Shall we be afraid of a monster that is China?
China's behavior has gotten uglier. Its recent collision with Vietnam over the construction of an oil rig in the Paracels, and its arbitrary building of an airstrip in the Philippine Spratlys, infuriate. The anti-Chinese rage in Vietnam this month is a consequence of this behavior. At the very least, the actions against the interests of our country and Vietnam are provocative and abet rising tension in the region.
For the first time, the two countries are experiencing muscling and aggression with tinges of violence, like being hosed with water cannons and rammed by Chinese ships. The strong-arm display in the South China Sea paints a different China today. Contrary to the post-national-liberation communist leadership in the 1950s that shunned pretensions to geopolitical hegemony in the region, the leadership that the ASEAN members confront in China today is one that is heady with superpower complex. It no longer minds disrespecting and hurting neighbors in the ambition to expand borders to theirs.
In fact, the China that we see now has gone not only to bully but belittle countries opting to defend territorial sovereignty from its incursion. More infuriatingly, its unfree press has gone to calling these countries rats, and urging Beijing to make them "pay a price they cannot afford." Does China believe now it can afford the economic, political and military price of ramming spurious claims on waters that do not belong to it? Does it think it can just get on with disrespecting or trouncing others' sovereignty? Does it feel so unbeatable now to just do what it wants to do?
The recent violent demonstrations by the Vietnamese citizens condemning China's oil drill in the Paracels debunk the phrase "undisputed sovereignty" as nothing but a hoax. The burning of foreign symbols signal more than disputedness. It is an assertion pregnant with the readiness to put lives on the line. Indeed, if the conflict between China and the countries of Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines turns into an armed confrontation Beijing's powerful clique of top bureaucrats, military generals and business billionaires may be hard put to convince their citizens how a group of tide-washed rocks and coral outcrops along foreign shores several hundreds of miles away had become a cause to go to war.
Yes, China today is no longer the sleeping giant that the western powers in the 19th and early 20th century partitioned into enclaves of foreign authority and wealth. It is no longer the fledgling nation post-1949, buffeted by agricultural famines, one economic debacle after another, and a state of inertia. It has risen to become an industrial and financial behemoth, that now stands to rival the largest economy in the world, the United States. Its powerful economic tentacles grip the globe from Africa, the Middle East, Europe, South Asia and even America which has more than five trillion dollars of indebtedness to it. Even in our country, it has interests in strategic utilities, and has a business presence almost everywhere all over the archipelago.
Translated to hegemonic ambitions, all these take on a monstrous apparition shadowing small countries like the Philippines and Vietnam. But is the threat of China grabbing territorial waters something to strike fear and trembling among those threatened? It had gotten to have so much stake in our economy, for example, from investments in vital industries to the flooding of cheap consumer goods in the market that withdrawing all of them can have the effect of removing pillars to a house. Will we fall if China becomes an enemy instead of an economic partner? Won't we survive without it? There is also the military might to reckon with. China's industrial and financial rise has pulled along the rapid modernization of the People's Liberation Army to standards that pose to level off with the US and western powers in the next decade. Its superpower status may be said to be a forgone conclusion a few years from now. Is it then the equivalent of the cinematic Godzilla for countries in the region to cower from at the thought of being trampled upon?
Translated to hegemonic ambitions, all these take on a monstrous apparition shadowing small countries like the Philippines and Vietnam. But is the threat of China grabbing territorial waters something to strike fear and trembling among those threatened? It had gotten to have so much stake in our economy, for example, from investments in vital industries to the flooding of cheap consumer goods in the market that withdrawing all of them can have the effect of removing pillars to a house. Will we fall if China becomes an enemy instead of an economic partner? Won't we survive without it? There is also the military might to reckon with. China's industrial and financial rise has pulled along the rapid modernization of the People's Liberation Army to standards that pose to level off with the US and western powers in the next decade. Its superpower status may be said to be a forgone conclusion a few years from now. Is it then the equivalent of the cinematic Godzilla for countries in the region to cower from at the thought of being trampled upon?
The answers to all are nay. At the back of its aggressive posturings is a China that cannot afford to make enemies with the world. It depends as much on its economic interests in our country for instance as we do on them. We can afford to bite the bullet and not have them anyway, as we have been used to - that is not having any of those mainland Chinese investments, in the past. But China's runaway growth and state of bigness today may not do well losing them. Countries like us are the wall that China like Humpty Dumpty sits on. Once the wall moves and offsets its balance, the overly fat character is bound to have a great fall, and no top bureaucrats in the Chinese Communist Party, military generals and billionaire businessmen can ever put it together again. This is to say that China has greater stake on not disturbing the status quo than shuffling the current world order.
