Xi’s eye for beauty
Credit to Author: MAURO GIA SAMONTE| Date: Sat, 25 May 2019 16:24:25 +0000
The world is uptight over the increasing trade war tensions between China and the United States. Agence France-Presse reports that Kiron Skinner, a director of policy planning at the US State Department, told a security forum that China is the first US “great power competitor that is not Caucasian.” What’s wrong with this view? That world political and economic power is a private preserve for westerners and that the worsening US-China trade conflict must be resolved toward maintaining this status quo.
Problem: US losing
One problem here is that the US, as borne by facts, is increasingly losing to China on the economic front of the struggle. Just to cite an example, Apple’s stocks virtually plummeted with the explosion of the trade war Trump declared against China. One reason for this is that Apple’s signature products iPhone and iPad are manufactured through Foxconn, a Chinese company operating right in the heart of China. Anytime China retaliates against Trump’s trade attacks, Apple’s products necessarily become direct hits.
But when, for instance, Trump, driven by a primordial need to preserve US business, eases up on his current blacklisting of China cybertech giant Huawei, thus opening up good prospects for Apple in the tremendous 1 billion-plus Chinese market, investors come rushing to buy into the company.
Stated briefly, China has grown so huge that the US, let alone other western power pretenders, can no longer embark on a trade conflict with it without getting a terrible trouncing. And this is where the danger lies. For given that racial attitude as Skinner has implied in his assessment of the US-China trade tensions, US, and presumably with its western allies, can be prompted into committing the miscalculation that they remain superior to China on the political front, i.e., including military. As Sun Tzu would put it, such miscalculation can lead to US escalating its trade war with China into a military one.
It becomes a most welcome breather, therefore, that China displays equanimity in this entire imbroglio.
An eye for beauty
At the opening ceremony of the Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations (CDAC) in Beijing three weeks ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping said in his keynote speech, “Thinking that one’s own race and culture are superior, and insisting on transforming or even replacing other civilizations is stupid in its understanding and disastrous in practice.”
Elaborating, Xi added, “There is no clash between different civilizations, [we] just need to have the eye to appreciate the beauty in all civilizations.”
The CDAC actually turned out to be one more occasion for demonstrating how President Xi Jinping has been consistent in pursuing a vision of a multi-polar world characterized by openness, accommodation and cooperation among nations. In fact, it has gotten clearer and clearer that such vision has been the major engine of Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which since its inauspicious inception in the late ‘50s has rolled on across oceans and continents, bringing the fruits of modern development to more than one third of the world already.
And yet, at no instance has the Xi adventure ever violated the endemic values of differing peoples, respecting native norms, culture and belief. There has been no occasion that China’s economic aid to developing nations has been conditioned on the host country subordinating to China in any manner whatsoever.
As President Xi proposed in his speech, in order to build up the Asian and global community with a shared future, there must be: mutual respect and equal treatment among civilizations; harmonious co-existence of various civilizations; openness, inclusiveness, and mutual learning among civilizations; and the need for civilizations to keep up with the times.
Anathema to US hegemon
China’s conduct of the BRI since it began shows that it has been succeeding in steering the world toward Xi’s vision as illustrated above. It has brought development to poor nations in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, and judging from recent events, like the break of Italy with the European Union (EU) in order to link up with the BRI, and yet with EU itself beginning to hobnob with China, BRI’s push to ultimately encompass the rest of the world has evidently become unstoppable.
The failure of the United States to counter China’s worldwide swing leaves it with no other choice but to engage China in a heightening of Trump’s economic war to the level of military confrontation.
President Xi recognizes the potential of this eventuality. In his speech at the CDAC, he stressed that Asia is not thoroughly peaceful, with wars persisting in the Middle East, while the Korean Peninsula and the South China Sea have not permanently stabilized.
He pointed out that not all Asian countries are prosperous, the region being host to the nine least developed countries (LDCs). One businessman-scholar stresses, peace is nothing but the absence of development, and so where there are hundreds of millions of extremely poor people which Asia is, the United States has found fertile grounds for sowing the seeds of war.
We need not wonder why the United States has been promoting the idea of the Philippines asserting sovereignty rights over certain areas in the South China Sea also claimed by China. Explosion of military hostilities in the region can only be a handiwork of the United States. Under the worsening tensions of the Trump trade war with China, military confrontation in the South China Sea best serves US world hegemonic design.
Additionally, military war with China gives the United States just that needed situation for it to unilaterally write off its $1-trillion indebtedness to China.
But can US win?
But surely, it is one thing that the United States is capable of engaging China in a military confrontation, it is another that it will succeed. From a reckoning of nuclear capability, the US has come out in the open that it is at a disadvantage. Asked during a congressional hearing, a top military officer admitted that if attacked with Russian hypersonic missiles, the US has no way of stopping them. China subsequently came out with disclosures of its nuclear capabilities the same as that of Russia’s.
But even granting that hostilities don’t escalate to nuclear levels, China has recently proven its readiness and might in the area of conventional warfare, too, when it deployed land troops to Venezuela to come to the aid of the Maduro government.
If China can deploy at a moment’s notice troops to the Caribbean, so can it with just as much facility to the United States homeland.
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