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

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

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.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chinese president Xi Jinping speaks at the eighth Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) summit in the western Indian state of Goa on Sunday. Photograph: Xinhua / Barcroft Images

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. Bonnie Glaser, Centre for Strategic and International Studies

“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.”