By: Isabel Sofia Santiago, Bryan Burgess
Reposted from AidData, Originally published on 28 October 2024

China has invested more than US$9 billion in the Philippines over two decades, making it one of the island nation’s largest bilateral lenders. But what are the true outcomes of Chinese-financed development projects—and how are Beijing’s media narratives shaping Filipino perceptions of these investments?

Last month, AidData and Asia Society Philippines (ASP), a non-partisan policy research organization based in Manila, held a series of workshops at four leading universities in the Philippines to explore these questions.

The workshops came on the heels of two major policy reports, Beijing’s Big Bet on the Philippines and Investing in Narratives, produced by AidData and ASP to uncover the outcomes and media narratives surrounding Beijing’s state-directed development finance. The reports received significant attention from Philippine, regional, and international media, including articles in the Financial Times, the South China Morning Post, the Manila Times, the Philippine Star, the Philippine News Agency, and the Manila Standard, and an interview with Rappler.

We were part of an AidData-ASP research team that traveled across the country to present our findings and launch a first-of-its-kind dashboard tracking key players and the subnational distribution of Chinese investments in the Philippines. Several AidData researchers who authored the reports—including Bryan Burgess (an author of this blog), Samantha Custer, Narayani Sritharan, and Jonathan Solis—were joined in-country by their research collaborators at ASP, including Marco Antonio Luisito V. Sardillo III, Timothy Joseph G. Henares, Angela Belonia, Isabel Sofia Santiago (an author of this blog), and Alec Julian A. Templonuevo.

Chinese investments are a sensitive topic for many Filipinos, with worries stemming from a lack of transparency around projects; an influx of Chinese workers for projects supplanting Filipino nationals; and ongoing tensions over the West Philippine Sea/South China Sea. AidData and ASP’s research did indeed find evidence of problematic projects associated with negative environmental, social, or governance impacts. However, there are also ways in which Chinese investment in the Philippines has been received positively. For example, during our trip to Davao, one local leader shared that Chinese projects had significantly improved the state of their province’s infrastructure.

AidData and ASP’s research was intended to provide an objective evidence base to create space for public discussion on both the positive and negative impacts of Chinese projects in the Philippines. Samantha Custer, AidData’s Director of Policy Analysis, remarked to local media her hope that as local communities are better informed about these trade-offs, they will be better able to mitigate risks and improve the quality of foreign investment in their country, whether from China, the U.S., or other players. To facilitate this dialogue, we held four workshops at leading universities across the country’s three major island groups—Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao—convening a diversity of perspectives from participants and panel discussants representing the government, the private sector, civil society, and academia.

Our first workshop took place in the heart of Ateneo de Manila University’s campus, in partnership with the Ateneo School of Government (ASOG). The workshop kicked off with welcoming remarks from Javier Jimenez, Head of Academic Programs at ASOG. John Nery, a columnist and editorial consultant at Rappler, a leading Filipino news site, acted as moderator and fielded questions from researchers at local think tanks, members of the academy, and students. Erwin Guile Dizon, a panelist and Director of the Ricardo Leong Center for Chinese Studies at Ateneo, noted how Chinese investment projects are often not seen and felt by ordinary citizens. Dr. Leonardo Lanzona, a panelist and Professor of Economics at Ateneo, highlighted this as a consequence of how large capital projects frequently displace the local labor force, as China brings in its own workers (see, for example, the challenges faced by the Northrail project). Incorporating what they’d learned in the panel discussion, workshop participants then engaged in a hands-on demonstration of AidData’s dashboard and dataset.

The second workshop took us some 1,400km south of Manila, to the University of Southern Mindanao (USM) in North Cotabato, a province in Mindanao, the Philippines’ second-largest island. North Cotabato closely borders former President Rodrigo Duterte’s home province of Davao, but a disparity of Chinese investments between the two provinces can be felt. Over the past decade, most of China’s infrastructure investments in the region were centered around Davao and did not trickle down to other parts of Mindanao, as noted by workshop attendees. Attendees were welcomed by Debbie Marie B. Verzosa, Vice President for Research Development at USM, with USM faculty panelists Rowell P. Nitafan and Maricar U. Juaneza providing a Mindanaoan perspective of Chinese investments.

