By Adolfo Quizon Paglinawan

 

Series 24: Forever Peace or Forever Wars?

Active defense  is the foundational guiding principle for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and China’s strategic defense planning, famously summarized by the maxim “we will not attack unless we are attacked, but we will surely counterattack if attacked”.

Core Principles

• Self-Defense Stance: The military strategy relies on a post-strike response, meaning operations begin only after facing an adversary’s aggression or an imminent threat of attack.
  • Unity of Defense and Offense: While strategic posture remains defensive, operational and tactical levels combine proactive offense, utilizing counter-attacks and striking along external lines to weaken the enemy.
• People’s War Concept: Modernized for the new era, it leverages comprehensive multi-domain capabilities—including cyber, space, and electromagnetic spheres—alongside traditional mobilization, aimed to build a flexible, technologically advanced joint-operations force capable of winning local wars under modern technological conditions.
• Nuclear Policy: Beijing maintains a strict “no first use” nuclear policy at any time or under any circumstances, keeping capabilities at the minimum level required for national security.
• International Security: Officially advocates for peaceful development through the Ministry of National Defense of the Peoples Republic of China, engaging in global peacekeeping and international humanitarian assistance.

Policy Shift

Last August 28 and for the first time in 16 years, however, the Standing Committee of the 14th National People’s Congress overhauled China law to allow Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping to place his country onto a war footing.

Yes, you read that right – simply stated the core goal is to streamline transition from peacetime to wartime, with “unification” and, vaguely for now, protection of “development interests” alongside sovereignty.

Simon Whistler, an international vlogger, describes it basically – “with the press of a button”.

After dealing with the United States and white Anglo-Saxon protestants (WASPs) for more than a decade, Xi has fully understood Henry Kissinger who said, “”It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal”.

The U.S. maintains unmatched global military reach, intelligence-gathering capabilities, and defense technology. Adversaries often face strict economic sanctions, trade restrictions, and exclusion from major international financial systems.

Nations that rely entirely on the U.S. for defense or economic aid can suffer when Washington alters its priorities. Allies can get pulled into regional conflicts, proxy wars, or trade disputes driven by broader U.S. strategic goals.

A superpower, much more a descending superpower, like the United States prioritizes its own national interests. Subsequently, dependent states are left vulnerable during sudden shifts in U.S. foreign policy, shifting geopolitical strategies or leadership changes which usually happens every four years after US presidential elections.

For instance, in the face of forthcoming elections this November, President Donald Trump has been cozying with Xi since the former visited Beijing last May.

Trump may have said that he will not war with China over Taiwan or engage another theater 10,000 miles away from his west coast, but poking the regional dragon has not abated, but in fact, escalated.

On the ground in Asia, the footprints of his State Secretary Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are all over the place.

A popular example is there has been no peace between China and the Philippines in the South China Seas since 2023 when we signed four additional sites for US in-country bases.

American functionaries like Sealight Raymond Powell and expired justice Antonio Carpio, and their employers at Stratbase ADR Institute have ben trying to sabotage a provisional agreement for the routine resupply (RORE) of the humanitarian needs of the Philippine marines at the BRP Sierra Madre grounded at Ayungin Shoal, that has had 16 peaceful successful missions since its signing in August 2024.

Marcos, obviously awed by the proposed donation of five retired 35-year-old Abukuma-class destroyer escorts by Japan to the Armed Forces of the Philippines, signed up with militarist Sanae Takaichi, attempting to marry the “exclusive economic zone” of the Philippines with that of Japan, disregarding encroaching on China’s maritime entitlements at the middle, and assuming Taiwan would not balk at the matter.

(For moment, the Otakus or Japanophiles of Tokyo forgot that World War II had already ended their 50-year rule of Formosa/Taiwan from 1895 to 1945.)

Not to be sidelined, General Xavier Brunson, commander of US forces in South Korea also proposed kill-web triangulating American forward operating bases in Sokor peninsula and their “inter-operability” with Japan and the Philippines.

Ripley’s dilemma?

