Aquino Calls at Ancestral Home on China Visit

Philippine President Corazon Aquino, shrugging off fresh coup rumors at home, began a state visit to China today with a sentimental journey to her ancestral home and an unscheduled shopping trip in Beijing.

Aquino, on her first trip abroad since last August’s abortive rebellion against her government, began the three-day visit by flying to Xiamen, the southeastern port once called Amoy, and traveling to the nearby village of Hongjian, from which her family emigrated a century ago.

Trade, Regional Issues

Accompanied by 16 senior government officials, she arrived in the Chinese capital by special plane and was scheduled to take a sightseeing trip Friday and talk with Chinese officials before an expected meeting Saturday with senior leader Deng Xiaoping.

Trade and regional issues will dominate the sessions, her aides said.

On arrival in Beijing, Aquino’s motorcade made an unscheduled souvenir-hunting stop at the city’s venerable Friendship Store, creating a stir amid heavy security.

Aides said they did not know what was on the presidential shopping list. The trip is Aquino’s first to China.

Firecracker Welcome

The day began with a morning visit to Xiamen and a noisy firecracker-punctuated welcome in nearby Hongjian, the village where Aquino’s great-grandfather lived before leaving for the Philippines in 1861 and where about 40 of her relatives still reside.

Nearly all the village’s 1,300 residents turned out on streets festooned with bunting and streamers of yellow, the president’s trademark color. At the family’s three-room stone ancestral home, Aquino met some of her Chinese relatives for the first time.

“This is the best welcome a visitor could hope for,” she said at a 16-course luncheon banquet complete with toasts of fiery Chinese mao tai liquor. “A homecoming, like a member of the family.”