Before he was elected to Malacañang, President Duterte promised to use a Jet Ski to reclaim a disputed reef seized by China. Since taking office in June, he has extended the hand of friendship.
The tough-talking Mr. Duterte will bring up to 400 business leaders, including some of the Philippines’s wealthiest tycoons, on a four-day visit to Beijing starting on Tuesday. In doing so, he’ll become the first Philippine leader invited to the capital by Chinese President Xi Jinping for one-on-one talks.
“Mr. Duterte’s visit is the strongest signal so far that tensions between China and the Philippines have eased off,” said Li Jinming, professor of international relations at Xiamen University’s Research School of Southeast Asian Studies. “He’s, right now, distancing the country from the US, but some of that is just rhetoric. We don’t think he will or can cut the US off. We’d be curious to know how long these icy ties can last. It might just be a temporary thing.”
President Duterte’s visit will provide an opportunity for a reset of relations with the Philippines’s biggest trading partner, which have been strained by territorial disputes in the South China Sea, where as many as six claimants are vying for fish, oil and gas. In a speech on Sunday, Mr. Duterte said he looked forward to exchanging views with Chinese leaders on how to further improve relations, and pledged not to give up on his nation’s claims in the waters.
Shifting stances
Even though Filipinos of Chinese descent make up some of the Philippines’s most powerful families, China’s relationship with the Southeast Asian nation nosedived in 2012, after Beijing effectively took control of the Scarborough Shoal, a triangle of reefs and rocks just 340 kilometers from Manila. The move prompted then-President Benigno S. Aquino III to take a firm stance against China while moving closer to the US, its top military ally.
President Duterte has sought to shift that stance since taking office, threatening to downgrade military ties and using foul language to repudiate concerns of human-rights abuses in his war on drugs that has seen more than 3,000 people killed. In terms of relations with China, Mr. Duterte’s policies are closer to the days when former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo ran the country from 2001 to 2010.
Arroyo had cut a deal for China’s Export-Import Bank to finance a $500-million rail project linking Manila to fast-growing provinces to the north, which was eventually scrapped under Aquino. She also approved a 2004 agreement on joint seismic surveys in the South China between China National Offshore Oil Corp. and the Philippine National Oil Co. that has since lapsed.
Business ties
Aquino made two visits to China, once in 2011 to meet with then-President Hu Jintao, and in 2014 to attend an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit. A planned visit by Aquino to China in 2013 was canceled due to tensions over the South China Sea. Arroyo made one state visit to China in 2004.
Mr. Duterte’s business delegation includes San Miguel Corp. President Ramon S. Ang; JG Summit Holdings Inc. President Lance Gokongwei; Enrique Razon, chairman of gaming company Bloomberry Resorts Corp. and global port operator International Container Terminal Services Inc.; Hans Sy, son of the Philippines’s richest man Henry Sy, who controls SM Investments Corp.; and liquor and tobacco magnate Lucio Tan, who also owns Philippine Airlines Inc.
“Both will try to avoid the mention of the South China Sea ruling, as that’s a nonstarter if two countries want to bring the bilateral ties forward,” Li said of the two leaders. “President Duterte will throw the word out there that he wants the Philippine fishermen’s fishing rights to be protected in the waters around the Scarborough Shoal, on which China may say joint fishing can be arranged.”
In return for not raising the South China Sea ruling in his talks with Xi, Mr. Duterte will be hoping he can persuade China to bring much-needed investment to lagging infrastructure projects in the Philippines. Voters have grown increasingly frustrated with worsening traffic jams, outdated public transport services and patchy electricity supply.
China’s Foreign Ministry said on October 12 it hopes President Duterte’s visit will help increase political mutual trust and strengthen pragmatic cooperation. At least a dozen agreements have been finalized for the visit, according to Zhao Jianhua, China’s ambassador to the Philippines.
“The Chinese side attaches importance to developing relations with the Philippines and stands ready to work with them to advance the bilateral relations in a sound and steady manner and create more benefits for both the two countries and peoples,” Foreign Ministry Spokesman Geng Shuang said at a briefing last week.
