Part 25: Where the Philippines seeks War, China sees Diplomacy
Legendary Chinese scholar and global affairs expert Victor Gao (a former English interpreter for late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and now a distinguished analyst and commentator on geopolitics and international law) keynoted on September 17 the APCU 14th Manila Forum titled “Ensuring Continuing Peace and Security in the Asia-Pacific Region.”
Drawing on his profound experience as a Yale-trained lawyer and veteran observer of China’s economic rise, Gao weighed in on why peace and development must guide the region’s future and explained how the Philippines can position itself in a rapidly changing global order.
I am borrowing from Vlogger Jan Writer his outline of Gao’s salient points to serve as guideposts for the consideration of the student council cabinet of President Marcos especially midgets like Secretary of National Defense Gilberto Teodoro, National Security Adviser Eduardo Año.
1. Historical Context of China–Philippines Relations
Gao highlighted the long history of peaceful coexistence between China and the Philippines, emphasizing that for “thousands of years” the two nations coexisted “without war, without conflict, without confrontation.” He expressed strong belief that this friendship will continue for “many thousands of years to come,” despite present-day tensions in bilateral relations, urging both countries to deal with current disputes constructively to prevent tensions from flaring into a major crisis.
2. Personal and Historical Connections to the Philippines and the United States
The Yale graduate recounted his own Yale Law School background and linked it to Philippine history: William Howard Taft (first U.S. Governor-General of the Philippines after 1898) was also a Yale alumnus and later became U.S. President and Chief Justice. He noted the Philippines’ early development compared to China in the early 1990s when he first visited Manila as a lawyer. At that time, the Philippines was among the most advanced nations in Southeast Asia, while China was still poor and underdeveloped.
3. China’s Rapid Economic Rise and Its Global Implications
Gao contrasted China’s state in the 1990s with its present economic strength, noting China is already the world’s largest economy in purchasing power parity (about 135% of U.S. size) and projected to surpass the U.S. at official exchange rates within five to ten years. He cited Elon Musk’s projection that by mid-century China could be twice the size of the U.S. economy, underscoring the need for the Philippines to adapt to a fast-changing global order, advising Manila to maintain friendly ties with both Washington and Beijing, warning that it would be “suicidal” to befriend one and make an enemy of the other.
4. Lessons from China’s Development Path Since 1978
Drawing from his experience as interpreter for Deng Xiaoping, Gao highlighted Deng’s three pillars for China’s transformation:
(a) Domestic stability at any cost. Without it, development is impossible.
(b) Peaceful foreign policy. Avoid wars to ensure stability and growth.
(c) “Development is the hard truth.” Economic development must be the overriding priority above politics and geopolitics.
Gao urged the Philippines to adopt the same mindset: treat development as the “hard truth” and invest heavily in connectivity and infrastructure, noting other ASEAN states (such as Laos, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam) are already advancing fast in rail and infrastructure.
5. Artificial Intelligence and the Need to Prevent Monopoly
Gao stressed that AI must remain a global, shared advancement, not a tool of dominance, warned against any single country (implicitly the United States) achieving “AI dominance,” calling it dangerous for global balance and reminding his American colleagues that AI is “artificial intelligence,” not “American intelligence,” and urged a multilateral approach.
6. Defense of Multipolarity and Free Trade
– Gao argued that the post-World War II order established in 1945 was inherently multipolar, citing the United Nations Security Council’s five permanent members with veto powers as a mechanism to prevent unipolar domination, criticizing U.S.-led trade wars and the use of tariffs as economic weapons, referencing a U.S. appeals court ruling many tariff measures unconstitutional. He called on China, the Philippines, and ASEAN to defend free trade in both goods and services, highlighting the Philippines’ significant income from trade in services.
7. China’s Role in World War II and the Importance of Historical Memory
Gao underscored China’s major contribution to defeating fascism, fighting Japanese aggression from 1931 to 1945 and sacrificing over 35 million lives. He linked this struggle to the shared wartime experience of the Philippines, which was also under Japanese occupation, arguing that without China’s resistance, Japan and Nazi Germany might have gained strategic advantage in Eurasia.
8. Rejection of the “Thucydides Trap” and Advocacy for the “Inevitability of Peace”
Gao dismissed Harvard scholar Graham Allison’s theory that China and the U.S. are “destined for war,” calling it a “fallacy and pointing out that both nations are nuclear powers, where any war would mean “Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).” Instead, he proposed his own concept: the “inevitability of peace” between China and the United States—whatever their differences, they must resolve them through negotiation and diplomacy.
9. South China Sea and China’s Military Posture
Gao reassured that China’s military build-up is aimed at deterring the United States, not threatening neighbors. He expressed relief that China and the Philippines are only using water cannons in maritime disputes, cautioning against escalation. He stated China will not fire the first shot but warned that if attacked, it will respond with overwhelming force, including nuclear capabilities.
10. Critique of Arbitration and Defense of Historical Borders
As a Yale-trained lawyer and international arbitrator, Gao declared that “arbitration without consent is a violation of the rule of law. and implicitly rejecting the 2016 South China Sea arbitral ruling, arguing no country can be forced into arbitration without its agreement. He cited the 1898 Spanish–American Treaty, claiming it clearly defined the Philippines’ western territorial limit at the 118th degree longitude, implying that some of the areas Manila claims today like Scarbrough Shoal has never been part of that treaty.
