Another focal point of talks in Manila has been the South China Sea and long-running tension between Beijing and U.S. ally the Philippines, which Washington is treaty-bound to defend in the event of an attack on its vessels.
China's coast guard, deployed widely for years far from its mainland, engaged in a brief altercation with Philippine navy personnel on Monday near a disputed reef in Manila's exclusive economic zone, prompting the countries to summon each other's ambassadors.
'INFRINGING AND PROVOCATIVE ACTIONS'
In a second incident on Thursday, China's coast guard accused the Philippines of "provocative actions" and said it had thwarted an intrusion at another disputed feature, the Scarborough Shoal.
The strategic atoll, long held by Beijing, falls within Manila's EEZ and is the South China Sea's most contested site.
The Philippine coast guard said water cannon was used on a government fisheries vessel that engaged in a "purely humanitarian undertaking".
Beijing claims sovereignty over almost the entire South China Sea overlapping parts of the EEZs of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam.
China does not recognise a 2016 arbitration ruling that those claims had no basis in international law.
China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi did not attend Thursday's forum in Manila and was due to join a regional meeting in Kyrgyzstan.
He told ASEAN counterparts on Wednesday the South China Sea was "our common home", where peace and stability rested in the hands of all.
Regional countries should "resist the incitement of foreign forces, oppose individual countries using the sea to make trouble," an official statement quoted him as saying.
On Thursday, a day after Wang and Rubio held talks in Manila on a range of issues, including Taiwan, Beijing began two days of live-fire drills in some parts of the Taiwan Strait near the shores of its southeastern province of Fujian.
They follow war games in December that were China's most extensive encircling Taiwan, a democratically governed island which China claims as its own territory.
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