THE phrase caught the interest of this column when it was addressed by Chinese President Xi Jinping to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer during the latter’s visit to Beijing recently.
“China stands ready to work with Britain in upholding a grand view of history, rising above differences, and promoting mutual respect, in order to translate the promising potential of cooperation into remarkable accomplishments, open up new vistas for China-Britain relations and cooperation to better benefit both the two peoples and the world at large.”
While Britain’s Opium War in the 1830s accounted for China’s century of humiliation, British recognition of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was the first by any European power and preceded that of the United States by a full decade.
In brief, there had been an age of more flowering relations between China and Britain than between China and America. Britain has been manifesting a more tangible strategic independent polarity to be able to concretely advance China’s advocacy of a multipolar world. This needs stressing, given the fact that the United States, until today, viewed as a staunch British ally, perseveres in its idea of a unipolar world under its sole leadership.
In a 2021 meeting with the most senior members of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in anticipation of the CPC centenary, Xi Jinping said emphatically, “Efforts should be made to educate and guide the entire party to take into account China’s pursuit of national rejuvenation strategy amid global changes of a scale unseen in a century, develop a grand view of history, examine the dynamics of change and identify historical patterns from the long course of history, the tide of the times and the global landscape, formulate corresponding strategies and policies, and advance our work with a holistic, foresighted and innovative approach.”
As I wrote in a previous column, whenever a finely calculating speaker says something, don’t take the bare rhetoric; search for the subtext.
And this column’s particular concern now is how to relate Xi’s “grand view of history” to the simmering tensions between China and the Philippines over the West Philippine Sea.
Spoken to a major world power, Britain, the phrase’s subtext could consist of something so all-encompassing that it could even unravel what is to become of the West Philippine Sea crisis.
Will the Tarriela noise lead to war with China or could a “grand view of history” bring about a clear delineation of what we activists in the First Quarter Storm initially learned as dialectical materialism?
Indeed, as pointed out in the cited address of Xi to Starmer, “grand view of history” is an ideological question, raised only to inner CPC circles, very rarely to a visiting head of a state with a contrary social system, i.e., capitalism.
In Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism, the progression of man’s social development goes from primitive communal system first, then slave system, feudal system, capitalism, socialism and ultimately, communism.
The establishment of the first socialist state in history came about as a product of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which was against the century-old feudal Romanov dynasty.
Similarly, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a socialist state, was the outcome of the five-year civil war won by the Mao Zedong-led Communist Party of China against the Kuomintang in 1949 and was itself a diversion from Marx’s view of historical materialism. China was far from being a capitalist state. As Mao Zedong put it, China was a semi-feudal, semi-colonial society and so could not yet leap to socialism. Instead of an anti-capitalist fight, what Mao Zedong fiercely launched was a national democratic struggle in which nationalist capitalists, regarded as national bourgeoisie, were lumped with workers, peasants, and petty bourgeoisie as revolutionary forces. Under the subsequent Premier Deng Xiaoping’s rule, China underwent a thorough innovation from classical Marxism to an opening-up policy toward world capitalism, expressed in his famous approach, “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice,” which allowed for flexible, pragmatic economic policies.
China soared to the world’s second-largest economy, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty and setting the stage for China’s modern development.
A “grand view of history” necessarily connotes the pragmatism to innovate from established dogma if such is necessary to attain set objectives.
What appear now as the escalating tensions between China and the Philippines over the West Philippine Sea actually speak of the quandary: How does the Philippines get out of the strait between capitalism ruled by the United States and socialism determinedly advanced by China worldwide?
Needless to say, no way could the Philippines win a war with China. Nevertheless, hawkish Philippine elements such as Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro, Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) chief Romeo Brawner Jr., and yes, PCG spokesperson for the West Philippine Sea Jay Tarriela, endlessly agitate for the possibility of the Philippines warring with China, heavily relying on expected support from the United States and its allies.
But precisely because UK Prime Minister Starmer was addressed by Chinese President Xi on the ramifications of the “grand view of history,” who are we to discount the possibility of Britain switching alliances at the appropriate time?
Absence British backing, the United States is greatly handicapped in a military confrontation with China.
This was the essence of the reminder of Xi to Starmer on the “grand view of history.”
Particularly on the unmistakable worldwide imminent dominance of socialism, history mandates that once a social system gets institutionalized in one section of the world, all the rest of the world just gets assimilated into that system.
With Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) gaining inroads right into Europe, it is not unlikely that Britain could end up executing its own modus vivendi with China.
And in that event, geopolitical alliances can alter so as to bring about a radically different world order in every aspect.
In the mid-1800s, capitalism had progressed in Europe to an extent that it needed new sources of raw materials. The encomiendas, which were the political units (provinces) for the colonial administration of the archipelago, were transformed by profit-hungry friars into the hacienda system in which vast lands were planted to coconut, sugar cane, abaca, tobacco, etc., raw materials for feeding into the capitalist industries in Europe.
The Philippine hacienda system was capitalism’s way of inescapably assimilating the Philippines into its world ambit.
Now, socialism has long been institutionalized in China, and there is no visible indication whether in the immediate or strategic sense that such institutionalizing could go any other way but China.
As it was inevitable that capitalism would assimilate the Philippines in the mid-1800s, so socialism must now.
The insistent rumblings to war with China by the hawks in the security sector are all manifestations of what should take place as an inescapable historical mandate in which not just the Philippines, in fact, but also the rest of the world are getting assimilated into socialism.
It is the grand view of history that such socialism perforce is indelibly fleshed with Chinese characteristics.