Philippines

As China tries to sell its soft power, one channel it is tapping into is its food and beverage industry, with brands like Mixue and Luckin Coffee moving into overseas markets. Alongside its tech exports like smartphones, can China convince others of its products and improve its image?

Amid rising tensions in the South China Sea between the Philippines and China, Japan is looking to forge closer security relations with the Philippines. An envisaged reciprocal access agreement between the Philippines and Japan would be an important step towards that end and help to achieve maritime stability in East Asia.

While Japanese PM Kishida’s recent visit to Manila points to the upward momentum of the Japan-Philippines Strategic Partnership, it will also be a litmus test of Japan’s strategic goals in the rest of Southeast Asia.

Heng Kim Song has been the freelance editorial cartoonist

The Xiangshan Forum is scheduled to open at the end of this week in Beijing, after a three-year hiatus due to the pandemic, and in that time several complex geopolitical and security issues have cropped up that are likely to be discussed. Furthermore, the sudden change in China’s military leadership and continued freezing of China-US military interactions adds another layer worth observing. Lianhe Zaobao correspondent Yang Danxu tells us more.

China takes a dim view of Manila’s decision to grant the US access to four military bases. While the two allies have framed the arrangement as bolstering deterrence vis-à-vis China, such a move is unlikely to deter Beijing.

The locus of superpower rivalry in the Indo-Pacific has gone down to the subnational level. The US and China are engaged in a power competition for influence within local governments in the Philippines, not least in the Cagayan area.

The Marcos Jr administration’s defence cooperation policy that hews closer to the US is facing domestic criticism, even from his sister. China is also growing increasingly uncomfortable with recent moves between the Philippines and the US, and posturing that suggests that the Philippines could be enlisted to part of the "China containment club".

Philippine academic Renato Cruz De Castro discusses the prospect of a trilateral Japan-US-Philippines defence pact and the US's building of informal trilateral networks in the Asia Pacific to safeguard its interests against China. However, he notes that there are practical issues to be resolved before a formal agreement can materialise.