China, awakening giant

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(Last of 2 parts)

Boyhood images often come to mind when I look at the China of today – huge, looming, crackling, fast closing in on America as a world power, its 1.3 billion containing almost a fourth of humanity. In our Pasay neighborhood, where Chinese often ventured to purchase old bottles and assorted containers (bote-garapa) in their shrill, singsong voice, we street kids chased after them. Intsik beho, tulo laway! were largely the epithets thrown at these then lowly, ill-dressed Chinese, sweating profusely in the sun. Little did we know we were grossly guilty of racial profiling – yes, racism – as we poked fun at them. They never answered back.

And little did we realize, as our parents and forbears didn’t, that these Chinese would one day amass riches and power in our own land by dint of hard, backbreaking work over the decades. If ever some Filipino Chinese-haters and jingoists had threatened to persecute, if not crush them as the Germans did the Jews, they didn’t act. Now it’s too late. The Chinese are here in ever increasing numbers. They have a corner on strategic industries and businesses like banks, commerce and leading financial institutions. They have built up colossal fortunes. They are assiduously courted by the powers-that-be. Many have settled into our society and are now – Chinoys.

And today with the world as China’s oyster?

Gone are the rickshaws and the communes. Fast going are the hutos, China’s equivalent of ramshackle urban housing. Fast going are the mudhuts in the hinterlands. Peasants who sometimes ate bark off trees during the great famines are no more. Gone, of course, are the famines and the great epidemics. China without difficulty daily feeds 1.3 billion Chinese. Hunger no longer stalks their land. As from the biblical ashes, modern China has risen. In 30 years, they have wrought what the World Bank and the West describe as "economic miracles". So fast has China progressed that try as America does, the former Middle Kingdom can no longer be stopped.

Today, China is on the verge of becoming Asia’s economic engine. "In the near future", say the experts, "China will replace America as the top market for Asian exports". As China and Taiwan join the World Trade Organization (WTO), East Asian economies will add more economic muscle as the Chinese engine loads up more powerfully. Add 25-30 million overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia whose business with China runs into billions of dollars. Their collective GNP is estimated at $450 billion. If they were a separate country, they would be the world’s ninth-largest economy, say authors Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislav (The Commanding Heights).

All roads led to Rome in the old days. Today almost all investment roads lead to China. Foreign direct investment rose 22 percent to $41 billion for the first nine months, an estimated $55 billion for 2002. Trade too is enjoying a boom year. The International Herald Tribune reports exports increased 21 percent to $263 billion, while imports grew 19 percent to $238 billion for a trade surplus of $25 billion. On investment, another report discloses America’s Boeing and Europe’s Airbus could be in for a combined contract of $450 billion for the manufacture of about 1600 to 1800 commercial aircraft for China in the ensuing decade.

Let’s go back to historian Paul Kennedy (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) who puts the picture in another way: "The plain fact is that the closer China comes to the American way of life, the more America’s share of world power will diminish…Year by year, the People’s Republic is becoming wealthier and as it does, the global power balances tilt." If China’s GNP per capita "came to equal South Korea’s – surely a strong likelihood – it would total more than $10 million. If it were to equal Japan’s per capita, it would total some $40 trillion" – way, way bigger than America’s ($8 trillion to $9 trillion).

These are figures that boggle the mind. And Paul Kennedy, a highly respected historian, treats us to a hair-raising futuristic landscape when he states (assuming China reaches Japan’s $10 trillion GNP): "If Beijing then chose to spend the same amount as the United States does on defense, China’s budget would be three or four times larger." So the final question Kennedy poses is: Can America stand a power three times larger than it is? "At the end of the day," he says, "this is a psychological problem." A hair-raising problem, I would add.

To understand China, the observer has to factor in the Chinese’s mystical bondage with eternal time. It is a civilization that has lasted 5000 years, that has stood the rampage of many invaders, that built the Great Wall, that tamed imperial cultures that set out to change China, that endured the humiliation of the Opium Wars when England sought to soak China in opiate, that dropped to its knees with the West’s imposition of the "Unequal Treaties", that saw many of its art and other treasures looted wholesale by the colonial powers. But as Lee Kuan Yew said, as the invader made many imprints on China, time erased these imprints and China always remained China.

Then one must not forget China of the Long March of 1934-35.

Mao Zedong, for all his many mistakes and blunders, remains the cult figure that he is because he symbolized a China that would not cave in. The harrowing almost impassable course over mountain, jungle and ravine was 6000 miles. The march started with 90,000 communist guerrillas. At its end in the caves of Yenan, only 5000 survived. Also considered a long march was the May 4, 1919 congregation in Beijing where tens of thousands from all over China – many of them intellectuals and historians, but largely youth – converged. They all had their visions of a Modern China. They were dreamers all. They sought to dissipate the mists of the past so they could open a door to the future. They were impatient for change.

Thus did eventuate the Communist Party of China and corollarily, the Japanese invasion. Thus did history provide the explosive mixture that would bring down the corrupt regime of Chiang Kai-shek with the powerful backing of America. It was the epic land battle of Huai-Huai in 1949, where Deng was an army officer, that destroyed Chiang’s Nationalist Army of 500,000. Huau-Huai was one of the major land battles of the 20th century. Thus, too, did Deng carve his niche in the military which backed him as he fought many a bruising political battle in the Central Committee and the Politburo.

And how did China peel off millennial poverty and transform the nation to where it is today – from lowly communist commune to, yes, capitalist colossus? China’s leadership, even as it has almost fully embraced capitalism, calls itself a "socialist" regime with "Chinese characteristics".

We have no more space to trace the Odyssey that converted China from a coolie civilization to the glittering citadel of progress it is today. Mao united modern China. Deng gave it enormous social, political and economic muscle. Jiang Zemin discarded its communist ideology and pointed China irreversibly to the capitalist market. Remember what Deng earlier said: "It matters not whether a cat is black or what, so long as it catches the mice". For that, he was branded a "capitalist roader". And even Mao sent him into two-year exile in the hinterlands. Mao set out on his Great Leap Forward which was a disaster. It sought to accomplish in 15 years what the capitalist nations had taken 150 years to achieve. Rehabilitated, Deng picked up the pieces. What was paramount was to modernize China. And this needed capitalist technology, managerial efficiency, and production.

With Mao dead in 1976, December of 1978 became a turning point in 20th century Chinese history.

Yergin and Stanislaw narrate it was that month of December that the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Congress of the Chinese Communist Party arrived at the decision "to reorient China toward the market". In plain economic lingo, this was momentous. The market was a capitalist market. A free enterprise market. This was a bruising break with Mao. This was a break with all the assorted ideological gods of Marxism-Leninism. Said Deng: "I have two choices. I can distribute poverty or I can distribute wealth." This little man also said: "It is glorious to be rich". And he also said that he had never read Das Kapital, the once revered bible of communism.

It must be mentioned that education played a central role in China’s dizzying spiral to progress and wealth. Science and math became a mantra as the leadership whipped up the citizenry to achieve more and more productivity. It was also under Deng that a flood of the best Chinese students in these disciplines was annually dispatched to America’s best post-graduate schools. There are about 60,000 such Chinese students in the US today. About one-half remain in America after graduation. The other half returns to China, there to disseminate their newly acquired knowledge. And what is more, they have seemingly an open mind on the culture and civilization of America.

Today, nobody talks communism anymore in China. As he is about to cede power, Jiang bequeaths his "Three Represents". These are China’s advanced social productive forces, China’s advanced culture, the largest numbers of the Chinese people.

Take out the jabberwocky. This means China has formally ditched communism, and embraced capitalism.

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