After Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte announced his "separation" from the United States, Beijing and Manila will resume talks on their South China Sea disputes, both sides said Friday, an apparent diplomatic victory for China after an international tribunal dismissed its claims to the waters.

The rapprochement between the two Asia nations could widen a political rift between the United States and the Philippines, whose recently elected leader has made no secret of its antipathy for America and ordered an end to joint maneuvers between their militaries.

The move to hold talks, suspended several years ago, will please Beijing, which has a longstanding policy of insisting territorial disputes be discussed directly between the parties, in an environment where analysts say it has more clout due to its economic size, rather than in multilateral forums.

The joint statement made no reference to a ruling by a tribunal at the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague earlier this year, which ruled that there was no legal basis to China's claims to nearly all of the sea -- a verdict Beijing dismissed vehemently.

Following talks in Beijing between Duterte and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, a senior Chinese diplomat announced the sides had agreed to restore the full range of contacts, although he said the leaders touched only briefly on the South China Sea.

"Both sides agreed that the South China Sea issue is not the sum total of the bilateral relationship," Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin told reporters.

The two sides agreed to return to the approach used five years ago of seeking a settlement through bilateral dialogue, Liu said.

That was followed with an announcement by Philippine Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez at a bilateral economic forum that his country and China will sign $13.5 billion of deals this week.

The Philippines will maintain its trade and economic ties with the United States, Trade Minister Ramon Lopez said on Friday, a day after President Rodrigo Duterte announced his separation from Washington. "The President did not talk about separation. In terms of economic, we are not stopping trade, investments with America," Lopez told CNN Philippines during a visit to Beijing, where he is accompanying Duterte.

Duterte's tirades are causing confusion in Washington, where officials have repeatedly said the Philippine government has not made any of his words official policy.

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Friday that Washington intended to keep its alliance commitments to the Philippines. Asked about Duterte's declaration that he had realigned with China, Carter said: "We have important alliance commitments which we intend to keep in the Philippines." "Obviously any relationship is one of mutuality and we will continue to discuss that with our Philippine counterparts," he told reporters before landing in Turkey. "That's not new today, but that's our alliance relationship with the Philippines."

Until Duterte took office on June 30, the Philippines had been one of the United States' most important and loyal allies in Asia, and a key to President Barack Obama's "pivot" to the region. Duterte, who describes himself as a socialist and has close links with communists still waging a rebellion in the Philippines, has revealed a deep dislike of the United States.

The Philippines had also been a bastion of democracy, albeit a chaotic and corrupt one, in Southeast Asia since shedding the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. But Duterte, who describes himself as a socialist and has close links with communists still waging a rebellion in the Philippines, has revealed a deep dislike of the United States.

He has repeatedly branded Obama a "son of a whore", and called on his countrymen to remember crimes committed by Americans when the Philippines was a colony of the United States from 1898 to 1946.