China courts Philippines leader Duterte amid signs of US rift

The Philippines president is visiting China but whether his focus is on building relations or his country’s infrastructure remains to be seen

The Philippines’ acid-tongued president, Rodrigo Duterte, will lead a major business delegation to China this week as Beijing attempts to lure into its orbit one of America’s key regional allies in a potential blow to Barack Obama’s “pivot” to Asia.

Hundreds of Filipino entrepreneurs, including some of the country’s top tycoons, are set to accompany Duterte on his three-day state visit during which he will be received by President Xi Jinping, another strongman leader some call China’s most powerful since Mao Zedong.

A spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry said Beijing hoped the visit would “help increase political mutual trust, strengthen pragmatic cooperation [and] extend traditional friendship”.

In a recent speech, Beijing’s ambassador to the Philippines heralded a new dawn for ties between the two countries.

“The clouds are fading away. The sun is rising over the horizon, and will shine beautifully on the new chapter of bilateral relations,” Zhao Jianhua told a reception in Manila.

Duterte’s mission to China follows a succession of anti-American outbursts from the 71-year-old, including calling Obama a “son of a whore” and telling the US president to “go to hell”.

Those withering statements have led some to conclude Duterte is plotting a historic diplomatic rupture with the Philippines’ long-standing ally, from which it gained independence in 1946.

At some point, “I will break up with America”, Duterte said in a recent speech at a synagogue in Manila. “I would rather go to Russia and to China.”

Speaking on the eve of Duterte’s visit to Beijing, the top US diplomat for east Asia, Daniel Russel, admitted Washington was still grappling with the policy implications of the Filipino leader’s “colourful” statements.

Bonnie Glaser, an Asia expert from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, said it was too soon to judge whether Duterte’s mission represented the start of a new diplomatic era in which Manila switched its allegiances to Beijing or was simply an attempt to play the world’s two biggest economies off against each other.

“I’m not sure anybody is completely clear what is in Duterte’s mind,” she said.

Even so, Glaser said Beijing would be celebrating how the Philippines’ leader had publicly spurned the country’s long-term ally.

“I think the Chinese are rather gleeful about the possibility of a loosening of the US-Philippines alliance. The Chinese believe the US has emboldened Manila to challenge China and has been instrumental in pulling the US into South China Sea issues. If China can successful defuse some of the tensions with the Philippines … then I think the Chinese hope they can reduce US involvement in the South China Sea.”

Nick Bisley, an international relations professor from Melbourne’s La Trobe University, said that for all the “surface-level fireworks” surrounding the Philippines’ president, he was in fact a pragmatic politician who would travel to China with clearly defined domestic objectives.

“He’s not going into this thinking he is some sort of Kissinger of the south Pacific.”

Rather, Duterte was hoping to secure billions of dollars of much-needed investment to address a looming infrastructure crisis. “He sees China as a pretty likely source of that.”

Duterte’s trip is the strongest hint yet of a stunning diplomatic volte-face towards China from the Philippines.

In recent years the two countries repeatedly clashed over territorial disputes in the South China Sea, with Beijing reacting furiously in 2014 after Duterte’s predecessor, Benigno Aquino, compared its activities in the region to Nazi Germany’s expansionism.

“At what point do you say, ‘Enough is enough’? Well, the world has to say it – remember that the Sudetenland was given in an attempt to appease Hitler to prevent world war two,” he told the New York Times.

In July, just weeks after Duterte’s landslide election victory, an international tribunal issued a thorough rebuttal of China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea when it ruled on a case originally brought by the Philippines government, in 2013.

But Duterte – who has described his trip to China as “a key turning point in both our histories” – has not pressed Beijing over the tribunal’s ruling, apparently seeking to use that verdict as leverage with which to extract concessions from Beijing.

Last week he instructed the country’s navy to halt joint patrols of the South China Sea with the US in order to avoid “any Philippine action that China might deem hostile”.

In an interview last week with al-Jazeera, Duterte said that during his visit he would fight to maintain islands in the South China Sea.

