[Xi’s visit to the Philippines — once an unshakable U.S. ally with deep historical and cultural ties to America — encapsulates how Southeast Asia and the Pacific have become ground zero in the accelerating contest for global influence between Beijing and Washington.]
By
Shibani Mahtani and Gerry Shih
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Chinese
President Xi Jinping, right, and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, left,
walk
past an honor guard during a welcoming ceremony at Malacanang Palace
in
Manila, Nov. 20, 2018. (Bullit Marquez/AP)
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HONG
KONG — At an Asian summit
last week, Vice President Pence and Chinese President Xi Jinping traded barbs
and delivered dueling visions of an Asia-Pacific tilted toward one of two
poles: the United States or China.
Hours later, the Chinese leader hit the road
on a Southeast Asia charm offensive.
Xi swept into the Philippines on Tuesday as
the first Chinese leader to make a state visit in 13 years. He laid a wreath at
a monument to a Philippine nationalist martyr before signing dozens of
agreements, including a significant oil-and-gas exploration deal in the
contested South China Sea.
Xi’s visit to the Philippines — once an
unshakable U.S. ally with deep historical and cultural ties to America —
encapsulates how Southeast Asia and the Pacific have become ground zero in the
accelerating contest for global influence between Beijing and Washington.
“China and the Philippines are close
neighbors with a thousand-year history of exchange, good neighborliness,
friendship,” Xi said at the opening of bilateral meetings Tuesday, “and
cooperation is our only correct choice.”
The stakes are high in Manila, where Xi is
seeking this week to win over President Rodrigo Duterte with generous
investments while having to contend with a Philippine military that remains
close to the United States and eager to nurture relations with Washington.
“The Philippines is potentially Xi’s crown
jewel in his foreign policy balance sheet,” said Richard Heydarian, a
Manila-based defense and security analyst. “No other Chinese president has come
this close to eradicating the Philippines from the U.S. sphere of influence, in
terms of optics.” Heydarian described the Southeast Asian country as a crucial
“swing state” in Asian geopolitics.
When Xi and Duterte announced a deal Tuesday
that will pave the way for joint exploration for oil and gas in the South China
Sea, it represented the culmination of a turnaround for two countries that were
locked in bitter territorial disputes for years before Duterte took power in
2016.
The Philippine strongman first visited
Beijing that year, stunning the world by turning his ire toward the United
States and promising to find in Xi a new, steady partner who could provide
billions of dollars in investments. He has doubled down on that rhetoric,
promising to shelve a landmark ruling on the South China Sea between the two
countries that negates China’s historic claims to the waters.
On the sidelines of the ASEAN summit in
Singapore, he accused the United States of stoking tensions with ongoing war
games and naval drills in the waters. The U.S. Navy conducted drills last week in the Philippine
Sea, in international waters east of the Philippines.
China is “already in possession” of the
contested South China Sea waters, Duterte told reporters. “China is there.
That's a reality, and America and everybody should realize that they are
there.”
The trade-off, Duterte hopes, will be cash.
Of the more than two dozen agreements signed between the two countries on
Tuesday, many related to infrastructure, including in Davao City, where Duterte
was mayor before becoming president.
Many Philippine officials say they have no
choice but to take Chinese investment. They are puzzled by why so few countries
— including, crucially, the United States — have been willing to help like
China has in a country that badly needs infrastructure improvements.
There has been Chinese, Japanese and Indian
investment in airports, subways and the telecommunications sector. But
Philippine Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez said he was “surprised” that
American bidders have not come forward.
“So maybe they have no interest. If that’s
the case, that’s fine,” he said in an interview. “If they want to look inward,
that’s their sovereign right.”
The Philippines’ sense of being left out
pointed to a basic dilemma for the Trump administration: how to square its
“America First” doctrine with its effort to keep allies in its orbit — and out
of China’s.
Although Xi unveiled his Belt and Road
Initiative roughly five years ago to disburse as much as $1 trillion in Chinese
funding across Eurasia, Washington has only begun to take notice recently and
make countermoves in the last few months.
As Pence and U.S. envoys swept through Asia
this month, U.S. officials say they have talked up what the Trump
administration is pitching as a possible alternative to Chinese investment: a
new federal agency created under the Build Act last month that could disburse
$60 billion in infrastructure investments to developing countries
Although the dollar amount may be dwarfed by
Chinese initiatives, the new program offers “transparency and built-in tools to
counter against corruption, and make sure no countries are saddled with debt,”
said W. Patrick Murphy, the top U.S. diplomat for the East Asia and Pacific
region. “This is not a policy about China, or trying to contain China, but
there are elements in our approach that offer alternative ways for countries to
meet their infrastructure needs.”
And mere weeks after he outlined U.S. grievances
toward Beijing in a significant speech in Washington, Pence again delivered a
blistering attack on China last week as he told Asian audiences that the United
States provided a “better option.” He unveiled initiatives including a $1.7
billion utility grid for Papua New Guinea, the poorest country in the region.
“If Pence’s speech at the Hudson institute
was a starting gun in a new phase of realpolitik, then the Asia summits were
confirmation that this is the new normal for the U.S.: there’s going to be a
well-organized attempt to push back on China,” said Nick Bisley of La Trobe
University in Australia.
So far, it is unclear whether countries have
fully bought into China’s largesse, even if it far surpasses U.S. offers. A
number of new Asian governments taking power, in countries such as Malaysia,
Sri Lanka and Pakistan, have questioned murky deals that previous governments
struck with China
The latest backlash came from the Maldives,
an island archipelago off the west coast of India known for its idyllic
beaches. The country’s new president took office on Saturday and said that
state finances had been “looted” by the previous administration, which oversaw
an expansion of ties with China in the form of major debt-funded infrastructure
projects.
The new Maldivian government now plans to
scrap a free-trade agreement with China concluded last year. The trade
imbalance between China and the Maldives is “so huge,” Mohamed Nasheed, the
head of the new president’s party, told Reuters. “China is not buying anything
from us. It is a one-way treaty.”
In Manila on Tuesday, a few hundred
protesters gathered outside the Chinese Embassy, shouting that the Philippines
was “not for sale” and decrying joint investment and exploration deals.
In recent weeks, Chinese officials have
denied that their investments amount to unfair “debt traps” for poor nations.
In public, Xi has indirectly chided the United States for what he described as
its “arrogance” in the region and positioned himself a supportive ally of
weaker, developing countries.
“Instead of pointing fingers at others, it
would be better to match its deeds with its words and truly treat all
countries, big or small, as equals,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua
Chunying said Sunday about the United States.
Zha Daojiong, a professor of international
political economy at Peking University and a former senior fellow at the Asia
Society, said the United States has historically been sensitive about its level
of influence in Southeast Asia, and Washington stepped up its efforts there
when it began to see Japan as a rival.
Decades later, that will likely happen again.
“It’s the intrinsic nature in that peculiarly
American stream of thinking about its dominance or ownership of Southeast
Asia,” Zha said. “There is not much China, and indeed Japan before China, can
do if the U.S. insists on singling it out as an archrival.”
Kaela Malig in Manila, Joanna Slater in New
Delhi and Lyric Li in Beijing contributed to this report.
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