As China Coast Guard vessels harass Filipino fishermen and Philippine Coast Guard ships in the West Philippine Sea, another battle is waged online for the minds of Filipino citizens.
Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) contributor Regine Cabato exposed one of China’s tactics in this digital tug-of-war, releasing an exposé on a disinformation campaign coordinated by Beijing that used vloggers, fake accounts, and media personalities to push its narrative on the dispute.
In response, Deputy Spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in the Philippines Guo Wei issued a public statement on Facebook questioning the PCIJ’s credibility due to its past funding from the United States’ National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—a US government-funded grant-making foundation established in 1983 that provides funds to private non-governmental organizations to promote democracy internationally.
While the official NED website no longer publicizes a list of recipients, past records show that the PCIJ, along with other news sites such as Rappler, was a NED grant recipient from 2018 to 2020. However, a closer look at NED’s terms shows that this does not undermine a media partner’s editorial integrity.
Are they the same?
The European Union defines Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) as coordinated, manipulative, intentional, and foreign-directed attacks on democracy and society. Critically, it does not examine whether the narratives being pushed are false, but rather whether they are being covertly promoted by foreign actors. Under the established definition, FIMI must be linked to foreign entities, amplify content in a coordinated manner, be intentionally directed toward some objective, and manipulate or misrepresent what it actually is. Based on the framework, Philippine journalists receiving funds from NED are not equivalent to the tactics China employs.
NED functions solely as a grant-making entity, providing funding to its grantees while not obligating them to publish or censor content. This is in contrast with the Chinese Embassy’s implication that NED-funded outlets simply parrot US interests. The Grantee Guide, an operational document by NED governing all grant relationships, makes this explicit: “Although the source of funds for the grant originates with the US Congress and is awarded to NED through the Department of State, neither the US Government nor the US Department of State is authorized to impose any requirements or obligations on your organization related to the grant-funded project.” Moreover, this is supported by the NED’s 2023 grant-making provisions, which read “NED and the Grantee are independent parties, and neither is an agent, joint venture, or partner of the other.” It also explicitly prohibits funds being used for US propaganda.
By comparison, China’s tactics—which the embassy did not deny—relied on a coordinated campaign on automated, inauthentic accounts on social media that parroted China’s narrative on the West Philippine Sea. According to Meta, over 155 accounts, 11 pages, 9 groups, and six Instagram accounts posing as locals were used and were subsequently taken down for taking part in Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior. That ticks all the boxes.
If NED had never funded the PCIJ, that story would have emerged even without NED funding. Without China’s operations, however, those accounts and statements would not exist.
Skepticism is still warranted
This is not to say that the NED is beyond scrutiny. It is a selective, foreign entity that selects beneficiaries in an application process, and its project-specific grants will shape what topics and stories get covered.
The organization was explicitly created as an overt alternative to covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operations, a fact acknowledged by Allen Weinstein, NED’s first acting president. He acknowledged in a 1991 Washington Post interview that a lot of what NED does was done covertly by the CIA 25 years ago.
In a 2008 paper published in the journal “Communication for Development and Social Change,” researcher Michael James Barker warns that even when non-government organizations are independent of their backers, discriminatory grant-making influences the reach and longevity of media, which can become an effective geopolitical tool.
He notes that NED’s board has historically included names synonymous with US foreign policy rather than neutral democratic development, such as Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, and Paul Wolfowitz. Barker concludes that because the NED’s activities tend to align with US geopolitical priorities, foreign media funding of this kind should be treated as a political donation until proven otherwise.
The Chinese Embassy’s callout of NED is valid. However, the concern is not the false belief that NED is manipulating media organizations like the PCIJ to write what it wants. The concern lies in its selective grant-making process and how it might be ignoring neutral democratic interests in the name of US-aligned ones.
Under the FIMI framework, the distinction still remains. The fact that NED’s grant disclosures have historically been publicly available on its website shows that NED’s influence operates openly, through publicly available grant disclosures, without covert coordination or the creation of false personas. China’s documented operations in the Philippines did none of those things.
For Filipinos navigating competing foreign interests in their information space, the FIMI framework offers not a definitive verdict on who to trust, but a more precise set of questions to ask.
