In a 2016 speech in Beijing, the then-recently elected president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, declared that it was time for the Philippines “to say goodbye” to its 70-year economic and security partnership with the United States. Instead, Duterte declared, the Philippines would “charter a new course” and align with China.
For the United States, the Philippines’ realignment with China was a disaster and seemingly toppled one of the key pillars of its “Pivot to Asia” strategy. And yet, less than four years after his declaration in Beijing – and despite his best efforts – Duterte found himself begrudgingly pivoting back to the United States. Today, under Duterte’s successor Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the Philippines-U.S. alliance is stronger than it has been in decades.
How did this happen? Why did China fail to exploit a golden opportunity to pull the Philippines out of the United States’ orbit?
While much has been written about why Duterte made the seemingly inextricable choice to align with China, few have examined why Beijing decided to pursue a strategy that ultimately pushed the Philippines back toward the U.S. alliance, or the implications that this case has for China’s future foreign policy behavior.
In this case, four potential explanations for China’s behavior stand out, with the first two finding weak support from the events that unfolded during Duterte’s presidency, and the second two finding stronger support.
The Trade-Offs Argument
The simplest explanation is that Beijing believed the tradeoffs it would have to make to cement a China-Philippines alignment were too costly, especially any tradeoffs involving territorial claims in the South China Sea.
The value that Beijing places in these claims is difficult to understate. First, food security has long been an acute concern for Chinese leaders, and the South China Sea is a rich fishing ground. Second, as China’s trade has grown, so too has its reliance on the sea lines of communication that extend through the South China Sea. Finally, China’s military installations in the South China Sea provide Beijing with significant intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities in the region, and contribute to China’s focus on achieving information superiority as part of its “informationized warfare” concept.
If China were to compromise with the Philippines on those claims, it could send a signal to others, especially Vietnam, that Beijing lacked the resolve to uphold its outstanding claims against them as well, potentially leading to an erosion of its position.
However, this explanation is not particularly convincing. Had Beijing left current Philippine installations alone while standing firm on its current possessions, it could have courted the Philippines while sill deterring Vietnam, thus avoiding costly tradeoffs. Such a strategy would not have sacrificed most of China’s fishing activities, its sea line of communications, or its existing military bases.
At the very least, depriving the United States of one of its key allies in the Indo-Pacific should have been seen as worth the risk of moderately increasing Vietnam’s boldness in the South China Sea, or even sacrificing some fishing activities. Accordingly, Beijing’s decision-making around the Philippines does not appear to have been informed by an intensive cost-benefit analysis. At the very least, such an analysis was unduly weighted by a nationalist view, or an overinflated valuation, of China’s South China Sea claims.
The Audience Costs Argument
A second potential explanation for China’s missed Philippines opportunity is that President Xi Jinping faced significant audience costs due to his government’s increasingly nationalist rhetoric. When discussing the South China Sea, Chinese officials often invoke the pride of China’s people, insisting that they would never accept any infringement on their sovereignty. Risking public backlash by backing down may have been seen as too costly by a regime that prizes internal security above all else.
Again, however, this argument finds little support. It is unclear whether Xi can truly generate audience costs given the increasingly personalist nature of his regime, and his ability to largely suppress public discontent. In addition, multiple analyses suggest that while Chinese policymakers do consider public opinion when it comes to South China Sea policy, thus far public opinion has not decisively shaped it.
The Credibility Argument
A third argument, which is better supported by the facts on the ground, is that Beijing never fully believed that Duterte’s overtures were credible. While Duterte himself repeatedly lavished praise on China and signaled his intent to move away from the United States, he failed to present a unified message. When Duterte visited Beijing in 2016 and declared the end of the Philippines’ relationship with the United States, his finance and economic planning secretaries hurriedly issued statements to clarify that the Philippines was not seeking to cut ties wholesale with the West. Before Xi’s visit to Manila in 2018, Duterte’s secretary of foreign affairs undercut a proposed deal to jointly develop gas and oil in the South China Sea.
Leaders of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) were even more reluctant than Duterte’s Cabinet to align with China. When an Islamic State affiliate took over the Philippine city of Marawi, senior AFP commanders apparently went over Duterte’s head to enlist U.S. military support. Additionally, those commanders ignored Duterte’s orders to cease joint South China Sea patrols with the United States and rebuffed invitations from the Chinese military to participate in joint exercises. One senior naval official claimed that “it will take more than one term of a president to shift seventy or more years of relations with the U.S.”
To Beijing, it may have seemed that Duterte was the only significant Philippine actor who wanted alignment. The Philippine public, while seemingly offering China a chance in 2017, continued to hold much more favorable views of the United States.
