Closer PH-China ties seen if Xi re-elected as CPC leader

Closer interaction between Beijing and Manila is expected once President Xi Jinping gets re-elected as China’s ruling party leader, an analyst said Wednesday.(Pixabay photo)

MANILA – Closer interaction between Beijing and Manila is expected once President Xi Jinping gets re-elected as China’s ruling party leader, an analyst said Wednesday.

Xi is widely seen to take on a third term as general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in the upcoming 20th Party Congress, which would arguably make him China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong.

With Xi at the helm, foreign affairs and security analyst Lucio Pitlo III said there had been willingness on the part of China to develop political relations with the Philippines.

“We have seen this in attempts to bolster party-to-party exchanges. Of course, the recent visit of (Minister) Liu Jianchao attests to that, meeting the Speaker of the House Martin Romualdez and leaders of other political parties,” he said in a Pandesal Forum in Quezon City.

Pitlo said China’s neighborhood diplomacy would likely continue under Xi’s third term as CPC general secretary, a kind of diplomacy where Beijing earlier placed Manila as a priority.

“Neighborhood and peripheral diplomacy would be central to Chinese diplomacy and the impetus for this will increase under the third term of President Xi Jinping, especially given the hurdles and setbacks in relations between China and the West,” he said.

He said China’s readiness to expand economic cooperation with the Philippines is also there and that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr’s infrastructure program “Build Back Better” would have “a lot of confluence” with China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

The South China Sea disputes, however, would remain an “irritant” prompting the need to find ways to peacefully handle any incidents in the area so as to “maintain a stable bilateral patch”.

Bilateral ties between Manila and Beijing dramatically improved over the past few years as former President Rodrigo Duterte during his term pursued friendlier relations with China and met with Xi less than a year into office.

In a telephone conversation with Marcos in May 2022, Xi said the two countries should “write a grand story on the China-Philippines friendship in the new era and follow through the blueprint for bilateral friendly cooperation, so as to usher in an even brighter future for the bilateral ties.”