“Jing Quan is the perfect bridge builder for Philippine-China relations”
China has named a new ambassador to the Philippines who replaced Ambassador Huang Xilian.
Huang arrived in late 2019, and I first met him at a conference in November that year. He will be remembered for arranging innumerable Chinese economic and financial contributions to the Philippines – including millions of doses of the first COVID-19 vaccines rolled out by the official Duterte government program of vaccinations nationwide that saved millions of Filipino lives.
Huang served at the most challenging times of China in the Philippines, not only because of the COVID Pandemic that officially started in Jan. 2020.
Hopes picked up in 2022 as the Duterte government transitioned to the new Uni-team government of the BBM-Sara Duterte tandem, expected to consolidate national unity by upholding sovereignty and independent government for the Philippines.
The Uni-team, from its inauguration in June 2022 to Jan. 2023, continued with the major policy legacies – including the cultivation of diplomatic and economic ties with non-traditional partners like China.
This was evidenced by the first state visit of President Bongbong Marcos in January 2023 to China when he was given a red carpet welcome by President Xi Jinping as the first official guest of China that year – capped off by the signing of $23-billion Chinese investments for the Philippines.
In Feb. 2025, without announced rhyme or reason, the Philippine government switched 180 degrees by getting off the administration’s foreign policy of “Friends to All, Enemy to None” with the government’s announcement of four new, additional military bases for the US.
This was followed by the adoption of the US prescribed strategy of “assertive transparency” of challenging Chinese Coast Guard ships at sensitive key sea dispute sites to invite reaction and photo-ops and megaphone “Chinese bullying” to the world.
The confrontational geopolitics in the foreign relations also turned inwards as the government’s incentive factotums in the legislature started raising baseless xenophobic privileged speeches and launched investigations into “Chinese spy networks,” “Chinese sleeper cells,” “Chinese paid bloggers” who are simply Duterte sympathetic netizens, and targeted Sara Duterte for impeachment simply for refusing to utter anti-China statements – and the nation was torn asunder between a minority of anti-Duterte and a majority of pro-Duterte forces.
Today, the nation is hopelessly divided specially after the “baha (flood)-gate” corruption scandals, and externally isolated from its ASEAN neighbors all of which are cozy with China.
The Philippines is also deeply estranged from the Big Brother of Asia and the Global Majority – China.
What this country needs today are bridges to bring together the nation as one and to bring the Philippines back to connect with its Asian, ASEAN and Global Majority brothers that have been coming together since 1955 in the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations (NAM).
(Editor’s Note: The Philippines participated in the first and main Bandung Conference, from April 18 to 24, 1955, in Bandung, Indonesia.
(The conference brought together 29 Asian and African nations to discuss peace, economic development, and decolonization during the Cold War. The Philippine delegation was led by Carlos P. Romulo, who delivered a closing speech at the event.)
Which brings me back to our welcome for the new Chinese ambassador to the Philippines, Jing Quan, who said on arrival: “As ambassador, I will firmly safeguard national interests and dignity while serving as a bridge to ensure that China-Philippines relations move toward stability rather than deterioration, and that the two peoples grow closer rather than further apart…”
His sense of mission for his diplomatic stint comes just at the right time and an imperative at this moment in Philippine history.
He is uniquely equipped to build the bridge to bring back the Philippines and China into the one big Asian family, having served as Deputy Chief of Mission of China’s most challenging diplomatic post, the Chinese Embassy in the USA.
He is the perfect bridge builder for Philippine-China relations, as he also comes from the greatest diplomatic and infrastructural bridge builder in the world: China.
China has bridged the torn ties of Iran and Saudi Arabia for one, and bridged Russia-China and India in the recent Tianjin Shanghai Cooperation summit, among others.
China has built thousands of bridges across the BRICS world in its Global Development Initiative’s Belt and Road Initiative linking countries towards its “Community of Shared Future for Mankind.”
(The author is president of Asian Century Philippines Strategic Studies Institute dedicated to supporting Philippine-China understanding and cooperation and promoting global multi-polarity.)
