated properly, which means findings the public can actually read,” he said. “Otherwise the Philippines risks spending a great deal of political energy on Mandarin teachers while the harder problems at sea stay where they are.”
Edited by Eugene Whong.
