Calming the waters

If your family raised you the way mine did me, for sure you have childhood memories of visiting with them Cebu’s Taoist temple. You remember the mostly red pagoda rising amid the greenery on a hill in Cebu City’s northwest. You can, if your memory is sharp enough, almost smell the sanctuary’s burning incense, almost see your face’s reflection filtered in one of the garden’s still ponds, almost behold that solemnity — a monk’s countenance.

If you have never been to the temple, you still have more than enough clues to surmise that your attitude towards China must not be summarized by the Philippine government’s case with that country at the United Nations (UN). I certainly do, though I am not familiar with the Dy side of my father’s clan, descendants of a Chinese man who sailed to Cebu generations ago. The names of my comfort food — those dishes you and I often partake of with our loved ones — ring Sinic. Siomai, siopao, lumpia, ngohiong — the English labels dumpling and spring roll do not quite capture the mouth-watering differences between these treats.

So Filipinos and the Chinese share an openness to the sacred, delight in similar food and even celebrate together some holidays like the Spring Festival or Chinese New Year. We have traded for centuries. We have intermarried. To this, historians can attest who specialize in the past of the waterfront district of Parian — Cebu’s Chinatown. There, you can find probably the most venerable dwelling in the Philippines, around 400 years old, half-Chinese in name — the Yap-Sandiego House.

Any day now, a UN tribunal at the Hague will render a decision on the complaint filed by the Philippines against China, based on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, over patches of land in that resource-rich area known both as South China Sea and West Philippine Sea.

“Philippine officials have asked the tribunal to find that China has violated the treaty by building islands in the Philippines’ economic waters, interfering with its fishermen, endangering its ships and damaging the marine environment,” the New York Times (NYT) reported. “The Philippines’ most sweeping demand is for the tribunal to reject China’s claim to sovereignty over waters within a ‘nine-dash line’ that encircles almost all of the South China Sea.”

The narrative dominating the media appeals to the instincts of the war freak and action movie fanatic as well as of sober international relations analysts. China has repeatedly asserted that it will pay no heed to the tribunal’s judgment. Beijing has built air strips and installed radars and missile launchers in the Spratlys. The United States (US), which has a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines, has entered the fray, sending warships there.

This flurry of hard balancing resulting from the Philippine complaint, an instance of soft balancing, is unfortunate. International conventions, often borne of war fatigue, must be respected. We must never again sink into a situation in which might makes right. This conflict now has the attention of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the G7 countries even as the NYT reported that China is drumming up support from friends like Russia. Political realism holds that the best case scenario consists in China softening in the face of soft balancing from the international community and accepting the UN ruling. After all, it has gained moral high ground on the world stage in critiquing military interventions like the unlawful US-led War on Iraq in 2003. The Chinese government’s persistence in militarism is a serious blow to its credibility as a vaunted partner or alternative to the US in leading the world order.

There are times when states lead people. These are times when people who speak from outside the apparatus of states must enlighten it. But lawyer Antonio Oposa’s suggestion for the Philippine government to initiate the movement for the Spratlys to be declared an open, international protected area and UN World Heritage site went unheard, and no one knows if Lao-Tzu has clout with the Chinese state. “Where troops have been quartered, brambles and thorns spring up. In the track of great armies there must follow lean years,” he wrote. “Weapons, however beautiful, are instruments of ill omen, hateful to all creatures. Therefore he who has Tao will have nothing to do with them… they are not the instruments of the princely man… Peace and tranquility are what he prizes.”

A year has passed since Filipino Catholics and their bishops started offering a prayer “in time of grave tension” for a peaceful resolution to this dispute. May those petitions be heard, as we look beyond the Chinese state to its gentle people, some of whom are friends who partly inspire these thoughts, friends with whom I have prepared siomai, eaten chicharon, explored the Yap-Sandiego House and learned that the realism of smiles, handshakes and piano melodies is far more effective than balance of power rhetoric in building a world of concord.