[China’s next leaders]

Sunday, 07 November 2010 00:00

China and the Philippines have become more tightly bound in commercial and investment relations than most Filipinos realize.
China is financing a lot of our infrastructure projects. Many Chinese companies—most if not all of them state-owned—are involved in many of our most important developmental activities.

China is the Philippines’ third largest trading partner. It is also our third largest donor partner and, despite the hostage-taking tragedy, continues to be a major—our fourth largest—source of visitors, tourists and businessmen, from abroad.

PH-PRC economic, political and cultural relations are growing, and bound to continue to deepen and expand, if only because of our nearness to each other. In a certain sense, though in very different forms, the same political, commercial and political imperatives that made the Philippines an important partner of China in dealing with the New World (the Americas) and Old Europe during the 250 years of the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade (1565 to 1815) are at work today. Geography and the resulting geopolitics tie China and us together.

This physical proximity, and the accidents of history, have imposed on the leaders of the Philippines and China—because millions of Filipinos and Chinese (especially those of Fujian, Guangdong and Hong Kong SAR) are blood relatives and in other ways sharers of a common personal history—a mission to take each other’s nation more sensitively, more caringly.

That goes for Philippine presidents and Cabinet members, as well as lawmakers in both chambers of our Congress, as well as for leaders in the different departments of life in the private sector.

That is the reason we have offered our readers today’s Special Report on the new generation of China’s leaders who will be coming in from 2012 onward.

The words of the former Secretary General of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), Ambassador Rod Severino, who is now head of the Asean Studies Center at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), in Singapore, bear repeating here. He was addressing an unsolicited advice to presidential-election winner Benigno Aquino 3rd in an article titled “A Foreign Policy Agenda for the New Philippine President” in Opinion Asia on May 14, 2010.

Ambassador Severino wrote this about China.

“Relations with China.
“President Aquino may have to make an early visit to Beijing, if only to focus his mind on this all-important relationship, to take the measure of China’s decision-makers, and to have a first-hand look at Chinese realities. Some of the issues to deal with are the conflicting claims of the Philippines and China to land features in the South China Sea and the uncertain nature of the maritime regimes there, the competition with China for markets and investments, the opportunities that a rapidly rising China presents to the Philippines, and the links between Chinese firms and powerful Filipinos. For the Philippines, China is both an opportunity and a challenge; it is both a rising power with which the Philippines has a territorial dispute and a surging market that can be an engine of growth for the region of which the country is a part. In any case, China is a looming force in East Asia while being held down by a number of internal constraints.
The Philippines ought to approach its relations with China with utmost seriousness and sophistication, taking these tensions and seeming contradictions into account. http://manilatimes.net/index.php/component/content/article/83-opinion-columnist/31646-chinas-next-leaders