There are emerging reports that Beijing explicitly warned Washington it could cancel the White House summit if the Trump administration delivers an earlier-announced $100-billion weapons package for Taiwan.

          President Xi Jinping is scheduled to meet President Donald Trump in Washington, this week on Thursday, September 24.

This has sent Trump to near panic in the face of embarrassing snub, given the midterm elections in two months.

The US is reportedly looking for a diplomatic workaround, weighing a delay of the Taiwan arms announcement until later in the year—even after the upcoming APEC and G20 summits, or none at all—to ensure the high-stakes bilateral meeting between the two presidents goes forward.

If the Republicans lose House and Senate majorities, Trump would even be a lameduck president by next year.

But on our homefront, what is alarming more than the collision of a BFAR vessel with  Chinese Coast Guard ship last week, is Gilberto Teodoro Jr.’s push back against China’s warnings regarding Taiwan’s plan to open a representative office in Cebu, stating that the Philippines—and not Beijing—defines how it implements its One-China policy.

The bar topnotcher has again revealed his lack of gravitas because how the Philippines defines its One-China policy is already explicit in the 6^th paragraph of the Joint Communique signed in 1975 opening diplomatic relations between China and the Philippines:

“The Philippine Government recognizes the Government of the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal government of China, fully understands and respects the position of the Chinese Government that there is but one China and that Taiwan is an integral part of Chinese territory, and decides to remove all its official representations from Taiwan within one month from the date of signature of this communique.”

Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry earlier confirmed plans for the Cebu office to cater to its travelers and business people in the central Philippines, alongside proposed economic corridor expansions.

The communique is not a case of believe or not, it has treaty status which has not only serious, sensitive and legal but vital implications to our diplomatic relations with China.

China considers the Taiwan question to be its ultimate “core interest” and the “red line of red lines” in its foreign relations, meaning Beijing treats any official foreign exchanges or moves toward Taiwanese independence as a fundamental violation of its sovereignty.

• The Joint Communique between China and the United States may have left some ambiguity in semantics -“the people of the United States will maintain cultural, commercial, and other unofficial relations with the people of Taiwan.”

But it was explicit in formally recognizing “the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal Government of China” and “The Government of the United States of America acknowledges the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China.”

• The Joint Communiques, however, between China on one hand, and Japan and the Philippines, on the other, leaves no room for interpretation:

Japan: “Taiwan is an inalienable part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China.”

Philippines: ”Taiwan is an integral part of Chinese territory” 

What makes the Philippine position more compelling is the addendum “The Philippine government… decides to remove all its official representations from Taiwan within one month from the date of signature of this communique.”

          So, whose law is Gibo Teodoro enforcing here and whose boot is licking here by invoking the ambiguity of the US position?

If this is official posture of the Marcos administration, then we should brace for the consequence – the Philippine is not just automatically but preemptively dragged in any event any complication involves Taiwan, proceeds to be a hot war.

New Chinese law

China is, however, way ahead of the WASP thinktanks and proxies, as we can anticipate it morph before our eyes.

When its new war amendment goes into effect on October 1, it will allow Beijing to begin a total mobilization of its society, not just to defend its own sovereignty or its territory of integrity.

(This is what Wang Yi was trying to impress upon Teresa Lazaro in a foreign ministers’ summit in Manila, where the Chinese top diplomat said Philippine-China relations are in a crossroad.)

As we speak, Xi can now rally the whole of China and industry, communications, energy, healthcare, the media, and the lives of its ordinary citizens to pursue “the historic mission of national unification”.

Whistler said those five words were not really reported across the Western world, but they were all Xi needed to lay the legal justification for all-out war over Taiwan.

With Chinese military activity, propaganda, and geopolitical attention all escalating toward the Taiwanese government, and with Taipei struggling to arm itself ahead of a future conflict, Beijing’s timing is hardly an accident, he added.

But, as if that were not troubling enough, this new mobilization law goes a step further, allowing China to mobilize its society for all sorts of other missions unrelated to its own survival, potentially signaling an era of far greater Chinese military action on the global stage.

