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.
Nowhere is the tussle more evident than in the Philippines, where Xi is seeking this week to win over President Rodrigo Duterte with generous investments.
“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.
Student protesters wear masks bearing the faces of, from left, President Trump, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and Chinese President Xi Jinping, as they claim that Duterte is selling the country to the two leaders during a demonstration outside the Presidential Palace in Manila, Nov. 20, 2018. (Aaron Favila/AP)
When Xi and Duterte announced a deal Tuesday to jointly explore for oil and gas in the South China Sea, it represented the culmination of a stunning turnaround for two countries that were locked in bitter territorial disputes for years before Duterte took power in 2016.
But when the Philippine strongman first visited Beijing that year, he stunned the world by turning his ire toward the United States and promised to find in Xi a new, steady partner who could provide billions of dollars in investments.
Duterte went further last week on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit in Singapore, where he accused the United States of stoking tensions with ongoing war games and naval drills in the South China Sea. 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, he told reporters. “China is there. That’s a reality, and America and everybody should realize that they are there.”
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 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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