Two months after the last Asean –
Association of Southeast Asian Nations – meeting, Cambodia is still catching
flak for torpedoing a joint statement that would have referenced the territorial
dispute in the South China Sea between China and the Philippines and Vietnam;
Malaysia and Brunei also have competing claims but they’ve maintained a lower
profile. Vietnam and the Philippines wanted the closing statement to ask all
parties to adhere to a code of conduct and abide by basic rules of the sea. It
was the first time in the Association’s 45 year history that no closing communiqué
was agreed upon.
Since Cambodia holds the rotating
chair this year it did its damnedest to prevent any language not approved by
Beijing. At one point it went so far as to cut off the microphone of the
Philippine representative to prevent him from speaking. In response to
Philippine complaints which were still being voiced long after the meeting, the
Cambodian ambassador to that country wrote a scathing article accusing the
Philippines of ‘dirty politics’ and saying it was trying to sabotage the
meeting by injecting outside matters into it. That prompted the Philippine
government to summon the ambassador for a dressing down – to register its own
complaint at the Cambodian ambassador’s decidedly undiplomatic tone. The
ambassador never showed up. With great surprise and raised eyebrows all around,
Cambodia declared a few days later that he didn’t show because he’d already
been reassigned. In typical Cambodian fashion the easiest way to deal with the
situation was to avoid it with a tall tale nobody would ever believe. At least,
in Cambodian reality, the confrontation was avoided by a little diplomatic
sleight-of-hand.
It’s not hard to understand Cambodia’s
extreme deference to China’s political needs as it’s the country’s foremost
donor and financier. Think roads, railroads, bridges, dams, irrigation; the
money keeps poring in. The dams are generally BOT, or build, operate for a long
period and then transfer to the government. The rest are concessionary loans;
that is, loans at lower than market interest, though considering how flush
China is, the interest rates are higher than they need to be or should be.
Nonetheless, there’s a lot of money flowing in and it’s made a clear difference
in Cambodia’s development. The latest tranche, announced September 4, amounted
to $523 million, five hundred of which is loans for unspecified infrastructure
projects, a cool $23 mil grant for the PM to use at his discretion.
Sin Serey, Cambodia’s ambassador
to Singapore, in response to an opinion piece in Thai newspaper The Nation
accusing Cambo of being too closely aligned with China is quoted as saying,
“Cambodia, a country with great civilization and culture for thousands of
years, is not a Banana Republic. Cambodia has not been and will never be
kowtowing to any country.” Of course not! However, according to Prime Minister
Wen Jaibao, China will ‘closely coordinate’ with Cambo on the upcoming Asean
meeting in November. But hey, that’s not kowtowing, only coordinating. He also
thanked Cambodia for helping China maintain friendly relations with the Asean
countries. Cambodia insists (paraphrasing from the same article) it’s not
taking sides but actually taking a principled stand in urging members to settle
their differences with China bilaterally, exactly China’s position. Well, now,
if you were a 900 pound gorilla would you want to take on a pack of hungry hyenas
one at a time or all together?
The dispute centers around
China’s claim to the entire South China Sea encompassing about 2 million square
kilometers, including areas that are very close, within figurative spitting
distance, to the other countries but far from China, more than 2000 kilometers
from the nearest mainland Chinese territory. Proximity doesn’t always infer
right of ownership, but it’s a strong determining factor nonetheless. China’s
claim goes back to the fifties when it drew a line around the South China Sea
and said this is ours based on historical precedents. This would be akin to
Mexico claiming California based on historical ownership while ignoring current
US possession of more than 150 years. Or Spain claiming the same because they
were there first, or why not go all the way back to Native Americans making the
same claim?
There are three areas of concern
regarding potential Chinese ownership of the whole South China Sea: first is
possession of natural resources, supposedly there’s a lot of oil under the sea;
two is fishing rights, in a very densely populated part of the world, of utmost
importance; three, and most worrying for the international community is sea
transport; about half of all oil shipments in the world and a commensurate
amount of other trade passes through the South China Sea. It wasn’t till the
seventies during China’s Cultural Revolution that serious claims were made in
the area.
The current dispute with Japan
over the Senkaku Islands – Daioyu in Chinese - in the East China sea is also instructive.
Japan took over control of the uninhabited islands in 1895 when nobody was
there and no other claims of sovereignty existed. It wasn’t until 1971, 76
years after Japan first took over, that China made its first claim or mentioned
them at all. What is Japan supposed to do? take a deep bow and say, We’re sorry
we’ve occupied your islands for more than a century, if it hurts your feelings
we’ll pack up tomorrow.
Recent Chinese aggressiveness
stems from three factors; a longtime inferiority complex and resulting quest
for revenge regarding perceived past wrongs done to them, a desire on the part
of the government to stoke the fires of nationalism to help it maintain control
and divert people’s attention from the deficiencies of autocratic government,
and a heady power that comes from their newfound economic prowess and wealth.
Chinese are still furious about
the way they were humiliated by the British more than 160 years ago in the
Opium Wars. They are rightly proud of their long history and rich culture but
still don’t grasp how their xenophobia, feeling of superiority and aloofness back
then kept them from changing and adapting to the modern world and thus made
them vulnerable to relatively very small forces from the outside. Japan too
made them feel small and inadequate in its easy takeover of parts of the
country and the ruthless way Chinese people were treated. Now that they are
borderline rich and powerful, they feel the need for revenge.