Academics from USM and local media were joined by representatives from the Philippine military, navy, and police, who made up a significant portion of the participants and brought a diversity of insights to the workshop. Following the panel discussion, a common sentiment heard was that Cotabato and other provinces in Mindanao were looking to further develop their telecoms infrastructure and improve their roads, and many citizens perceive China as a potential financier for these efforts. A military representative commented that lessons learned in the workshop will help them build civil-military operations in the region.

Next, our team traveled to Miriam College in Porac, Pampanga near Clark for the third workshop. Local business leaders, representatives from various organizations, and academics traveled from as far as Metro Manila to attend a morning of lively discussion. They were welcomed by Ambassador Laura Q. Del Rosario, President of Miriam College and a career diplomat, for a morning of lively discussion. The attendees included representatives from the Clark Development Corporation, the American Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines, the Pampanga Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Clark Investors and Locators Association, the Department of Trade and Industry, the National Economic and Development Authority, the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization - Regional Center for Educational Innovation and Technology (SEAMEO INNOTECH), and Rappler.

Metro Clark, the second-largest metropolitan area in Luzon, the largest island in the Philippines, has long been a hub of international activity—it once hosted the largest overseas U.S. air base and is now home to the booming Clark Freeport and Special Economic Zone. The area is also currently a locus of Chinese investment, anchored by the Bank of China’s $690 million syndicated loan, made in partnership with Banco de Oro and Philippine National Bank, to the Clark Global City Corporation to develop a mixed-use business district. Panelists Lucio Blanco Pitlo III, President of the Philippine Association for Chinese Studies, and Aaron Jed Rabena, a Senior Lecturer at the Asian Center in the University of the Philippines, discussed how increased dialogue could allow China to provide the Philippines with essential infrastructure, particularly transportation, similar to the China-funded railway projects in Indonesia and Laos.

After the panel, business leaders dove into the dashboard’s richly detailed data on recipients and implementing entities. The transparency the dashboard brought to Chinese development projects was felt immediately, with a local CEO noting that he’d been aware of one major Chinese state corporation’s involvement in the Clark Global City project—but none of the others listed in the project record. Despite the strained relations between the Philippines and China under the Marcos administration, a local business leader highlighted that Chinese companies are still actively investing in the region, particularly in property acquisitions that warrant further exploration.

We held the fourth and final workshop at the Museo de La Salle on the University of St. La Salle campus in Bacolod, popularly known as the City of Smiles and one of the two capitals of the Negros Island Region. Nestled among religious artifacts and exhibits on the history of the region, our team was joined by Rafael “Lito” Coscolluela, the former governor of Negros Occidental (a major sugarcane-producing province), as well as Andrea Lizares-Si, Chairperson of the Provincial Council for Women, to discuss the long history of linkages between China and the Philippines. One audience member from the local Chinese-Philippine Chamber of Commerce noted that “trying to unmix the Filipino from the Chinese and American influence in Negros Island would be like trying to unmake a soup.” They further emphasized their connection to both cultures by stating that while they are Chinese by blood, they are Filipino by heart.

Attendees then used the AidData dashboard to act out their own panel discussion between the government, civil society, and journalists. The government ‘representative’ explained how he would assess potential Chinese state-backed investments in Bacolod’s all-important sugar sector, to which the civil society ‘representative’ countered with a series of tough questions based on details she pulled from the dashboard on the spot, emphasizing that agriculture is an overlooked yet crucial area for development in Philippine food security.

Across four workshops, no two went the same. Our joint AidData-ASP team had the privilege of being able to shape each to the unique perspectives and local interests of the participants. Stress-testing the tool with users from civil society, government, business, and media highlighted for us that the desire for data-driven insights is not just the provenance of academics—and that enabling these stakeholders to answer questions that matter deeply to their work was the most exciting part of this project.

Photo credit: Glimpse

‍Isabel Sofia Santiago is a project-based Assistant at Asia Society Philippines. Her research focuses on Philippine-China relations, Philippine fashion and textiles, Japanese political economy, geopolitics, and global fashion.

Bryan Burgess is a Senior Policy Specialist at AidData. He develops and scales new methods to quantify novel data on U.S. foreign policy tools, China's investments in the Asia-Pacific region, and the foreign policy influence of great powers across Asia, Europe, and Latin America.