18/07/2026
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About thirteen years ago I worked the graveyard shift at a BPO company. It was the usual routine to solve problems, calm angry customers, and apologize for things I did not break. One night a Texan called to complain about a $19 charge on his credit card. I pulled up his account and there it was. He had approved the expedited shipping fee himself because apparently patience was not included in his order. I explained it politely. I explained it again. Then I explained it slowly.
When the facts refused to cooperate with his outrage he reached for the only thing left.
βYou are just a monkey from the Third World.β
Funny how that works. When people run out of evidence they go shopping for insults. China Daily just reminded the world that racism never really disappears. They released an AI generated cartoon portraying Filipinos as monkeys amid the West Philippine Sea dispute. Somewhere a room full of adults looked at one of history's oldest racist tropes and decided that this represents a rising global superpower.
This was not satire. Satire punches up. This punched down. Racism does not become sophisticated because a computer draws it instead of a cartoonist. The only thing AI accomplished was saving someone the effort of holding a pencil. Leaders persuade and convince, they do not reach into the dusty attic of colonial era racism and call it geopolitical analysis.
The irony is delicious. The same government that demands mutual respect on the world stage somehow misplaced the mutual part. That cartoon did not make Filipinos look smaller. It made China look insecure. Because power does not need to dehumanize people to make its point. Only weak arguments and fragile egos rely on that.
Thirteen years ago a man in Texas called me a monkey because he could not explain away his own $19 mistake. Today a state newspaper did the same thing. They both rely on the same flawed operating system of intellectual dishonesty. They believe that by debasing others they are elevating themselves. They spent billions on military modernization and propaganda only to have their superpower status brought down to the level of a petty keyboard warrior insult.
Artificial intelligence can mimic logic and rhetoric, but it can never simulate a shred of human dignity. If this is the best their algorithms can offer, they have lost the right to be taken seriously at all. Maybe the real lesson is not about what China thinks of us, but what they think of themselves, because you only reach for a mirror when you are terrified of what the world actually sees when they look at you. || Hanna Zapanta
