A defining moment

When President Duterte sits down with President Xi Jinping in Beijing, it will be a defining moment for our bilateral relationship. The two leaders represent the fastest-growing economies in Asia. Rehabilitation of our bilateral relationship will produce profound consequences on both ends.

Our bilateral relationship is multifaceted. Cultural exchanges between our two peoples go back centuries. We provided important ports for the trade routes extending from China’s eastern cities down to the Malacca Straits. For as long as historical records go, the sea we shared was never a barrier to mutual cooperation. It was a bridge that enabled trade, exchange of know-how and many intermarriages.

We are cousins. We are relatives who have always been ready to help each other.

Nations are fairly recent inventions. The borders that resulted from that invention imposed barriers where there was none before. Communities that once traded and drew prosperity from doing so were asked to consider the other foreigners. Beneficial relationships ended on the altar of fabricated animosities.

The Cold War produced imagined barriers between our two peoples. Ideology, however, could never overcome history. Ideology is nothing but a flimsy excuse to produce hatred where there was always friendship.

The past six years represented what should be the lowest point in our relationship with China. Manila, during the previous administration, pursued a policy that reduced a flourishing and multifaceted relationship into a mere squabble over which entity owned this reef or that. Issues of trade and commerce were thrown into the dustbin, and everything was reduced into a game of asserting ownership.

I recall the wise words of Kalinga leader Macliing Dulag when asked if he had papers to prove ownership of the land his people inhabited. Ownership was a completely alien idea to the wise old leader. He wondered: “How could anyone own land? The land outlives us.”

The sea we share will outlive us as well. No one should really own it. It will outlive nations. Yet that sea will continue, as it has been for millennia, to be a bridge rather than a barrier.

During the Cold War, we entered into treaties supposedly to look after our defense. The outspoken assumption in these treaties is that China was the enemy. That is the same unspoken assumption underlying the manner we have tried to build up our armed strength. We were taught to build barriers rather than bridges.

We Southeast Asians were taught to pursue the path of confrontation rather than mutually beneficial collaboration with our neighbors. At some point, surely, we will outlive that historical straitjacket. It is the orthodoxy of one superpower wanting to make us a pawn in some revived strategy of containment against what they consider a “threat” to their hegemony in a region that is not theirs. We can choose not to be prisoners of that orthodoxy. This region is ours, all of us who actually inhabit the periphery of a beneficial sea. We have used this sea as a means for cooperation for thousands of years. It will continue to be our means for cooperation in the next 10,000 years.

President Duterte’s decision to depart from the orthodoxy imposed by one superpower is a wise one. That orthodoxy demeans us. It makes us merely instruments of a game one superpower prefers to play. For the past six years, our Southeast Asian neighbors looked at us as an oddity. We were bent, at American behest, to pursue a foreign policy strategy meant solely to make China lose face. It was a counterproductive strategy.

By choosing to rejuvenate our historical friendship with China, President Duterte has made a wise choice that will most benefit our people. He is not doing this simply to spite Washington. He is doing this to reopen the old bridges of friendship that will help our own economy’s emergence.

This is more than just an “independent foreign policy.” It is a step taken in the nation’s best interest. This is what patriotism means in the last analysis. It is also the path of wisdom.