China said on Friday it wanted to strengthen its cooperation with the Philippines on combating drug use, with authorities planning for Mr. Duterte to attend several activities related to the fight against drugs during his stay in Beijing. Drug-control agencies in both countries have initiated talks that are soon expected to deliver outcomes, the foreign ministry said.
‘Soft ball’
References to the South China Sea in the joint statement will likely be vague, said Kang Lin, a deputy director of the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, China’s only state-backed research institution dedicated to research in the disputed waters.
“The statement may pledge to boost dialogue and communication on mutually concerned matters in order to control disagreements,” Kang said. “They may say they’ve reached consensus on jointly exploring the resources in the South China Sea. In one word: Soft ball approach is the way to go.”
Loans for railway or power-grid projects in the Philippines could be facilitated through institutions, such as the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) said Kang, adding that China may also roll out measures to boost agricultural imports, such as bananas and pineapples, from the Philippines.
“The AIIB, for us, is the No. 1 priority,” Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez III told reporters. “We will discuss with them our whole plan and we will match it with theirs. We’re just new, and I don’t know exactly what they want to do. We have to go to them and see what their priorities are also so we can match our priorities with them.”
The President acknowledged that he can be impeached if he concedes his country’s territorial claims in the South China Sea in talks with Xi and other Chinese leaders this week in Beijing.
President Duterte said in a speech before leaving for Brunei Darussalam and China that, while he will not bargain the Philippines’s territorial claims, “there will be no hard impositions,” as he tries to renew his nation’s strained friendship with China and intensify two-way trade and investment. Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonio T. Carpio, who has done extensive studies on the territorial conflict, warned last week that conceding the Philippines’s sovereign rights in the disputed waters is a ground for the President’s impeachment. Carpio said China may ask the Duterte administration to acknowledge Chinese sovereignty in contested South China Sea territories before agreeing to any business deals or joint exploration of potential sea resources.
Asked to react to Carpio’s warning, Mr. Duterte said he agreed with him. “He is correct. I would be impeached,” the President said at a news conference at the international airport in the southern city of Davao before embarking on his two-nation trip.
“I said we cannot barter which is not ours [or what] belongs to the Filipino people,” said President Duterte, who is a lawyer and once served as a government prosecutor. “I cannot be the sole authorized agent, for that is not allowed under the Constitution.”
Mr. Duterte, who was Davao’s mayor before assuming the presidency in June, has walked a tightrope in trying to mend damaged relations with China and defending his country’s claims in the disputed South China Sea.
In July an international arbitration tribunal ruled that China’s massive claims to the sea on historical grounds were not valid under a 1982 United Nations treaty, handing a landmark victory to the Philippines, which had filed a complaint against Beijing under President Duterte’s predecessor. The tribunal in The Hague specifically ruled that China has violated the rights of Filipino fishermen, who have been blocked by the Chinese coast guard from fishing in the disputed Scarborough Shoal, off the northwest Philippines.
“The international decision will be taken up,” Mr. Duterte said. But he added without elaborating that “there will be no hard impositions.” When the tribunal’s July 12 decision was announced, President Duterte did not make any celebratory remarks that he said could offend China, which has ignored the decision as a sham and campaigned to discourage governments from recognizing the ruling.
Mr. Duterte has not pressed the Chinese government to comply with the decision. Labeling himself a left-wing politician, President Duterte has announced step to scale back the Philippines’s military engagements with the US, including his opposition to joint patrols with the US Navy in the South China Sea and joint combat exercises with American forces. He has lashed out at President Barack Obama for criticizing his deadly anti-drug campaign, but has reached out to China and Russia.
Mr. Duterte will travel to Brunei before making a three-day visit to China that starts on Tuesday in the southern city of Xiamen. He’ll then fly to Beijing, where, President Duterte said, “We will stick toward our claim. We do not bargain anything.”
Aside from Xi, Mr. Duterte said he would also meet Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and National People’s Congress Chairman Zhang Dejiang. “This is a matter of international comity when you go there, we only want to talk,” he said. “And remember, there are only two options: We go to trouble or we talk.”
“We cannot choose the path there in between,” said President Duterte, who has ruled out any war with the Asian superpower. Bloomberg News, AP