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Duterte to attend 'One Belt, One Road' in China in May


President Rodrigo Duterte is going back to China.

In a speech delivered before Filipino-Chinese businessmen, Duterte said he would accept the invitation of Chinese President Xi Jinping to attend the One Belt, One Road forum. According to Reuters, "One Belt, One Road" is Xi's landmark program to invest billions of dollars in infrastructure projects including railways, ports and power grids across Asia, Africa and Europe.

“And I am going there. I was invited by the President himself ‘yung the One Road, One Belt, One Road. It’s a very ambitious project of China,” he said.

The forum will be held in May.

Duterte visited Beijing last October, an occasion that highlighted the thawing of relations between the two countries, which have been embroiled in a maritime dispute over overlapping claims in the South China Sea.

On Friday, Duterte once again thanked Xi for helping the Philippines.

“And the economics, we are improving. I would like to thank China again. Our exports in banana have doubled and the pineapple increased by 50 percent. And China says, you sell to us what you have in your country. And we will teach you how to improve on the quality before you send it there. But we are willing, we are opening the floodgates of our country in importation because we want to help you,” he said.

“So I would like to thank again President Xi Jingping for being just too kind to us,” he added. 

Duterte reiterated that he could not enter into a military alliance with China because of the Philippines’ defense pact with the United States.

“Anyway, there’s the RP-[US] Defense pact. It was a… it’s a passé now but it’s there. So I will not enter into a military alliance with anybody but certainly, I can choose the friends who are kind to us, those who understand us, and those who do not make imposition,” he said.

“A country has every right, sovereignty, to deal with a particular problem on a sound way, taking into account the culture, the prevailing environment. Nobody should really be f—ing us with interference. Respeto lang ‘yan. Out of respect. Unless you are really into genocide,” he added.

The US under the administration of former President Barack Obama had been critical of Duterte’s war on drugs. —JST, GMA News

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