But why the kind of aggressiveness that it has never displayed before? Recent sorties into its neighbors' seas show a country frantic to lay hands on resources that do not belong to it. The bullying and abrasive talk do not exhibit strength. They exhibit a weakness more profound than anybody could see. China did not do this even in the direst of times in the past. Why is it now brazenly doing things that soil its status in the international community, even as they court the ire of neighbors? Beneath is fear. China's display of offensive actuation in relation to them is one of a mythical god facing the specter of mortality. It is one already far from the China of old that did not need so much to live, much so grab other people's possession.
After the red army ousted the forces of Chiang kai shek from the mainland in 1949, China at once faced tough challenges to its existence as a communist-led state. The United Nations led by America shut it out. The so-called Free World of countries aligned with the west isolated it. US-orchestrated military alliances looked for every opportunity to wipe it from the face of the earth. But it was a China that stood strong, proud, defiant and united. It was a China that inspired peoples throughout the world to struggle against oppressive ruling classes and their foreign sponsors. It gave imperialism, the new era of western colonialism, a prick in the ass. It was a friend and dependable ally of the small and oppressed. Its historic people's war against imperialism, over the first half of the 20th century was held as a guiding light by similar revolutionary struggles in other societies. Seen as threat, the western powers led by the United States exerted all might to crush it. They could only lash at it, not break it.
But such a China, inspiration and ally of people's liberation movements in the third world, is no more. In its stead has slithered a new China of self-enriching Communist Party bureaucrats, military generals acting like feudal lords, and empiric business proprietors who would enter the world's tiny circle of one percent superrich. It is a country that is seeing the gap between the vast masses of the people and the obscenely wealthy top layer of society growing wider and wider. It is a China that is steering farther away from the promise of socialist equality under the pro-people ideological leadership of its revolutionary years. Power and possession of wealth at the apex of state and society is already monopolistic. Meanwhile, its base of more than one billion population fray on the sharp edge of poverty, powerlessness and alienation.
Thirty years since the advent of the Deng Xiiaoping economic formula, the merry party is winding over. The capitalist road is sliding towards the fate others have come to, such as the' Great Depression in America in the 1930s. As wealth becomes more and more concentrated in a few and all businesses monopolized by bank-industry fusions of the financial oligarchy, the same acute ills of the moribund western capitalist societies set in: money that is becoming nothing but worthless paper, floods of goods not being bought anymore by the marginalized masses simply because their minuscule purchasing power cannot afford them, and a runaway growth with no limit to the voracious need for energy. Society is awash with goods. But teeming millions of people remain dirt poor. Never before has so much wealth been created. But trillions of dollars in the hands of a few stand to lose value with the prospect of having nothing to spend on anymore. Unprecedented hugeness in the capacity for production poses to stand idle, because the big company owners face the prospect of not getting any further profit with factories continuing to run. And so, retrenchments and shutdowns become the order of the day. More massive numbers become unemployed, and the idle labor force bloats further to explosive proportion.
China is contracting the above deadly capitalist depression-syndrome of the west. The flexing and trashing of political-military muscle in the Paracels and the West Philippine Sea is part of this. It manifests the pallor of fright at the specter of end times. China is no longer the strong nation that needed least, but other societies needed. It must have greater markets in other climes to dump goods. It must have bottomless wells of energy supply to fuel ever expanding productive capacity. It must have all the monetary reserves it can extract from financing bankrupt businesses and governments to continue to be relevant. In short, it is a new China that is direly in need of continual infusions of resources into its economic bloodstream in order to survive. It is a China nearing the trip to the intensive care unit that America and Europe have gone to since 2008.
The great Chairman Mao Zedong has admonished not to fear the imperialists for all their awesome military might and display of political-economic prowess. He said, "dare to struggle and dare to win," for the oppressors of the world are nothing but paper tigers. Out there in a tiny spot of the West Philippine Sea called the Ayungin Shoal, a squad of Philippine marines living on hard conditions of existence aboard a dilapidated navy ship that has been grounded for years, does so for the country. Dare to struggle and dare to win, for the fearsome monster that is China today is nothing but a paper tiger.
As confrontations in the Spratlys become more frequent and escalate in intensity, it helps to be reminded that what we are facing is not a country, but an elite power clique at the helm of the society that China has now become. It is not the Chinese people that we face, but opposite them, a vulnerable creature expected to toss in the gigantic ebbs and flows of the turbulent political and economic waters their capitalist route is coming to. The Philippines is on the right track to opt to resolve its dispute with China by a rules-based approach of international arbitration and multilateral diplomatic alliance building. But when the water cannons are replaced with live ammunition, we should not be seen as only up to words.
