Our all-important ties with China
THE 21st Century has been dubbed the Asian Century, and for good reason. We see China rising and carrying the rest of Asia along with it, just like the dragon Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte once prophesied to wake and shake the world.
Just over a week ago one of the sharpest geopolitical-economic analyst I have known in Asian media had this article in the Asia Times, “China leads world economic recovery”. The author is David P. Goldman, an American economist and author, best known under the pseudonym Spengler in Asia Times.
Goldman channeled the German historian Oswald Spengler, whose most famous work, Decline of the West (1918), asserted that Western civilization was already dying. He was also responsible for economic publications in the Lyndon LaRouche movement which since the 80s already predicted all that we see today including the rise of China.
Now Goldman is also predicting that China will lead the global economic recovery from the devastating impact of the Coronavirus pandemic, and this is the key paragraph in his analysis and prognosis:
“Caixin’s manufacturing survey for China showed a positive reading of 50.7, while the comparable Markit PMI Index for the US in May came in at 39.8. The Caixin services reading reflects a broad sample of privately-owned business, and suggests that Chinese consumers are spending freely. By all indications, this is a grass-roots economic boom rather than an investment-driven expansion driven by state spending.”
Caixin is a media group which focuses on and tracks China’s economic and financial developments much like Bloomberg and other business media groups in the West. It is relied upon for objective and accurate economic data on the business and industrial goings-on in the Chinese economy.
China was the first country to uncover and deal with the coronavirus outbreak and handled it very successfully with only 83,057 cases and 4,634 death in the latest tally, but what is most interesting in the aftermath of the main brunt of the pandemic hit in China is its approach to economic recovery. One of the first things it did in early April was to issue “Consumption Coupons” to its people to boost retail recovery. It has run a fiscal deficit of only 3.6% of GDP to stimulate its economy.
The U.S. of course had a very different coronavirus tale to tell. Plagued with delayed, confused and contradictory policies to deal with the outbreak in its own shores, skewed priorities placing business over public welfare, embroiling health issues in the political and electoral campaign mire, the U.S. having ¼ of China’s population now has 1,933,560 infections and 110,220 deaths as of June 10, 2020.
U.S. COVID-19 economic and financial response to help its people survive and refloat the economy consisted of four trillions of US Dollars passed on through big corporations much of which got stuck in the corporation buy backs of its own stocks and hedged by businesses entrusted to distribute this to workers and never reaching the grassroots intended beneficiaries. U.S. unemployed due to the pandemic is now 40-million, a Great Depression level joblessness. The estimates of U.S. stimulus is 11 ½ to 20% of GDP.
Goldman is not the only optimistic voice looking at China to lead the global economic recovery post-Covid 19, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been looking at China for positive leads. In February 2020 the IMF Kristalina Georgieva said China will see a “’most likely scenario … a V-shaped impact… as factories in China gear up to make up for lost time…” and in late April IMF deputy director of Asia and Pacific Kenneth Kang said factory restarts “give us hope that we will see a recovery in Q2…”
The Philippines will be facing a 1.9% contraction of the economy in 2020 while an estimated million OFWs will be losing their overseas jobs. The Philippine economic crisis is a very serious matter and every economic life saver to hang on is vital for out people’s welfare. China is the major hope of the Philippines for an early recovery. In an interview of our Amb. Chito Sta. Romana in Beijing on the occasion of the 45th Anniversary of PHL-China diplomatic relations the ambassador greeted with gladness the normalization of our banana export volume to China.
For the same occasion Chinese Amb. Huang Xilian issued a literarily beautiful as well a historically accurate narration of the two countries “embracing a better future of China-Philippine friendship..” reviewing the great financial assistance China has extended to the Philippines worth billions of US Dollars, COVI-19 assistance, but to this we must add the promise of the earliest anti-bodies COVID-19 remedy President Duterte expects for China as well as the vaccine that China will extend as a “global public good” to countries such as the Philippines.
Thus, our positive engagement with China is one of the most vital link to a better future for our people, and out nation and its media must really work towards bettering that “strategic cooperation” and help the country overcome the cynical anti-China naysayers and saboteurs of our country’s “independent foreign policy” and President Rodrigo R. Duterte’s cultivation of friendly, if not fraternal relations with the People’s Republic of China.
