Carvajal: Fits and starts

CHINA’S Xi Jinping came to the Philippines on a state visit with his whole country squarely behind him. That’s because China is ruled by the Communist Party of China (CPC) that he personifies and speaks for. Everything he signed and did with President Duterte during his visit had CPC approval and was consistent with CPC strategy for China’s long-term national development.

We may not agree with the iron hand by which CPC rules China. But we have to acknowledge that China’s steady progress towards economic and military superpower status is due mainly to the Chinese government’s single-minded adherence to the long-term goals and policies of its ruling party.

The Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, on the other hand, met with Xi Jinping as a popular yet maligned head of a nation that is racked by political and tribal divisions. Like he came to the bargaining table with Xi Jinping in the wake of a survey that says majority of Filipinos consider as “not right” the government’s “inaction” on the favorable arbitral tribunal’s ruling on the disputed West Philippine Sea.

(Inaction, of course, is never right of a leader. But is the invitation to Xi Jinping not the latest of actions that implement Duterte’s strategy towards the problem with China? Duterte is in fact doing something. It’s just that it is not to the liking of the opposition. But when did it ever happen that the political opposition in this country liked the actions of the incumbent?)

That being so, it was a fractiously divided Filipino nation that inked the agreements with a united China. It was Duterte’s sheer will that produced the 29 agreements. Going it alone is, of course, far from ideal.

Yet he cannot afford to be rendered immobile by being torn between two sides. It is not his fault that our pseudo democratic system does not lend itself to bi-partisan approaches to national issues.

My point? Like China (and other developed countries like Germany, France and Great Britain) we need to be ruled by parties that have a vision and road map for the nation’s development and the high moral standards to adhere to them. We cannot continue to be ruled by sweet-talking individuals whose vision does not go beyond re-election and who, for lack of any moral principle, plunder, murder, cheat, and buy votes just to stay in or get back to power.

We may not go for the bloody way CPC acquired power and the iron-handed way it wields it in China. But in our own way we have somehow to strive towards a level of political maturity where we are ruled by political parties with lofty visions and high moral principles. Self-serving individuals with little or no moral principles at all can only move us sidewise and in fits and starts, if ever.

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