Harmonious Relations
"There is the potential for an incident. It's a question of face. The new Japanese Prime Minister Abe has hawks in his cabinet and he doesn't want to back down. The Chinese new leadership doesn't want to back down, so I don't see how either of them can back off at this stage."
Senior diplomat, Beijing
Thanks to the heft, the volume and the trade that China has experienced with its mode of experimental capitalism that has been so hugely beneficial to employment, manufacturing, economic growth and international influence, there have been huge benefits. One, that more Chinese are being drawn out of their endemic poverty and into the rising middle class. Two, that the nation has become wealthy, and has been able to invest hugely in its defensive spending.
Chinese communist-style capitalism has resulted in giving China immense firepower. Military spending has increased from $17-billion in 2001 to roughly $150-billion in 2009. And, if anything, it is accelerating. And with that increased arsenal has come greater confidence, and belligerence as well. Territorial disputes with neighbours have shaken the geography. China has pridefully resumed its place as the Middle Kingdom; the sun around which lesser nation-planets revolve in the eastern constellation.
There has been a heavy cost in production and manufacturing and huge trade opportunities that have given China its upward mobility and new power in the international community. A dreadful toll has been taken on its environment. Chemical spills in rivers, land saturated with the contamination of manufacturing, and the air so dense with particulates that the sun is blocked out, and China's great metropoli are grey with smog, their populations suffering from breathing difficulties, asthma and lung diseases.
Hungry for energy since energy sources result in power to energize manufacturing, there are coal furnaces everywhere with their chimneys belching out carbon dioxide, chemicals, heavy metals, obliterating the fresh clear air and replacing it with noxious fumes. China has had to temporarily shut down industries, and limit the use of vehicles on days so full of particulate-laden smog that measurements soar off the meter into dangerous-to-human-existence.
These are all compelling and distressing details that Chinese live with, and that the new Chinese administration has vowed to deal with - along with endemic corruption at every level of the bureaucracy. And then there are the sovereignty and territorial integrity issues that trouble Vietnam, Thailand and South Korea in dealing with their giant neighbour. And, of course, Japan, which is becoming itself more militarized, changing over from a defensive military culture to an offensive, nationalistic mode.
China's stand-off with the Philippines west of the main Philippine island of Luzon was one issue. Taiwan, Vietnam, Brunei and Malaysia are furious about China's claims to ownership of the entire South China Sea. An official map of China's full territory yet to be distributed increases the number of areas disputed with its neighbours from 29 to 130.
"The Chinese ideal", wrote Henry Kissinger, "stressed subtlety, indirection and the patient accumulation of advantage. Rarely do Chinese statesmen risk the outcome of a conflict on a single all-or-nothing clash. Elaborate multi-year manoeuvres are closer to their style."
"Observe carefully; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership", wrote Mao Tse Tung.
Labels: China, Conflict, Controversy, Environment, Marketing, Political Realities, Traditions
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, February 05, 2013
<< Home