Ironies of our China policy

On June 9, 1975, President Ferdinand Marcos signed with Chinese Premier Chou En Lai the joint communiqué wherein we embraced the One-China policy. While they were toasting each other over maotai, Ninoy Aquino was in prison. Barely a month earlier, he had just ended a 40-day hunger strike to protest his trial before a military tribunal. He had instructed his lawyers to withdraw all motions pending before the Supreme Court, and he had to be forcibly dragged by soldiers into the military courtroom for his trial.

What a difference 36 years can make. Today Ninoy’s son is President of the Republic, and is the guest of the Chinese government. Then the Chinese were die-hard communists and Marcos’ aim was to neutralize their open support for the Maoist rebels in the countryside. Today the Chinese are capitalists and only the local rebels still believe in Chairman Mao, and Mr. Aquino’s aim is to increase Chinese investments in the Philippines and lessen the tensions in the Spratlys.

Those two goals entail radically different strategies. We must distinguish when a Chinese policy statement is directed at us and when it is directed to someone else. On economic matters, say the Chinese hunger for our vast mineral deposits, China is talking to us and indeed needs to talk to the native lords, both elite and mass-based, who hold the levers of access to local mining. But on political matters, China might actually be talking to a global audience, chief among them the United States, to demonstrate how far China will go to advance its interests.

China’s interest in our mines is a mixed blessing. In one sense, we can have them eating off our hand. China’s search for mineral deposits has taken it to places as far and as alien to them as Africa. Whatever they extract they have to ship across several oceans just to bring them to China’s shores. We, on the other hand, are right across China’s eastern coast, and in a land where Chinese engineers will live in what is at least a more familiar culture. This alone should yield significant savings in transport and managerial costs.

But the fly in the ointment is the environmental risk—not because we are dealing with mining but because we are dealing with China, a country whose environmental record is, to say the least, far from exemplary.

I have long rejected the knee-jerk anti-mining position that all mining is poison for the earth. Economic progress entails environmental costs, and how much of the earth we sacrifice in exchange for more schools, more hospitals, more roads and more infrastructure for the local population is a policy decision that we must make deliberately and democratically. If the anti-mining activists had their way from the very beginning, the Industrial Revolution couldn’t have happened. And even if you really hate mining, please ask the indigenous peoples first if they are willing to forego the benefits that mining will bring.

But what I worry about is that in the past we dealt mainly with foreign mining investors accountable to strict environmental standards in their own countries, say the United States or Australia. It was bad enough when some of these companies felt at liberty to flout home-country standards when they operated abroad. How much more with Chinese miners, whose home-country standards are deplorable to start with?

That is why President Aquino’s recent declaration in Beijing is most assuring: “We will not take short cuts in order to close deals; we will follow the correct procedures,” by way of contrasting himself to former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and the ZTE-NBN scam. “What this simply means is that investors will not anymore have to rely on connections in order to set up shop.”

Of all possible investments, it is in mining where we must maximize Mr. Aquino’s pledge: his “culture of transparency” will preclude Arroyo-era corruption scandals and his “level playing field” should conversely protect foreign investors from predatory local elites.

About the Philippines’ call for China to declare 2013 “Visit the Philippines Year” to attract Chinese tourists, all I can say is: Good luck! The idiocy of the Luneta shoot-out leaves too much of a black mark in the minds of Chinese tourists mulling over their vacation options.

Overall, this bilateral mindset for economics must yield to a multilateral mindset for national security. China has always insisted that these disputes be resolved bilaterally, and conversely we have insisted on a regional approach. We must preserve the regional approach already adopted in the 2002 China-Asean Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea. We must ensure that any joint development be carried out only in disputed territory, and not in territory that already belongs to us. And we must maintain our exclusive right to the natural resources found in our Exclusive Economic Zone created under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. This  should be the irreducible minimum position.

How China deals with the Philippines with regard to the Spratlys signals to the world China’s political will to assert its hegemony in this neck of the woods, so to speak. It is a subtle game of feints and symbols at which the Chinese are adept, given their ancient and sophisticated civilization. It is a game at which, sadly, we are clumsy amateurs. Some foolishly think that when China sends its warships to the Spratlys, it thus postures only for Filipinos. Only partly so. We are too small an audience to warrant such preening. The message is directed to other global powers. And since China has gone to great lengths to picture itself as a non-threat, we must likewise take it to task publicly and openly when it bares its aggressive streak in the Spratlys.

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