Man in the Middle: Rodrigo Duterte Gets a Taste of China’s Heavy Hand
Untested Philippines tough guy finds himself at the heart of a U.S.-China contest
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has landed at the heart of a regional tug-of-war between Washington and Beijing over the South China Sea. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
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DAVAO CITY, Philippines— Rodrigo Duterte, the newly elected Philippine president, is used to being treated with the utmost respect.
In his previous job, as mayor of this once lawless southern city, his war on drug dealers left a trail of bullet-riddled corpses, targets of police operations as well as vigilante death squads. He roared through the streets on a motorcycle toting a high-caliber rifle.
But on the afternoon of July 12, Mr. Duterte was irritated, according to one of his closest aides. He felt China was toying with him.
A cabinet meeting had just received word live from The Hague of Manila’s stunning victory in its legal challenge to China’s claims in the South China Sea, and after noisy clapping and jubilant fist-pumping around the table the first order of business was to issue a public statement. A minister spoke up: He’d had dinner the previous night with the Chinese ambassador.
That got Mr. Duterte’s attention. “Are you already a spy of the Chinese?” he demanded, in a teasing kind of way, according to the aide who was in the room.
The minister then relayed a long and detailed list of demands from the envoy about what the Philippine government should say—and not say—when the ruling came out. Anticipating a defeat, China was panicked at the prospect that Manila might issue a gloating statement that would add to its humiliation.
Mr. Duterte turned serious. What irked him, said the person in the room, was more than just the presumptuousness of the Chinese demands. The president had met with the ambassador himself earlier the same day to offer reassurances. “Didn’t he trust what I told him?” asked Mr. Duterte.
“Between us guys,” he remarked, “I would have said some of those things, but because the embassy wants me to say them, I won’t.”
The Chinese Embassy in Manila didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The Philippine leader is getting a quick lesson in Chinese heavy-handedness.
He is in the middle of an epic contest between China and the U.S. for regional supremacy. In the eyes of many Chinese nationalists, Manila is little more than an American pawn in this bigger game. Does Mr. Duterte, entirely untested on the global stage, have the temperament and political skills to maneuver between the two giants?
Ahead of the ruling—a surprisingly one-sided judgment that struck down China’s historic claims to the South China Sea and declared that China had violated Manila’s rights by building artificial islands, despoiling reefs and chasing away fishermen in its waters—Mr. Duterte’s critics sensed an eagerness to back down.
On the campaign trail, he even suggested he could trade maritime sovereignty for a Chinese-built railway line in his impoverished home province of Mindanao.
And he pledged that he wouldn’t put Philippine troops at risk in a conflict with China they could never win. If necessary, he joked with his usual swagger, he’d ride a jet-ski to the Scarborough Shoal to defend the disputed reef himself.
Mr. Duterte didn’t pick this legal battle with China; he inherited it from his predecessor, Benigno Aquino III. But now that Manila has scored a victory he wants to use it as leverage in bilateral talks. China, however, has rejected the ruling as a “piece of waste paper” and won’t negotiate with Manila on that basis.
Washington is watching Mr. Duterte warily. He makes no secret of the fact that he doesn’t trust American security guarantees. Ramon Beleno, a political-science professor at the Ateneo de Davao University, says that while Mr. Aquino believed that America “has our backs,” Mr. Duterte “wants a more independent policy that does not require support from the U.S.”
That doesn’t mean he wants to abandon the American alliance. At the cabinet meeting, the aide said, he declared he would welcome a show of strength by American aircraft carriers. “Let them send their ships,” he told ministers. “You tell them: ‘Come already.’ But I can’t say that openly.”
Still, says Chito Sta. Romana, president of the Philippine Association for Chinese Studies, “There’s been a shift.” Mr. Duterte “has signaled he wants cooperation with Beijing not confrontation.”
Mr. Aquino started out with that ambition, too. But after Chinese ships grabbed the Scarborough Shoal in 2012 he did an about-face and started comparing the Chinese regime to Nazi Germany. He launched the legal case the following year.
Mr. Duterte is a more volatile personality—and he brings his street-fighting sensibilities to international diplomacy. After his presidential election win, he initially refused to see the U.S. ambassador who had criticized him for a shocking joke he made about the rape and murder of an Australian lay minister in 1989. Mr. Duterte later apologized.
China will expect him to mind his manners. In Beijing, “the Punisher,” as he’s popularly known for his terror tactics against crime, may have met his match.
Write to Andrew Browne at andrew.browne@wsj.com