This definitely provides a foreboding of China’s less flexibility on dealing with the Philippines in the South China Sea.       

Whistler explained, “For a nation at war, a full-scale mobilization of society is a last resort, and one that nations have only used in leveraging mostly dire scenarios.

“It’s an act that requires putting the regular affairs of an entire country to a strategic pause, grinding its civilian institutions and industries to a halt, and completely disrupting the sense of normalcy that ordinary people rely on.”

The vlogger discussed extenuating nuances – “Large shares of the working-age population are told, not asked, to take on new roles, whether they’re donning a uniform and picking up a firearm, or headed to work in munitions factories and behind the wheel of supply trucks.

“Not just individual factories, but entire industrial sectors are adapted to serve the war effort.

“Private property can be taken back by the state, transportation and energy infrastructure can be repurposed away from civilian use, and even a nation’s legal system shifts its focus from protecting the rights of individuals and organizations to ensuring that the nation and its people are leveraged to their maximum possible extent.”

Where others flinch, China advances

Powerful countries tend to avoid full-scale mobilization whenever possible.

The United States never even came close during its War on Terror; Russia has managed to shift over to a war economy without mobilizing the whole of society, while Ukraine struggled but also skirted an all-out mobilization.

 The people of Ethiopia, however, have not been so lucky. Its Tigray Civil War turned two million into refugees fleeing from ethnic cleansing, mass detentions, and systematic use of sexual violence. Up to 800,000 people died from combat and famine in what has become one of the deadliest recent conflicts.

But if any advanced nation on Earth were to try to mobilize for war, then China would easily be the most obvious candidate.

Whistler elaborates, “Generally, authoritarian states have an edge anyway when it comes to mobilization, both because they have already gotten their society accustomed to a very firm-handed approach from their government, and because the government has more levers and tools of enforcement when the order comes down.

So, it should jolt no one that ever since 2010, when China first passed its National Defense Mobilization Law, the country has given itself full and explicit permission to monopolize the lives of its citizens in wartime.

In the past, China could only use the law for active defense, in response to a threat to Chinese national sovereignty, its territorial integrity or its overall national security.

But the new changes allow China to mobilize — again, the whole of society — for two other reasons:

Unity and development interests.

Of the two, national unity is the easier addition to understand.

Under Xi Jinping, Taiwanese reunification has become a bigger and more salient issue, and it’s been used internally to help justify massive military spending, anti-corruption purges of the military and civilian leadership, and more.

According to the new law, however, China can mobilize in response to “threats to its development interests”, which is a very vague term that could, in theory, mean quite a few things, as China maintains development interests all across the world, from Asia to Latin America to Africa and beyond.

If one thing is crystal clear at this stage, it is that China is either preparing for a major war in the near future and wants to give that impression to the rest of the world.

Suffice it to say that a legal revision this big, wouldn’t have been passed just by accident.

Implications to Asian aspirants

If Beijing really does want to invade Taiwan in the near future, the threat of national mobilization would help to signal to countries like the US, Japan, or South Korea that China is serious about taking its offensive all the way.

A China that could credibly signal that it might mobilize, or even a China that chose to mobilize at the start of an invasion or even before, would show the rest of the world that they should either sit out of the conflict, or be prepared to compete directly with a nation of 1.4 billion people operating a high-tech, incredibly high-volume manufacturing sector with a massive military and control over critical supply chains in an all-out, society-wide effort to take Taiwan.

Whistler prognosticates: “That’s a particularly appealing way for Beijing to approach the problem right now, as the defense of Taiwan starts to look more and more like a losing battle.

“The US and its Indo-Pacific allies are running critically low on air-defense interceptors and are redeploying aircraft carriers and missile defenses away from the region.

“Taiwan is struggling to seriously expand its investment into its military, and Japan, an old Chinese rival that is now openly discussing re-militarization, is still too early in its re-militarization process to actually rival China head-to-head.”

