President Rodrigo Duterte and his delegation arrived in Beijing on Tuesday night for a four-day state visit.
Straight from his state visit in Brunei Darussalam, Duterte’s plane touched down at the Beijing airport at 8:07 p.m., Tuesday.
On Wednesday night, Duterte is scheduled to meet with the Filipino community in Beijing, and on Thursday, he is expected to meet top Chinese leaders including President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang, and National People’s Congress Chairman Zhang Dejiang.
Over the weekend, the President said that he would raise a controversial arbitral ruling on the South China Sea with China’s leaders.
He has vowed not to surrender any sovereignty or deviate from the July award by the tribunal in the Hague where the Permanent Court of Arbitration favored Manila but Beijing refused to respect the ruling.
On Thursday also, he is also expected to deliver a keynote speech at the Philippine-China Trade and Investment event.
Before flying back home to Davao City on Friday, Duterte would meet with executives from the Bank of China.
In the Xinhua interview published on Monday, Duterte expressed he wanted negotiation, not confrontation, over the South China Sea.
“There is no sense in going to war. There is no sense fighting over a body of water,” Duterte said.
On Tuesday night, China’s official news service, Xinhua, said the trip showed the Filipino politician’s “keenness to repair the seriously damaged relations” with Beijing and was a sign of his “pluck and pragmatism”.
Duterte has brought a 400-strong business delegation from Manila, and it is designed to secure billions of dollars of investment and to repair relations with the world’s second biggest economy.
The President has announced several times that he wants the Philippines to make alliance with China, and Russia, instead of maintaining a good relationship with the ally country, the United States of America.