It was a governor in name only. The Yongle Emperor never actually gained any sovereignty over Luzon, despite trying to make a claim on some territory. In reality, many different rulers from throughout the archipelago, from Sulu to Maynila and elsewhere, had established trade connections with Chinese dynasties going back at least to the Song. These also became loose diplomatic ties. However, these were not the same kinds of close ties that occurred between, say, Dai Viet and China on the mainland later on. The only modern source (Ho 2009) cited in the Wikipedia articles that mention this actually also puts the “governor” in quotation marks and notes that the effort at gaining some kind of sovereignty was ineffective. It makes it pretty clear that this wasn’t an actual claim with merit.

Whoever wrote the Wikipedia article took this at face value and wrote instead that there was a real Chinese governor ruling. It becomes apparent when reading how Filipinos in the region viewed the Chinese visitors that there were no Chinese rulers. They saw them as often visitors, in Tagalog calling them “sanglay”, which means “regularly coming” from two Chinese loanwords. There was never a Chinese government established though.

For more information on the relationship between China and the Philippines, I can recommend two books in particular. However, the interactions were fairly shallow at the time, mostly being about trade. It wasn’t until the colonial period and major immigration of Hokkien people to Southeast Asia that the Chinese really began to leave some kind of mark on Filipino culture. Anyways:

Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society by William Henry Scott

Raiding, Trading, and Feasting: The Political Economy of Philippine Chiefdoms by Laura Lee Junker.