11. Philippines’ Strategic Opportunity for Development
Gao praised the Philippines’ geographic advantage as a hub between China, Japan, and the United States, with natural endowments to become “one of the wealthiest nations in the world.” He urged the Philippines to embrace sustainable development and leverage Chinese investment, financial resources, and technology, emphasizing that China would work with the Philippines “completely as equal” and “will never hold a gun at anyone in the Philippines.”
12. Peace, Security, and Sustainable Development as the Core Goal
– Gao concluded that peace and security are essential not only for their own sake but to enable sustainable development urging the Philippines to “wake up” and treat development as the hard truth, as China has done since 1978 and reaffirming his belief that China and the Philippines must maintain friendship and jointly pursue development for the benefit of their peoples.
Comments
There is only one thing that Jan Writer in his article missed. After Gao mentioned the military parade at Tiananmen Square in Beijing last September 3, he explained that the Dong Feng 61 was all about a strategic intercontinental ballistic missile that can reach any part of the globe in a maximum of 20 minutes, carrying 60 nuclear warheads and 1 cataclysmic hydrogen bomb.
Writer said Victor Gao’s speech hit him, like a quiet confirmation of what I’ve long suspected about the architecture of power in our region. He spoke without theatrics yet every line carried the weight of someone who has seen both the machinery of the West and the rise of his own country from the inside:
“I didn’t hear in him the paranoia that usually coats discussions of China. I hear the steadiness of a man who knows that peace is not charity but calculation. What I found most resonant is his insistence that “development is the hard truth. Deng Xiaoping’s mantra, passed on by someone who literally interpreted for him, lands like a reprimand to us. While Laos and Indonesia lay down high-speed rail, we are still debating whether basic infrastructure is politically convenient.”
Writer said Gao simply pointed to the obvious: no one will wait for us. We either build or we become a footnote. Even his controversial take on arbitration — “arbitration without consent is a violation of the rule of law” — forces a reckoning. Whether one agrees with his reading of the 1898 treaty or not, he names what the West pretends to forget: law without consent is just coercion dressed in legal robes.
“That provocation matters because we in the Philippines have been conditioned to treat international law as if it were neutral when in fact it often serves the very hegemon whose bases still sit on our soil. Gao called on us to see our geography — between China, Japan, and the Pacific — not as a battleground but as a bridge. He promised that China will meet us “completely as equals,” and unlike the tired pledges of American aid, this one comes from a country that has already turned poverty into power within a single lifetime,” he added.
In an earlier post last March, Writer anticipated Gao’s remark on why the US can no longer bring its money to the Philippines: “They’re not shutting down USAID because it’s ineffective. They’re shutting it down because they can no longer afford to fund their imperial projects. The printing press in Washington is no longer enough. Every new dollar they conjure out of thin air now pushes them closer to collapse.
“De-dollarization is accelerating. One by one, countries are walking away from the greenback. Fewer nations are willing to bankroll America’s global meddling in exchange for paper backed by debt. And now, the nightmare begins – those excess dollars, once scattered across the Global South like confetti during regime change parties, are barely trickling back to its homeland.
“The U.S. economy will implode from within. Not a bang, not a war. Just the slow, inevitable suffocation of empire under its own worthless currency.”
Writer concludes, “Listening to Gao, I hear but a challenge: stop letting foreign powers script our fears. Choose development, protect multipolarity, and act like a nation that owns its future. For someone like me, who has spent years watching the U.S. play savior while keeping us dependent, his words are more than agreeable. They are a call to finally grow up as a country.”
PostScript
I have been elected trustee of the Association of Philippine-China Understanding that invited Victor Gao to Manila. His statements echoed the basic tenets I have teaching my students and subscribers since I came back to the Philippines in 2009, from my diplomatic, missionary and consultancy years in the United States, Caribbean, South America and West Africa spanning 36 years.
I was drafted into APCU after I received a laureate for promoting Philippine-China friendship especially in my two books the first of which was “A Problem for Every Solution”. This was a historiography of our relations since Sultan Paduka Pahala of the Sultanate of Sulu’s Eastern Kingdom signed a Treaty of Tributary Independent State with Emperor Yong Le of the Ming Dynasty. I also traced the assistance China has given us in our fight for independence from Spain, the United States and Japan, and how the Chinese through their families in-country has served as the underground economy of the Philippines.
Many foreign service practitioners and student will not be confused relating to China if they only read my dissertation on how China enforces its foreign policy through its four keys to harmony, deeply-rooted in the Confucian principle of “hexie” (和谐) that was used by Hu Jintao as his platform. The term originally meant accord and balance, and what is now famously known for its connection to China’s state-promoted ideology of a “harmonious society” in a new multipolar world order. Xi Jinping has expanded this into a global community with a shared future for mankind.
My second book traced the origins of the coronavirus that caused the Covid 10 pandemic to the United States, debunking the propaganda that it broke out in Wuhan China. Today it stands as the only survey of international media and various medical journals, that started documenting from the first recorded outburst of the virus on June 30, 2019 in a senior retirement community in Springfield, Virginia.
In my third book “The Poverty of Power”, after discussing key policy failures of the previous presidencies for thirty years from Corazon Aquino to her son Noynoy, in the manner they managed rainwater and energy, I passed on to the newly-elected President Bongbong Marcos that he cannot be the “phoenix” of Philippine sustainable development sans China.
To be continued.
Leave a Reply