“Nobody is going to give up anything there,” he said, adding that under the constitution, a president cannot give away Philippine ground.

But he added that although he would raise the Hague tribunal verdict, he could not be forceful. “We have this judgment. I can go into a rage because it’s being occupied ... the other [option] is to talk. What do you think will happen to my country if I choose to go to war?” he said. “We can only talk.”

Experts say Duterte will seek billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese investment to bankroll projects including as an ambitious network of rail links.

Francis Chua, the head of the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told the Inquirer he would seek to “reawaken” dormant trade ties with Beijing. He said: “We expect to have a bounty of business opportunities from this visit, especially with a president willing to explore the limits of a fruitful partnership with China.”

Duterte is also expected to press for Filipino fishermen to be allowed to fish around the Scarborough Shoal, a disputed area in the South China Sea.

Bisley said it was crucial the president could return from China with tangible achievements to show voters.

“He needs to have face in this whole thing. He can’t come back to the Philippines looking like he’s gone on bended knee and he’s got all these gifts but is really a Chinese cat’s paw,” he said.

Bisley said he believed Washington had been “genuinely surprised” by Duterte’s actions since taking office but cautioned that a permanent shift towards Beijing was far from guaranteed.

“It is still really early days. He’s three months in and he moves around a lot. It could well be that if he feels slighted in Beijing for whatever reason – if he feels it doesn’t go his way – he could easily just come back to Manila and pretend it all hasn’t happened and tell everybody how much he loves America. You can’t rule that out.”

Tom Phillips in Beijing and Oliver Holmes in Bangkok

* The Guardian. Monday 17 October 2016 06.04 BST Last modified on Monday 17 October 2016 07.27 BST:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/17/china-courts-philippines-leader-duterte-amid-signs-of-us-rift

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 Philippines president Duterte says ’time to say goodbye’ to America

On visit to China the leader repeats his denunciation of Barack Obama as a ‘son of a whore’

President Rodrigo Duterte met with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping Thursday, state media said, as the Philippines’ leader seeks closer ties with the Asian giant while blasting his US allies.

Duterte is in China for a four-day trip that is expected to confirm his tilt away from Washington and towards Beijing’s sphere of influence.

The two leaders were to hold official talks and sign a “series of cooperation documents”, the official Xinhua news service reported.

Duterte is hoping to take advantage of Beijing’s deep pockets to score a raft of trade and infrastructure deals.

His recent rhetoric blasting the US and President Barack Obama and promising to sideline a territorial dispute over the strategically vital South China Sea has been welcomed in Beijing.

During a speech addressing the Filipino community in Beijing Wednesday, the firebrand president said the Philippines had gained little from its long alliance with the US, its former colonial ruler.

“Your stay in my country was for your own benefit. So time to say goodbye, my friend,” he said, as if addressing the US.

He also repeated his denunciation of Obama as a “son of a whore”.

China, he said earlier, was “good”. “It has never invaded a piece of my country all these generations.”

Foreign policy under Duterte has dramatically shifted from that pursued under predecessor Benigno Aquino, who took Beijing to an international tribunal over its extensive territorial claims in the South China Sea – where it has built artificial islands capable of hosting military facilities – and won a resounding victory.

The move infuriated Beijing. But Duterte, who took office in June shortly before the tribunal ruling, has made a point of not flaunting the outcome.

He has also suspended joint US-Philippine patrols in the South China Sea, and has threatened an end to joint military exercises.

The South China Sea is of intense interest to Washington and it has repeatedly spoken out on the various territorial disputes between China and its neighbours over the strategically vital waters.

In 2012, China seized control of Scarborough Shoal, a fishing ground in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone.

Tensions have risen between the US and China over Washington’s so-called “pivot” to the Asia-Pacific, a move that Beijing says is intended to contain it.

Duterte was scheduled to meet with Premier Li Keqiang later in the day.

Agence France-Presse

* The Guardian. Thursday 20 October 2016 06.08 BST Last modified on Thursday 20 October 2016 06.20 BST:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/20/philippines-president-duterte-says-time-to-say-goodbye-to-america

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