Enough is enough

This is too important to let pass, Ruby Tuason will still be there tomorrow. Was P-Noy right to suggest that China’s leaders are doing a Hitler?

His comment of course was so attention-grabbing it grabbed the attention of the world, quite apart from the leaders of China themselves. Last I looked it was still an item in Yahoo News, having been so since last week.

“At what point do you say: ‘Enough is enough?’” P-Noy asked the New York Times. “Well, the world has to say it—remember that the Sudetenland was given in an attempt to appease Hitler to prevent World War II.”

“Sudetenland” of course was what Hitler called the German-speaking lands he seized from Czechoslovakia in 1938, which presaged his invasion of Poland. And thence Europe. P-Noy’s point being that if you don’t stop China from fledging expansionism now you won’t be able to stop it from full-blown expansionism later.

Unsurprisingly, China responded angrily. Or one of its mouthpieces, Xinhua News Agency, did: “(Aquino’s) latest attack against China, in which he senselessly compared his northern neighbor to Nazi Germany, exposed his true colors as an amateurish politician who is ignorant both of history and reality.”

So, is P-Noy’s comment justified?

Not perfectly so, but reasonably so, yes.

The parallel is worlds from being, well, parallel. The prospect of China graduating from sending gunboats to disputed territories, making claims on the entire China Sea, and imposing all sorts of rules on its air space to gobbling up its neighbors simply defies credulity, to say the least. Germany doing so then did not. Hitler had spent the 1930s arming Germany to the teeth and had been whipping up public resentment over the apparent humiliation Germany had endured after the First World War. German invasion of Europe didn’t just seem likely, it seemed imminent. Not so China’s invasion of its neighbors, let alone the world, today.

Nor indeed, to find an example closer to home, does China’s belligerence over the South China Sea or its outlying territories give off even faint echoes of Japan’s martial overtures throughout the 1930s which presaged its occupation of Asia and the Pacific. Japan’s imperial ambitions not quite incidentally drew from economic need, which it showed by coercing the occupied countries to form an East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. China already dominates Asia and the Pacific economically, what does it need to invade it for?

Which is really what Western experts in particular find the most puzzling thing. China has become the second biggest economic power in the world without shouldering an immense military burden and without recourse to gunboat diplomacy. What in hell is it trying to provoke its neighbors for, thereby risking the prospect of a conflagration there? And quite incidentally drawing the not very altruistic attention of the only superpower left in the world, the United States, the one country that enjoys the most mind-boggling arsenal of weapons ever assembled in the history of humankind and the one empire that, having entered the phase of decline, is looking for ways to revive it.

The only answer the experts can think of is that China remains trapped in a Middle Kingdom mentality, a parochialism or self-centeredness that is proving petty and self-destructive. You would imagine, say observers, that with its current status it would launch an initiative to win friends and influence people, its neighbors chief of them. Instead, it is doing everything in its power to lose friends and piss off people, Vietnam and Japan among them. Vietnam is a country that is not exactly loath to take on a seemingly invincible power and Japan a country that has had a fractious relationship with China for reasons that owe to Japan’s own belligerence in the past.

Whatever the reason, China’s current bullying of its neighbors, even if it nowhere near represents a Hitlerian threat, remains a nasty aggravation that needs to be nipped in the bud. It does represent a threat unto itself, which is that of us and our neighbors living under China’s tyrannical shadow, even if only informally, even if only enforceable economically, for decades to come. That is not a pleasant prospect, and I am glad that P-Noy, however he represents quite

possibly the weakest country (economically) in the emerging bloc that is opposing China, has drawn the line here. If it takes comparisons with Hitler to rouse the world into taking a collective stand against its schoolyard bully antics—China insists that the countries it is feuding with speak singly and not with one voice—then by all means invoke Hitler.

While at this, nothing could be more amateurish or ignorant of history and reality than not researching the characters of the Asian leaders you are dealing with. Had they done so, they would have learned that the current Philippine president, who has known bullies and tyrants in his lifetime, one of them snuffing the life of his father, would be the least inclined to take a path advocated by coercion and force majeure. Those are the very things guaranteed to make him go against it.

Will this defiance cost us dearly? Yes. China has become the most pervasive and dominant economic force in Asia and is not without the means to hit back at perceived tormentors. As witness Hong Kong’s recent moves discriminating against us, or indeed China’s tepid response to “Yolanda,” the only country in the world to manifest it. There will be consequences, but no more so than simply ignoring the provocations China has thrown our way the last couple of years. Ignoring them will have consequences that are far more intolerable. Tama na, sobra na.

Enough is enough.