‘Laughable, cynical’: Filipinos pan Chinese coronavirus music video as South China Sea propaganda

Penned by the Chinese ambassador, Iisang Dagat (One Sea), was supposed to celebrate ties between the two nations

Instead, its accompanying YouTube video featuring images of Covid-19 aid is being seen as a cynical attempt to distract from Beijing’s maritime actions

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A still image from the YouTube video of Iisang Dagat. Photo: YouTube

Published: 9:00pm, 27 Apr 2020Updated: 10:31pm, 27 Apr 2020

Thousands of Filipino social media users have panned a song written by China’s Ambassador to the Philippines titled Iisang Dagat (One Sea) that was meant to celebrate ties between the two nations, claiming that it instead makes crude references to Beijing’s maritime claims in the contested South China Sea.

Released on April 24 on the Chinese embassy’s Facebook page, a music video of the song, written by Ambassador Huang Xilian has Mandarin and Tagalog/Pilipino lyrics and captions and splices together images of health supplies sent by Beijing to Manila to help it cope with the outbreak of the coronavirus.

It features four singers: embassy staffer Xia Wenxin, Filipino singer Imelda Papin who was popular in the 1980s and is now a vice-governor of Camarines Sur province in the Philippines’ largest island of Luzon, Filipino-Chinese Singer Jhonvid Bangayan and Chinese actor Yubin from the television series The Untamed.

On YouTube on Monday, the video had 146,000 “dislikes” as opposed to 2,000 “likes.” Of the 20,000 comments, most were negative, describing the video as “propaganda”. More than 8,000 people signed a petition on Change.org demanding the video be taken down.

Newspaper columnist and Filipino-Chinese entrepreneur Wilson Lee Flores said the music video had the “wrong timing”.

The Philippines is battling a continued rise in coronavirus infections despite a lockdown of its largest island of Luzon, home to more than half of the population since mid-March. It has the highest mortality rate as a proportion of its population in Southeast Asia, with a death rate of 4.57 per million based on official reported figures.