EVERY year, people wait for the mid-autumn moon to peak on the 15th night. It rarely does. This year, it didn’t become full until the 17th. Small thing. But it tells you something: real alignment doesn’t happen on schedule.
You could feel that at the SMX Convention Center in Pasay City on Sept. 23. The room was full: diplomats, officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs, businessmen, members of the media, Chinese-Filipino (“Tsinoy”) community leaders. During China’s National Day reception, Zhou Zhiyong, chargé d’affaires ad interim at the Chinese Embassy in Manila, spoke about the direction China is moving in under its 15th Five-Year Plan — artificial intelligence, green technology and ”high-quality growth.” On the South China Sea, he made the usual point: that disputes shouldn’t define the whole relationship.
But let’s be real: you can’t talk about Manila and Beijing today without holding two opposite truths in your head at once. Deep, centuries-old community ties on one side, and a maritime standoff getting more dangerous by the day on the other.
Look at the Tsinoy community. Decades of serving as a civic backbone: building schoolhouses in rural areas, running volunteer fire brigades, organizing calamity relief and providing free medical missions for poor families. That work is real. It doesn’t disappear because relations hit a rough patch. Nor are those functional lifelines theoretical: commercial trade keeps moving and travel policies like the 14-day visa-free entry generate incomes for local hotel workers, drivers and shopkeepers.
But civic work and everyday economic ties don’t make the maritime rough patch go away. The standoffs in the West Philippine Sea are not small. They’re serious. Sovereignty. Maritime rights. Real risk. But shooting at each other won’t solve anything; it will only make a bad situation worse.
Bilateral ties are like a marriage. You fight, you get mad, you stand your ground. But you don’t file for divorce over every blowout. You have to consider the family and what a total mess a breakup would be. The problems don’t disappear overnight, and nobody’s asking to pretend otherwise. But you don’t burn down the house, so to speak, just because you had a shouting match in the kitchen. It’s still best to talk without a third party or a lawyer.
Resolving this takes time. Restraint. Dealing with reality as it is.
The moon doesn’t wait for the 15th. It rounds when it rounds. The relationship will round when it rounds — if both sides let it.
Henry Go is a businessman and civic leader. He is a former director of the Rotary Club of Manila, a life member of the Philippine Constitution Association and coordinator of the Parish Finance Council of the Binondo Chinese Parish.
