(Author’s Note. I wrote an article on this subject years ago, but I have to do a rewrite because China has evolved so rapidly through the years, and so have all our perceptions. This article, a Filipino perspective, will simply skim the surface of a vast complex topic and focus on current geopolitics and on a basic guide for having a peaceful or warlike relation with China, or both.)
China is still a mystery to most outsiders, especially to the Western world, which looks at China only as a “threat” to Western dominance and supremacy. Yet there is the other side of the coin — the “opportunity” to grow with China. Ironically, China is a “friend” and an ‘“enemy” all at once. So, we can make war or make peace. It is a tightrope we must walk.
The phenomenal growth of China in the last half century has been so rapid, it defies understanding for those, like me, who have never been to China. A comparative history of the growth in total number of skyscrapers per country came out about a decade ago, where China had practically no skyscrapers 50 years ago. Then, the animated graph showed how it quickly overtook all Western nations in less than a decade. (I am still trying to locate the link to this phenomenal post.) At the end, China beat the US and all the EU nations and was “on top of the food chain.”
This kind of growth was driven by engineering (technical) and electronics (digital) all at once.
The effects of the rapid growth of China is phenomenal in that it became a source of power — geopolitical, social, psychological and cultural. The rise of China is partly due to its evolving culture through history, genetics, geopolitics, and spirituality. The old Great Wall Chinese mindset, which feared Western conquest and cultural domination, has been replaced by the new China — wanting economic dialogue with the world as the path to growth.
The first lesson in China relations is not to intimidate this new giant, which can hit back ten-fold. When the US and EU confiscated the financial and corporate assets of China and Russia, they were blind to its consequences. China and Russia confiscated US and EU firms in return on a larger scale, perhaps three-fold, because the US-EU had a far greater corporate presence in China. How could they be so dumb, to put it bluntly.
We must look to China through the bipolarity of the Yin and Yang cosmic forces in Chinese philosophy. Yin and Yang are an indivisible whole. One cannot exist without the other. Opposites attract and repel each other in a way that they achieve “cosmic equilibrium” or balance. Yin and Yang are complementary, interconnected, interdependent. Yet, they paradoxically yield both harmony and conflict, both peace and war.
China will go out of its way to accumulate trade partners, unlike the US, which focuses on superiority and supremacy. This is the principle that will accelerate the “inter-regnum,” the transition from America to China as the new global force, because the China formula addresses economic progress, not the American formula of military dominance. This inter-regnum, unfortunately, may first trigger WW3, or the cleansing of the planet, according to political scientists.
The second lesson to learn is the ability to walk the tightrope — to regard China as a friend and as an enemy all at once, which we will cover in Part 2 in next week’s StarGazer.
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