Peaceful intentions

China’s leader- in- waiting Xi Jinping should speak in public more often about his country’s peaceful intentions.

Xi, currently China’s vice president, said at the World Peace Forum in Beijing last week that the world has nothing to fear about his country’s growing economic and military power.

Maybe if he repeats it often enough, it will turn into reality, and China’s neighbors will stop worrying.

It would help if the country would match its leaders’ words with actions. In the past years, China’s aggressive actions to claim territory in disputed waters have intensified alongside its military buildup, so how can this reflect that favorite Chinese catchphrase, a peaceful rise?

For countries with much smaller armies and land areas, nothing can be more threatening than incursions into its territory (and poaching and destruction of endangered species) by a giant neighbor. China’s so-called nine-dash line, which lays claim to nearly the entire South China Sea (what made them so blessed?), will always be a major threat to Philippine territorial integrity.

Even China’s fishing fleets are viewed with suspicion in this neighborhood, and not only because the Chinese like to harvest endangered corals, giant clams and marine turtles. The fishing fleets are always backed by Chinese muscle – either civilian law enforcement ships or military vessels.

It’s also good to remember that the multi-story military barracks now standing on (and surely slowly destroying) the coral network of Mischief Reef, which we claim as Panganiban Reef, started out as mere flimsy huts on stilts that China said were shelters for their fishermen. This is still seen as a creeping invasion of sorts, and it hasn’t stopped there. Mischief is believed to be the staging point for other Chinese vessels venturing into Panatag Shoal off Zambales and other areas within the Philippines’ 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

Perhaps when Xi Jinping assumes the highest Communist Party post this October, he can tell the different agencies in charge of maritime matters to give him some breathing space to win close friends in the neighborhood apart from Cambodia.

Xi, who is calling for a “new security concept,” will be leading his country through a decade that will secure China’s place in the community of nations. Will the world’s second largest economy be seen as a threat, or a friend and responsible ally?

China’s actions in its own backyard will help provide the answer. Any nation that wants a leadership role in world affairs must first be able to peacefully co-exist with its closest neighbors.

Chinese officials often point out that because they were preoccupied with political turbulence and poverty alleviation for several decades, they neglected their external defense needs. Today their military is simply making up for those decades, helped along by their economic prosperity.

Anyone who has visited China will believe its officials when they say that they’d rather not go to war with anyone because they still have to attend to the pressing needs of their people. An unhappy population can spell disaster for the Communist Party of China – and there is still enormous potential for unrest amid the growing prosperity.

Being the world’s most populous nation makes the Chinese feel that in times of need, they cannot afford to rely on other countries for help. This is true whether in terms of food, energy, or national security.

The world’s second largest economy still has hundreds of millions of citizens living in abject poverty. Some of them can be seen huddled in tiny rooms in the alleys of Beijing, or clutching babies while begging for alms in the streets of Shanghai.

Feeding and sheltering them, providing jobs and lifting more of them from the clutches of poverty will soon fall on the shoulders of Xi. He will assume power as China’s largest trading partners, the United States and the European Union, continue to grapple with financial woes and economic slowdown.

As standards of living rise in China, so do labor and production costs. The country is starting to become a victim of its own success as less prosperous neighbors become more attractive for foreign investments.

At the recent Foreign Ministers Meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Phnom Penh, where China participated in the East Asia Summit and the ASEAN Regional Forum, Beijing had hoped to focus on economic cooperation with ASEAN and the participants in the EAS and ARF.

Beijing has been negotiating shipping cooperation agreements, for example, with several ASEAN states, to facilitate trade and maritime logistics between key Chinese cities and Southeast Asian capitals. Trade between China and ASEAN is robust.

Instead the economic agenda took a backseat to territorial disputes at the ASEAN meeting, although I doubt if Beijing was surprised. China’s foreign policy rarely shifts during its periodic leadership changes. The country is one of the largest contributors to international peacekeeping efforts and has become a major source of foreign aid, particularly for countries that do not want the conditionalities attached to aid from countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Yesterday, President Aquino skirted the territorial dispute and thanked China for a P 5.2- billion loan that financed the construction of a project at La Mesa Dam to provide clean water in Metro Manila. The project was finished eight months ahead of schedule by the contractor, China International Water and Electric Company.

“Even when China becomes developed in the future, it will never seek hegemony,” Xi told the peace forum in Beijing last week. “We must abandon the old mindset… China will actively participate in the reform of the international system for governance with a view to move toward a more just and equitable international political and economic order.”

Although it became a nuclear power decades ago, China was the first country to formally promise that it will never fire the first shot in a nuclear confrontation.

China under Xi isn’t expected to slow down its military buildup. It’s also unlikely to give up its territorial claims in the near future, especially because the story has dominated the news in China since April. The dispute is stoking nationalistic sentiment even among Chinese Netizens who are not enamored with their government’s authoritarian ways.

But China has prospered in an environment of regional peace, by opening up to the world and abiding by international rules. It has prospered and gained influence by making friends. It shouldn’t lose its momentum now.

Declarations of peaceful intentions are best backed by action.