Duterte’s volatile personality did not help his case either. When Duterte visited Beijing, one Chinese scholar claimed that “he still could change his words in the future,” and that he was a “very, very volatile guy” who would be difficult to trust. Accordingly, Chinese policymakers likely asked why they should risk watering down China’s South China Sea claims or devote more resources to courting the Philippines if the mercurial Duterte or his successor were likely to renege on a deal later.
The Foreign Policy Breakdown Argument
A final explanation for this case, which also finds strong support, is that China’s foreign policy apparatus failed to align its policies on the Philippines – or the operations of key actors – with wider Chinese grand strategy. Despite how many Western observers portray China, its foreign policy is not the result of a unitary process, but the result of “competition and compromise” among various actors. While Xi leads the direction of long-term strategy and sets policy goals through Leading Small Groups, many of the details are left for lower authorities to iron out.
A factor that further erodes Chinese foreign policy cohesion, especially in the South China Sea, is the partial autonomy of China’s maritime militia fishing fleet. Rather than use naval vessels to stake its territorial claims, China has primarily utilized its maritime militia. Doing so allows the navy to focus on blue water activities and provides China with some level of deniability as it engages in gray zone operations. However, the maritime militia’s lines of authority are entangled, as the militia is not a coherent body but is constituted of various groups operating under local and provincial authorities as well as different military authorities.
The lack of cohesion among various Chinese foreign policy actors was evident throughout the Duterte years. From 2018 onward, Beijing continually engaged in provocative actions in the South China Sea, even at key moments when Duterte extended olive branches. For instance, only six days after Duterte announced in 2020 that he would terminate the Visiting Forces Agreement with the United States – a pillar of Philippines-U.S. military cooperation – a Chinese naval ship targeted a Philippine Navy ship on patrol with its gun control director. A day later, as many as 76 maritime militia vessels were seen in the waters around Thitu Island, the Philippines’ largest outpost in the South China Sea.
A truly aligned and functional Chinese foreign policy apparatus would have seized the opportunities that Duterte repeatedly offered – especially his suspension of the Visiting Forces Agreement in 2020 – to pull the Philippines further away from the United States. Instead, Beijing either failed to perceive the significance of the suspension, or it failed to sufficiently coordinate the operations of naval and maritime militia units to forestall any actions that might antagonize the Philippines. As a result, Duterte’s olive branches were repeatedly rejected, forcing him to back pedal. Duterte eventually had no choice but to stand up for Philippine claims in the South China Sea and restore the Visiting Forces Agreement with the United States in full.
A smooth foreign policy process would also have placed a higher priority on the Philippine development projects undertaken by Chinese state-owned enterprises. When Duterte visited Beijing in 2016, he secured $24 billion in development assistance from China. And yet only 5 percent of that pledge had come to fruition by the end of Duterte’s presidency. Additionally, the rebuilding of Marawi, spearheaded by Chinese companies, also progressed extremely slowly, further damaging Philippine public opinion of China.
Implications for U.S. Policymakers
In sum, Beijing’s actions on the ground during Duterte’s presidency suggest that it responded cautiously to the Philippines’ overtures due to Duterte’s perceived low credibility, and that it simultaneously failed to align its Philippines strategy with wider grand strategy due to a dysfunctional and fractured foreign policy apparatus. Had Beijing not placed such great emphasis on its South China Sea claims, it is possible that it would have developed a more flexible and tailored strategy toward the Philippines under Duterte.
In contrast, the flexibility of the United States under former President Joe Biden – who was willing to overlook Marcos Jr.’s familial past and populist rhetoric – enabled Washington to seize the moment in 2022 to pull the Philippines back into its orbit and construct an even stronger alliance than existed before.
Should China’s foreign policy community learn from its mistakes during the Duterte years, then a more accommodating Philippine leader after Marcos might find a more aligned and worthwhile partner in China, especially if that Philippine leader is less volatile than Duterte. Whether Xi’s China has enough flexibility to learn from its mistakes and pursue a more aligned strategy is an open question, but U.S. policymakers should not underestimate Chinese flexibility or assume that the Philippines will automatically remain in its orbit. The Philippines-U.S. relationship will require constant attention, and the early signals thus far from President Donald Trump’s second administration towards the Philippines are encouraging.
Finally, this case demonstrates that future efforts to counter Chinese grand strategy will be most successful when U.S. policymakers can identify instances where China’s foreign policy apparatus breaks down due to the fragmentation of relevant Chinese actors or a fixation on nationalist paradigms over realist thinking. While it is unlikely that there will be many cases such as the Philippines where a foreign policy establishment and public are so well-aligned with the United States to start with, less dramatic opportunities may arise for the United States to pull third parties into its orbit or counter Chinese efforts to do the same.