Except that the Philippines president has conceded the South China sea to China even though Philippines won in an International court. Hes a Communist and a lover of Communist China.
When China started building the islands, Obama pressured the Philippine president not to respond militarily to stop their harassment of Filipno fishermen when they “roped off” the shoals. Since no one stopped them, they then went on to build the islands, which not only steal the fishing and oil resources from the Philippines (and Viet nam) but enable them to militarily block shipping from the Middle East to Japan and Korea.
So Duterte was confronted with a China that had militarized islands when he took over. He tried to make nice, but China screwed him anyway. This was bad, because the average Filipino hates China, since the Chinese immigrants and the part Chinese elites run the economy and prevent ordinary Filipinos not related to them (e.g. from marriage) from getting ahead.
The back story is that the last election was supposed to be won by either a crooked candidate the US could control, or by an actual American citizen with CIA ties. Duterte stepped in the last minute and won, because the ordinary people voted for him. Since then, the CIA, CIA funded “news” groups, human rights groups, the Francis Catholic church, and the educated class/elites of Manila have been busy fighting him.
There are a lot of similarities between the CIA attempt to get rid of him and how the CIA got rid of the Russian friendly president of the Ukraine. The difference is that here he is popular with ordinary folk. The elite complain if druggies are killed, but ignore that drug related crime and political hit jobs in the past killed a lot of non elite innocent folk but weren't noticed by the elite.
You can “buy” protesters here for ten dollars a day, yet the protests against Duterte have been small.