| Summary: | This article examines the China-Philippines relations in the South China Sea (SCS) from 1997 to 2017. The premise is that the China's interaction with litigating neighbors in the SCS (such as Vietnam and the Philippines) is shaped by strategic, political-economic and symbolic relations analogous to the dynamics of the Imperial China with the nomadic peoples of Central Asia in the so-called "tributary game" (Zhou, 2011). The central hypothesis is that, just as the tributary game lasted for centuries in an asymmetric but relatively stable pattern, the same asymmetrical and stable pattern tends to prevail in the contemporary stage. In this scenario of a de facto Chinese control of many positions in the SCS and the expectation of economic gains by the Philippines, it is more likely that the tributary game shall move away from a conflictive stance and towards the conciliation-submission stance consolidated by the mutual learning process and by the inevitable economic and diplomatic gravitation of Asian countries around China.
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