Will the no-longer sleeping giant be a friend, or a foe?

China’s President Hu Jintao will be arriving here Tuesday after a successful sortie to Jakarta and Bandung, a sort of saunter down Memory Lane in which 100 Asian and African countries had their chiefs of state and foreign ministers commemorating the 1955 Bandung conference in West Java (Indonesia) which had launched the "non-aligned movement."

Half a century ago, China had been represented in Bandung by the brilliant, eloquent and redoubtable Premier Zhou Enlai, while the host has the dynamic Independence father of his country, Sukarno. Sukarno’s dream had been to call together 29 "original" countries from Asia and Africa in the Third World to "unite". Against whom? Against the old Colonial powers of the West, of course.

Having covered the colorful Bung Karno during the years leading to the GESTAPU Coup of 1965 which led to his downfall, I can still vividly remember his pejorative terms of condemnation. He loved to assail the "Necolims", the so-called "neo-colonial imperial" forces and the "Oldefos" (Old Established Forces). Thus the spirit of Bandung he orchestrated was that of a once "voiceless" Asia and Africa joining into a chorus of defiance, their voices growing thunderous in unity. A revolt, the old Bung used to perorate, "of the colored peoples"!

I had sat just a couple of rows behind him when he delivered, years later, his famous "TAVIP" (Tahun Vivere Pericoloso) or "Year of Living Dangerously" speech before the Istana Merdeka, and the crowd interrupted that hour and a half address with thunderous applause and locomotive yells of "Hidup Bung Karno!" (Long live Brother Karno!) no less than 54 times – almost a shout-a-minute. He was a spellbinder, but used the same phrases so frequently that, in the end, we foreign correspondents, sometimes traveling in his entourage, could almost lip-synch his speeches at the same time he uttered them.

I was surprised to read in yesterday’s Financial Times that our old friend, Roeslan Abdulgani, who wrote President Sukarno’s opening speech and served as the Bandung conference’s Secretary General, is still alive at the age of 90. I was not surprised that old Abdulgani remains as irrepressible, blunt and outspoken as ever. He was quoted in the FT article as grousing that the current gathering seem pale in comparison with the 1955 conference.

"There, the Financial Times quoted him as saying, "I saw giants, such as China’s Zhou Enlai, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru," and, naturally, his own boss, Sukarno. Noted Abdulgani: "But their successors gathering in Jakarta today are just ‘half-giants’, although that is better than dwarfs."

Our President GMA, who joined the fun over there last Friday, ought to be comforted by the description of her as not being a dwarf but "a half-giant".

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Why can we say that Hu Jintao’s trip to Indonesia was successful? Because, probably in response to the violent anti-Japanese riots which swept China in the past two weeks, Japan’s Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi offered a very unusual public apology at the Jakarta conference for Japan’s aggression in World War II.

The fact that Koizumi expressed "deep remorse" over the pain inflicted on its neighbors in Asia before more than 100 Asian and African governments is a landmark occasion. While Japanese leaders may have extended mumbled apologies in the past, it was unheard of for a Prime Minister to declare it in so international and public a forum.

By this time, Koizumi and Hu may have already met in Jakarta to ease the tensions generated by the tsunami of anti-Japanese feeling (originally encouraged by Beijing) which is sweeping China and thus put an end to the protest demonstrations.

The truth is that the Chinese government has for the past two days been trying to put a damper on further riots and marches. Beijing has warned against any attempt to organize demonstrations on May 1 (labor day) or, worse, on May 4, which commemorates the date of May 4, 1919 when angry students demonstrated in Beijing against the handover of German concessions in China to Japan. That first anti-Japanese demo is dubbed in history "The May 4 Movement".

Websites are now being scrupulously monitored and any announcements of demonstrations are being either eradicated or blocked, and messaging systems have been prohibited from transmitting inflammatory words and texts. In short, the inter-net is now being policed, and anti-Japanese websites blocked. The Chinese authorities have brought cyberspace under control, finally – which may go to show the violent demonstrations could not have been triggered off without Beijing’s nod. The protest marches had, indeed, been spinning out of control and perhaps Beijing itself grew alarmed at the prospect the demonstrations might be turned against the government itself.

Anyway, they got what they said they wanted: The Japanese Prime Minister apologized.

This is a year, evidently, for apologies. Japan’s very articulate and friendly Ambassador Ryuichiro Yamazaki, last April 9, in his speech at the "Araw ng Kagitingan Commemorative Rites" on Mount Samat in Bataan, marked the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II by conveying "to the entire audience my heartfelt apology and feelings of profound mourning for all those who had suffered and died during the war." Ambassador Yamazaki reminded his listeners, though, that former Prime Minister Murayama, on the 50th anniversary of the war in 1995, already "apologized", too. But we must recall that for a people who are quick to apologize for everything five times a day at least (gomen nasai), Japan’s apologies for the war have always, previously, been acts of reluctant obfuscation.