“Just as important, 2027 has long been regarded in some circles as Xi Jinping’s all-important deadline for reunification.

“2027 will mark one century since the founding of the People’s Liberation Army, and it’s the deadline Xi has set for his military to be prepared to carry out large-scale military operations.”

That said, there are legitimate reasons to believe that Xi isn’t going to order an invasion of Taiwan, at least not in the near future.

For one thing, Taiwan will hold elections on the 28th of November, on the local level, and if the nation’s opposition party, the KMT, does well, then China may decide to wait for the next presidential elections in 2028.

The KMT have become very close with Beijing over time, while Taiwan’s current president supports rearmament as an existential priority.

If the KMT are victorious in 2028, then China may believe it can take Taiwan peacefully, either by engineering a soft takeover similar to its actions in Hong Kong, with the KMT’s direct support, or by playing up the threat of a ruinous invasion so that the KMT can justify capitulating without a fight.

So, we cannot definitively say that this new law will be used, or that it was amended, just to clear the way for a Taiwan invasion.

But we also can’t rule out that China’s real priority is its development interests.

If that were true, then China’s willingness to endorse the idea of national mobilization to protect far-flung Chinese assets across the globe could also be taken as something much deeper.

This is where I depart from Whistler’s analysis because he cannot answer his own question – why mobilize?

He even made it narrower – Why get the whole of Chinese society involved in what should be open and shut deployments abroad?

Conclusion

I will even amplify it – and why mobilize bigtime?

My answer is because China does not intend this to be an open and shut adventure in the same way America had looked at its role as the world’s policeman only to be consumed by its own greed.

We started this article by saying that the descending superpower United States is unreliable, and more so in desperation. We also cited the unpredictability of how far Japan will expand its militaristic condition-reflex.

Whistler said there more are variables that has not yet decoded. He is dead wrong and the rationale is right under his nose. He sees it as an option between either an all-out diplomatic effort to show that it would be lethal to incur China’s wrath, or the decision to commit to an all-out war.

After reading all of Xi Jinping’s books, what I know is that it is a decision to commit to an all-out war precisely to enforce no option for countries to settle their disputes except through diplomacy, with peace as the only weapon of choice as the United Nations had envisioned.

China’s paramount leader’s speech in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan says it all – the multipolar world is already a reality. It is irreversible.

But who will protect this new world order?

Who will cover the back of the nations under international law that supports it against nations that are still under the United States’ rules-based order of zero-sum and cold war solutions?

China is now laying the foundation for something humungous and unprecedented, an economy that can supersede other economies and a war capability that will end all wars.

The handwriting has now manifested on Washington’s wall: mene, mene, tekel, parsin – “God had numbered the its reign and brought it to an end, weighed it on the scales and found its lacking, and would give its kingdom to the people.”

Premier Zhou Enlai had decoded it as far back as December 1953 when he introduced the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.

• Mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity: Nations must respect each other’s borders and political independence, treating all countries as equals.
• Mutual non-aggression: Countries promise not to attack, invade, or use military force against each other.
• Mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs: No nation has the right to meddle in the domestic politics, governance, or legal systems of another country.
• Equality and mutual benefit: International relations and trade must be fair, bringing advantages to all participating nations rather than exploiting others.
• Peaceful coexistence: Countries with different social systems, ideologies, and beliefs should strive to live and cooperate in peace rather than conflict.

Xi Jinping is now enforcing it – where might is right to achieve right is might, in pursuance of authentic historical materialism.

He did not propose a community of shared future as a shibboleth. He envisioned all countries to live in global village guided not by unilateral but global governance to reshape international relations in an era of cooperation to face shared challenges.

As for the Philippines, who under Marcos has turned south as a US dog while the majority of the world has boarded the bus north to the new silk road onto multipolarity, we must unshackled again our nation to return to the wisdom of the framers of our Constitution, towards an independent foreign policy, and bring prosperity back to all our people and not just a privileged few.

The dove must slay the hawk, leading to forever peace, and away from the quagmire of forever wars.

   

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