Wenceslao: China is not all ‘good’

PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte, since pivoting towards China, has heaped praises on our giant neighbor, making its leaders appear less prone to advancing their country's interest than officials of the United States. That went as far as him issuing erroneous assertions during his recent trip to Beijing. “(China) has never invaded a piece of my country all these generations,” he said. That was a jab at the US, which colonized the country in 1899.

That merited a correction from Supreme Court (SC) Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio, who was among the legal minds who won for the Philippines in the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague its claim over a portion of the South China Sea. He noted the two instances China invaded our territory, with the first one in 1995 when it seized Mischief Reef in the Spratlys and the second one in 2012 when it invaded Scarborough Shoal.

Duterte, though, is not the only one with erroneous perception about China. Many of his critics, for example, still view China as a communist country in the traditional sense. When the President announced the cutting of ties with the US, Trillanes accused him of thinking like a communist. “If he thinks like a communist, talks like a communist, frees the communist and appoints the communists, then he must be a communist,” Trillanes said.

Of course, Duterte is not a communist and I doubt if he ever embraced Marxism, the basis of communism. Neither is China a communist country now even if it is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) stated through its publication Ang Bayan, China is a capitalist country on the way to becoming imperialist like the US.

But here's a caveat. China's leaders are all members of the CCP, which means that while their practices are capitalist, their viewpoints and methods are still influenced somewhat by the official ideology of Marxism, Leninism and Maoism. Knowing this is important to understand how China's leaders treat China-Philippines relations. Are they better than, say, a Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump?

I don't profess to know the practice of Marxism by a party like the CCP that has long been in power after winning the revolution. But I think that the same party discipline and practices that are guiding the CPP are also guiding the CCP. If so, then the President is wrong in saying that China is all “good.” The CCP is good in advancing Chinese interest and that is bad for Philippine interest.

One hallmark of a communist party is its adherence to collective decision-making. In some parties, where factionalism is existent, adherence to it may be mere lip service but generally there is an effort to get a consensus in every major decision. What I am saying is that the decision to offer loans and investments to the Philippines and the mellowed stance on the territorial dispute with the Philippines was not of President Xi Jinping's making but a collective one.

This is very much unlike in the Philippines where, especially in the case of Duterte, almost all of the decisions—well-studied or knee-jerk—are made by the president alone. Which is why we should be wary of the kind of relation we have with China as of the moment because while every move of its leaders, aimed to promote the country's interests, is well studied, ours have so far followed the twists and turns of the President's mind, making our moves inferior.

While we are agog about China's promise to provide billions of dollars in loans and investments, we should be warned that only a minuscule part of that is out of goodwill. Profiting from a big chunk of those loans and investments would be the Chinese state and firms themselves. Plus this: because of those investments and loans, they have recovered from the setback of the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling on our claim to portions of the South China Sea.

That’s how well-studied China’s current moves are, and because our own moves have seemingly been made out of the President’s pique, we may be falling into a well-laid trap.

(khanwens@gmail.com/ twitter: @khanwens)

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