Marcos heads to Beijing for talks with Xi on disputed South China Sea

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was preparing to board a flight to Beijing on a Tuesday in early January, carrying with him the weight of a territorial dispute that has shadowed his country's relationship with China for years. The three-day visit would bring him face-to-face with President Xi Jinping for the second time in as many months—a November meeting in Thailand had been the first—and this time, the agenda was unmistakable. Manila wanted to talk about what it saw as illegal Chinese construction in the South China Sea and the coordinated deployment of Chinese vessels in waters the Philippines claims as its own.

Marcos framed the visit in diplomatic language before departure, saying he looked forward to the meeting and that "the issues between our two countries are problems that do not belong between two friends such as the Philippines and China." But the subtext was harder to miss. A Philippine foreign ministry official had already signaled publicly that the South China Sea would be on the table. China's foreign ministry, for its part, offered a different emphasis: Wang Wenbin, the spokesperson, made no mention of maritime disputes and instead spoke of focusing on "bilateral relations and regional and international issues of common concern," with cooperation in agriculture, infrastructure, energy, and culture framed as a path toward a "golden era."

What made this visit significant was the pivot it represented. Under Marcos's predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines had tilted sharply toward China, setting aside its territorial grievances in exchange for Chinese investment and infrastructure projects. Marcos was now attempting to recalibrate. He had already met twice with U.S. President Joe Biden since taking office, and both Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Vice President Kamala Harris had visited Manila in the previous year, each time reaffirming that Washington would defend the Philippines militarily if it came under attack in the South China Sea. In May, Marcos himself had declared publicly that he would not surrender "an inch" of Philippine territory to any foreign power—a statement that drew applause from those who supported a 2016 international arbitral ruling that had rejected China's sweeping territorial claims in the region.

The South China Sea itself was no abstract concern. Roughly three trillion dollars in ship-borne commerce passed through those waters annually, making it one of the world's most economically vital shipping lanes. It was also a persistent flashpoint between China and the United States, with Beijing's military activities and Washington's freedom-of-navigation operations creating an ongoing tension that smaller nations like the Philippines found themselves caught between.

Analysts watching the visit expected Marcos to use it as an opportunity to signal that the Philippines was moving away from Duterte's extreme tilt toward Beijing. Renato Cruz De Castro, an international affairs analyst at De La Salle University in Manila, acknowledged that the South China Sea issue would likely come up in the talks. But he held no illusions about the outcome. "At the end of the day, China's goal is to force us to accept the fait accompli, that they will be operating within our exclusive economic zone," he said. In other words, Beijing was unlikely to change course simply because Manila had raised the issue. The question was whether Marcos could use the visit to establish a new equilibrium—one that acknowledged China's economic importance while also reasserting the Philippines' territorial claims and its security partnership with the United States.