The Economist July 10th 2021 Asia 39I
nthecoldwaroverthewarmwaters
of the South China Sea, one combatant,
the Philippines, has discovered a new
weapon for keeping its adversaries out of
the areas it claims: the voices of women.
On June 30th the Philippine Coast Guard
vessel Cabra spotted seven foreign craft,
five of them Chinese, in waters claimed
by both the Philippines and China. One
of the Cabra’s officers, Provisional Ensign
Gretch Mary Acuario, a woman, hailed
the foreign craft, and asked them to
identify themselves and state their in
tentions—a sort of nautical formal in
vitation to buzz off. Without waiting
around to answer, all seven craft scooted.
It was no fluke. The same officer had
pulled off a similar feat in April.
Ensign Acuario demonstrated what
the coast guard had suspected for a
while: that its women are more effective
with the spoken word than its men. The
suspicion was so strong that the coast
guard arranged a special course of train
ing, exclusively for women, as radio
operators. The course culminated in the
graduation of 81 female radio operators
just days before Ensign Acuario’s latest
triumph. ViceAdmiral Leopoldo Laroya
told the trainees that, in their inter
actions with foreigners, their voices were
less likely than men’s to raise tensions.
“We want our Angels of the Sea to be
come the voice of peaceful and rules
based order at sea, especially in our
country’s sensitive maritime frontiers,”
he declared.
The waters of the South China Sea
contain fish in abundance, lie above
deposits of oil and gas and are a busycorridorforshipscarryingmanyofthe
goods the world trades. The other littoral
states, although anxious to maintain
their claims, do not want to get into a
shooting war with China, which claims
most of the sea and has built artificial
islands bristling with missiles and fight
er jets to defend it. For the most part,
however, both China and the other
claimants try to assert themselves with
fishing boats or coastguard vessels, to
reduce the risk of escalation. Via radio or
loudhailers, each side tells the other it is
trespassing, and to clear off.
Why the voices of the Angels of the
Sea should be more persuasive is a mat
ter of speculation. The coastguard
spokesman, Commodore Armand Balilo,
explained to local media that a female
radiooperator’s voice “becomes sooth
ing. The environment becomes calm,
and no one is raising their voice.” The
Philippine National Police had set an
example by putting female officers in the
front rank of its riot squads, in the expec
tation that the mere sight of the women
would dissuade angry crowds from
attacking. The tactic works, usually.
Or perhaps the sex of the speaker
makes no difference at all. Chinese skip
pers may simply be heeding the whispers
of their own government warning them
to act with restraint in disputed waters
while there is still a chance that Rodrigo
Duterte, the Philippine president, will in
return weaken his country’s military
alliance with America. That alliance is a
far greater deterrent to Chinese asser
tiveness in disputed waters than a whole
choir of Angels of the Sea.TheSouthChinaSeaHark! The herald angels say “buzz off ”
M ANILA
The Philippines’ secret weapon against Chinese incursionsstartups, model themselves on their fore
runners in America’s Silicon Valley. They
promise a meritocratic idyll where work
ers refer to each other by their madeup
English names instead of their job titles,
are valued as individuals and are judged on
the basis of their ideas rather than the
hours spent at a desk. There are beanbags.
Yet a string of incidents in recent
months suggests that South Korean work
places—and bosses—are proving hard to
change. In February workers at Kakao took
to Blind, an app that allows verified em
ployees to whinge anonymously, to lam
bast their company’s peerrating system,
which they said encouraged personal at
tacks and poisoned the atmosphere. In
April employees at Krafton, the company
behind “Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds”,
a popular online game, petitioned the la
bour ministry to stop their boss forcing
them to work overtime without time off.
In May, an employee at Naver commit
ted suicide after being bullied at work,
causing outrage in the press, sermons
from concerned politicians and union
protests outside the company’s headquar
ters. Coupang, the country’s biggest deliv
ery service, which has long been criticised
for the conditions endured by its logistics
workers, faced a consumer boycott in June
after a blaze at one of its warehouses killed
a firefighter. Whitecollar employees
grumble about overbearing bosses and er
ratic decisionmaking at the firm.
Some observers attribute the misery to
growing pains at companies that are mak
ing the transition from startups to big cor
porations. One worker told a local news
outlet that Korean tech firms seemed to be
incorporating the worst aspects of Korean
corporate hierarchies coupled with the
American obsession with performance rat
ings. Others see the challenging work con
ditions as par for the course in a new in
dustry. “Nobody teaches you what the orig
inal process for something is because the
process probably doesn’t exist yet,” says Yu
Donghyun, a 27yearold startup worker
in Seoul. “You go to these places to grow
and take what you can from them and once
that’s over, you leave.”
The companies seem keen to be seen to
tackle the problem. Naver’s chief opera
tions officer resigned in June following an
inquest into the worker’s suicide. The
company promised to overhaul its man
agement structure. Kakao launched a con
sultation process for unhappy employees.
Krafton doled out extra holidays and said it
would look into whether employees were
working too much.
It may be that the firms are serious. Un
til it is clear that they are, disappointed
tech workers who cannot afford to take Mr
Yu’s advice to leave will have littlechoice
but to stick to the timehonoured method
of dealing with gapjil: grin and bearit.n