Still Japan is an important
trading partner, to the tune of $350 billion annually, and investor and employer
of many Chinese so it would seem to behoove China to minimize conflict with
Japan. Recent news articles have implicated China in organizing the anti-Japan
protests, which have turned violent and caused many Japanese to reconsider
their commitment to China, all the while the state media counsel calm and
non-violence. In Qingdao on September 15, rioters/looters spent more than four
hours causing $30 million damage to a Japanese-Chinese joint venture
supermarket. If they were Tibetans, Uighers or Falun Gong practitioners peacefully
demonstrating they’d have their heads bashed in and taken to jail in a wink and
a nod, but somehow the police in one of China’s largest cities stood helpless for
4 hours while a large supermarket was being ransacked.
Do they expect to humiliate Japan
by forcing them to abandon the islands and still expect that country to
maintain its massive industrial presence there? Maybe they feel so rich and
powerful they can forego that economic relationship in spite of the great loss
to both economies.
Let me relate an incident from my
own experience while living in China in the mid-nineties. For three days Chinese
TV news headlined a story about a few shipping containers from a recycler in
New York that were sold as recycled scrap paper but actually were garbage. The
question, continually repeated by news anchors in an insulted and angry tone
was, Why is America sending us its garbage?
Having spent quite a few years in
a cooperative recycling business in Portland I can offer a little background.
Scrap paper is almost worthless. We received a token $5 per ton for it and the
brokers received their shipping costs but not much more. We recycled it in
spite of the loss because we believed in the cause. It all went to China where
their low cost of labor allowed them to pick through it to pull out the more
valuable stuff before recycling the rest for low quality uses. Because it was
mixed paper people often mistook it for garbage, or would carelessly toss
garbage in with it. Knowing the waste paper business and the probable lackadaisical
attitude towards recycling in New York at the time, it wouldn’t be surprising
if some or even a lot of garbage got mixed with the paper. It also wouldn’t be
surprising if an unscrupulous outfit purposely misrepresenting their garbage as
paper to save the cost of disposal and receive money for their ‘paper’. So a
few containers worth a few hundred dollars sent by a private company became
America Sending China its Garbage as an outrage and humiliation.
My Chinese wife, who I brought to
America a year or so later, was amazed to see Made in China everywhere. So at
the same time the Chinese media was casting America in the most derogatory
terms as a means of stoking nationalism, it was making bundles of money while
taking over the American market. I haven’t been back to China in 16 years but
everything I hear tells me nothing really has changed.
For 16 years and more the US has
been complaining about China’s manipulation of its currency to make their goods
artificially cost less and for the same length of time China has promised to
change and proceeded with very small adjustments just barely enough to temporarily
appease the US and its other trading partners but not enough to change the
reality on the ground. During that time it has amassed $3 trillion worth of
foreign reserves, mostly in US dollars. This all came about because of
capitalism’s love of doing business with a state which maintains firm control
of its workers; forbidding unions or protests or any kind of dissention from
the party line.
China for its part has taken the
ball and run with it. With a combination of smarts and hard work in addition to
currency and market manipulation and repression of workers, it has become too
powerful not to want to flex its muscles and take what it considers its
rightful place in the world, with threats of force if necessary.
China is now a communist country
in name only. When I lived there my wife was a teacher in a minority kids’
boarding school. The teachers, administrators, students and maintenance staff
all lived at the school in a gated complex. Health care and all social benefits
were enjoyed by all. The maintenance staff lived in quite mean circumstances
compared to the headmaster, but nothing like the gulf between the two levels
today. At one point I met an important fellow who I was told had a lot of
money. He rode a bicycle like everyone else because he didn’t want to flaunt
his wealth. That’s communism. All that is finished, people are now on their
own; the grave to cradle safety net - the Iron Rice Bowl - has been shredded.
Today, China much more closely
fits the description of fascism. Quoting from my dictionary. “Fascism is a set
of right-wing political beliefs that includes strong control of society and the
economy by the state, a powerful role for the armed forces, and the stopping of
political opposition.”
China has perfected the
philosophy: The state controls everything important, all opposition is
repressed, leaders live like royalty while the peasantry are exploited and
oppressed for the benefit of the nation. Nationalism fits perfectly into the
fascist mindset..
Consider the plight of China’s
hundreds of millions of migrant workers. They work excessive hours for low
wages, are segregated from and looked down upon by their fellow urbanites, they
receive no benefits in the cities they live in, including not having the right
to send their children to school, let alone healthcare or any other social
services. They’ve worked hard to make China rich without receiving any of the
benefits that are their due and certainly would be forthcoming in a true
communist state. Illegal immigrants in America have more rights and receive
more benefits than Chinese migrant workers in their own country.
The question is why act the bully
and turn your whole neighborhood into a conflict zone using a flimsy, if not
specious, historical argument for a bunch of small uninhabited islands? China
is a great country: Even if there are natural resources there, why play the ruffian
and antagonize everyone around you? The answer is twofold: autocratic leaders
need to feed the fires of nationalism to maintain their power, and they are
basically clueless. Just as most Chinese people blindly follow the party line,
the leadership is prone to take stands which almost everyone else in the world
considers ridiculous. Their vendetta against the Dalai Lama is a case in point.
He is very widely, if not universally, recognized outside of China as a wise
and great spirit, an advocate for peace, yet to China he’s pure evil and every
time he goes to visit another country China lodges a protest and threatens
vague repercussions. To the rest of the world their attitude towards the Dalai
Lama makes them a laughingstock. They are either so far out of touch they are
oblivious or maybe they do understand the absurdity of their positions but
don’t care because they cravenly feel the need to use him as a nationalistic
focus, a foil to help maintain their power.
China has money to burn and knows
how to use it to make friends with countries like Cambodia. Recognizing how
important China is to Cambodia’s development plans, Cambodia will do all in its
power to protect China’s interests, even against the wishes and interests of
its neighbors.
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