But why the kind of aggressiveness that it has never displayed before? Recent sorties into its neighbors' seas show a country frantic to lay hands on resources that do not belong to it. The bullying and abrasive talk do not exhibit strength. They exhibit a weakness more profound than anybody could see. China did not do this even in the direst of times in the past. Why is it now brazenly doing things that soil its status in the international community, even as they court the ire of neighbors? Beneath is fear. China's display of offensive actuation in relation to them is one of a mythical god facing the specter of mortality. It is one already far from the China of old that did not need so much to live, much so grab other people's possession.
After the red army ousted the forces of Chiang kai shek from the mainland in 1949, China at once faced tough challenges to its existence as a communist-led state. The United Nations led by America shut it out. The so-called Free World of countries aligned with the west isolated it. US-orchestrated military alliances looked for every opportunity to wipe it from the face of the earth. But it was a China that stood strong, proud, defiant and united. It was a China that inspired peoples throughout the world to struggle against oppressive ruling classes and their foreign sponsors. It gave imperialism, the new era of western colonialism, a prick in the ass. It was a friend and dependable ally of the small and oppressed. Its historic people's war against imperialism, over the first half of the 20th century was held as a guiding light by similar revolutionary struggles in other societies. Seen as threat, the western powers led by the United States exerted all might to crush it. They could only lash at it, not break it.
But such a China, inspiration and ally of people's liberation movements in the third world, is no more. In its stead has slithered a new China of self-enriching Communist Party bureaucrats, military generals acting like feudal lords, and empiric business proprietors who would enter the world's tiny circle of one percent superrich. It is a country that is seeing the gap between the vast masses of the people and the obscenely wealthy top layer of society growing wider and wider. It is a China that is steering farther away from the promise of socialist equality under the pro-people ideological leadership of its revolutionary years. Power and possession of wealth at the apex of state and society is already monopolistic. Meanwhile, its base of more than one billion population fray on the sharp edge of poverty, powerlessness and alienation.
Thirty years since the advent of the Deng Xiiaoping economic formula, the merry party is winding over. The capitalist road is sliding towards the fate others have come to, such as the' Great Depression in America in the 1930s. As wealth becomes more and more concentrated in a few and all businesses monopolized by bank-industry fusions of the financial oligarchy, the same acute ills of the moribund western capitalist societies set in: money that is becoming nothing but worthless paper, floods of goods not being bought anymore by the marginalized masses simply because their minuscule purchasing power cannot afford them, and a runaway growth with no limit to the voracious need for energy. Society is awash with goods. But teeming millions of people remain dirt poor. Never before has so much wealth been created. But trillions of dollars in the hands of a few stand to lose value with the prospect of having nothing to spend on anymore. Unprecedented hugeness in the capacity for production poses to stand idle, because the big company owners face the prospect of not getting any further profit with factories continuing to run. And so, retrenchments and shutdowns become the order of the day. More massive numbers become unemployed, and the idle labor force bloats further to explosive proportion.
China is contracting the above deadly capitalist depression-syndrome of the west. The flexing and trashing of political-military muscle in the Paracels and the West Philippine Sea is part of this. It manifests the pallor of fright at the specter of end times. China is no longer the strong nation that needed least, but other societies needed. It must have greater markets in other climes to dump goods. It must have bottomless wells of energy supply to fuel ever expanding productive capacity. It must have all the monetary reserves it can extract from financing bankrupt businesses and governments to continue to be relevant. In short, it is a new China that is direly in need of continual infusions of resources into its economic bloodstream in order to survive. It is a China nearing the trip to the intensive care unit that America and Europe have gone to since 2008.
The great Chairman Mao Zedong has admonished not to fear the imperialists for all their awesome military might and display of political-economic prowess. He said, "dare to struggle and dare to win," for the oppressors of the world are nothing but paper tigers. Out there in a tiny spot of the West Philippine Sea called the Ayungin Shoal, a squad of Philippine marines living on hard conditions of existence aboard a dilapidated navy ship that has been grounded for years, does so for the country. Dare to struggle and dare to win, for the fearsome monster that is China today is nothing but a paper tiger.
As confrontations in the Spratlys become more frequent and escalate in intensity, it helps to be reminded that what we are facing is not a country, but an elite power clique at the helm of the society that China has now become. It is not the Chinese people that we face, but opposite them, a vulnerable creature expected to toss in the gigantic ebbs and flows of the turbulent political and economic waters their capitalist route is coming to. The Philippines is on the right track to opt to resolve its dispute with China by a rules-based approach of international arbitration and multilateral diplomatic alliance building. But when the water cannons are replaced with live ammunition, we should not be seen as only up to words.
Let us also be prepared for the ultimate conflict. Can a small country like us stand up to an emerging superpower like China? I think the right question is, shall we or shall we not? That is, dare to struggle and dare to win. Take it from their fathers themselves.
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