If President Xi Jinping were to visit Manila, “I’d take him to a Chinese restaurant”, Philippine President Benigno Aquino said.
Such a dinner would “risk paling in comparison” to the food in China, Aquino told the South China Morning Post in an interview last week, but his objective in bonding with Xi would be “to show him how ingrained Chinese culture is in this country”.
The Philippine president said the meal “might be at an extravagant place or it might be at a very simple noodle house, that would be his choice; the bottom line is, he would see a lot of typical Filipinos enjoying that part of Chinese culture”.
The Philippines and China have close ties that go back centuries: roughly one million Filipinos - or one per cent of the population - are of Chinese ancestry, including Aquino, a fifth-generation descendant of an immigrant from Hongjian village in Fujian province. It has not been announced if Xi will visit Manila for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November.
Relations between the two countries have been glacial since 2013, when the Philippines filed a case before an ad hoc arbitral tribunal under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea contesting China’s claims in the South China Sea.
Aquino said that if Xi were to visit his country, he would also invite him to see “what we’re trying to do with the bottom 20 per cent of our population that is mired in poverty.” He said the Chinese government was also addressing similar issues with its poor.
“Perhaps, at the end of the day, the appeal is, if we could concentrate all our efforts on alleviating the plight of our [respective] countrymen in that particular condition rather than having to attend to these contentious and dangerous territorial issues,” he said.