DAVAO CITY—Chinese and Philippine officials last Friday attended the groundbreaking ceremony of one of two mega-sized rehabilitation centers in Mindanao in Sarangani province.
Jin Yuan, the economic and commercial counselor of the Embassy of China, led the team to officially start the construction of the Dangerous Drug Abuse Treatment and Rehabilitation Center (DDATRC).
The center has a floor area of 6,707.56 square meters, including admission and administration building and clinic, visitors’ pavilion, transition villa, staff house, motorpool building, male and female dormitory building and multipurpose covered court.
The facility sprawls on a hill in Barangay Kawas overlooking the Sarangani Bay and General Santos City, the province’s information office said.
China has funded this facility with P350 million.
Yuan said Sarangani is one of the recipients of the “China-Aid Philippines,” an offshoot of President Duterte’s state visit to China in October 2016. The other province is Agusan del Sur, he said.
Both provinces would each host a 150-bed capacity regional rehabilitation center, “one among the consensus reached during the talks between President Duterte and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing,” the information office said.
Yuan said the agreement between the two governments would allow 21 months to finish the facility. The contractor is China State Construction Engineering Corp. Ltd., which Yuan said was rated among the “World’s Most Admired Companies” by Fortune magazine. He added the company is also the largest construction, building-work contractor and real-estate conglomerate in China.
Yuan, Gov. Steve Chiongbian Solon and other officials showed the now-symbolic clenched fist of Duterte during the groundbreaking ceremony as he also acknowledged that “China is the Philippines’s largest trading partner.”