Oh well. Koizumi finally went – and did it. He can now return to the Yakusuni Shrine in Tokyo and tell the Imperial war dead: Gomen nasai.

What bothers me, however, is that what China may want goes far beyond a mere apology. China is bidding to become The Power in Asia, after already emerging as an Economic Power. Thus, I’ll wager, the demonstrations and riots were aimed at weakening Japan and scuttling Tokyo’s bid to become a member of the United Nations’ Security Council. What Beijing wishes to attack, probably, is what it feels to be an already expanding Japanese-American "conspiracy" to not only gang up on China, but to "protect" renegade Taiwan.

Then there’s the bid of Japanese companies to start drilling for oil and gas in a disputed area of the East China sea, in the Xihu Trench, not too far from Shanghai.

The problem is that Chinese hostility may, instead, not only provoke Japan to rearm and even revise its Constitution, and drive Japan, as well, more firmly into alliance with the United States. As for Taiwan, the government of President Chen Shui-bian knows that militarily it cannot stand up to the powerful People’s Liberation Army and Navy but it can hold off any assault or invasion for a week, or two, to enable allies like the US, and possibly Japan, to come to their rescue.

That’s what I learned in Taiwan during last week’s stint there.

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Aside from Taiwan’s feisty Vice-President, Ms. Lu Hsiu-lien, better known as Annette Lu, the most interesting official I interviewed was Dr. Tan-Sun Chen, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. (President Chen Shui-bian has promised this writer an interview, for television at that, after the mid-May elections for the National Assembly).

Dr. Chen, who had to relinquish his US Passport – note this – in 1993 when he became a member of parliament, the legislative Yuan, as MP for Overseas Chinese (he went to Tokyo to revoke his US passport and reacquire his Taiwan, "Republic of China", passport) spent 29 years in the United States.

As a leading activist of the movement which became the now-ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Chen had to live as an "exile" from the Kuomintang "martial law" regime, then acquired a Green Card. (Dual citizenship is allowed in Taiwan). Dr. Chen had not intended to acquire Green Card or US citizenship status, but two years (he said) after he arrived in America, the Taiwanese consulate in Houston, Texas, where he lived refused to renew or revalidate his ROC passport.

Already holding a Bachelor of Science in Atmospheric Sciences from the National Taiwan University, Chen got a Master’s in 1966 from Oklahoma University, then a Doctorate in Geophysics from Purdue University in Indiana. His expertise, it seems, is in satellite technology.

"I really don’t know how I got into foreign service," Chen remarks to this day.

He was born September 16, 1935, in Tainan, Taiwan’s oldest and most historic city. He says that during the previous Kuomintang regime, there was blatant discrimination against native Taiwanese like himself in favor of the two million Chinese from mainland China who came over with the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in 1949.

The KMT imposed martial law in 1949, he recalls, beginning half a century of authoritarian rule known as the "White Terror". Nonetheless, Chen asserts, "we finally won democracy".

He was a member of the Legislative Yuan 1992-3, then Magistrate of Tainan County in 1993-2001, and later a member of the Science and Technology Advisory Council under the first Cabinet of President Shui-bian when the DPP at last overthrew KMT rule and assumed the Presidency.

Dr. Chen warned that the People’s Republic of China may now be courting the Philippines and showing us its smiling face. "But beware," he grinned in turn.

China is, indeed, on a roll. Its GDP is booming at 9.7 percent, a first-quarter leap well above its own government targets, with a first quarter $16.6 billion surplus. Exports are surging – but, let’s not forget, two-thirds of China’s exports are to the United States.

What ought to be of concern is China’s obvious beefing up of its military forces and capabilities. Contrary to reports, the prospect of Europe lifting its arms embargo on China is not "dead". The French, who have sold billions of dollars worth of Airbuses to China are keen to profit from the euros 12 billion Beijing is proposing for arms procurement, including 1,200 Mica missiles, 180 engines for emergency use, and 210 Mirage 2000-9Cs, capable of giving the new PLA air force a Sunday punch. (Taiwan currently operates only 60 Mirage 2000-5E jets, bought a decade ago). The Germans are eager to sell, too.

As for our relations with Beijing, Napoleon Bonaparte’s hoary quip about the Sleeping Giant has come true. The French Emperor warned that when it awakes it will shake the world. World-shaking time has come.

The question is: In the long run, will the smiling giant become friend – or foe? Or worse, an ambitious would-be Superpower, keen on governing first Asia, then dominating the planet. The Middle Kingdom coming back with a vengeance, to proclaim itself the Center of the World – this time in deceptively non-Communist get-up (spick and span in coat and tie, eschewing the peasant-proletarian Mao jacket).