Obviously knowing what class of service you're booking would be helpful since it affects the scenarios quite a bit. If it were me and I couldn't pay for business, I'd probably do ORD-LAX/DFW-HKG-MNL, booking in premium economy and staying on the AA flights until HKG.

Advantages of this approach:
- Earn 1.5 EQMs per mile (so nearly 30K total)
- Can hopefully upgrade most of the flights if you can stomach the co-pay (for a flight that long it seems totally worth it to me!)
- The fall back to premium economy if upgrades don't clear isn't so terrible
- Not outrageously more expensive than coach

Alternatively, routing through NRT works as well and that's probably what I'd do if I was paying for business since you'll end up with 32K+ EQMs even with the more direct routing, so you'd be in great shape for PLT either way and it looks to be about 6 hours shorter travel time.