"Here's Ambassador Sta. Romana in his own words."
"Here's Ambassador Sta. Romana in his own words."
A media delegation organized by the Chinese Embassy in Manila in coordination with China expert Herman Tiu Laurel, or "Ka Mentong," flew to Beijing on Sept. 21 to begin a 10-day visit to the capital city, Changsha in Hunan province, and Xiamen in Fujian province.
On the second day of our visit, we had a meeting with Philippine Ambassador to China Jose Santiago "Chito" Sta. Romana to give us insights on what's going on in China at present. He agreed to meet us at the Philippine Embassy in Beijing on Sept. 22, a Sunday, or a week before the 70th Anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China on Oct. 1 this year.
Here's what he told us during our informal discussion with him:
“When our group of Filipino youth and students arrived in China in 1971, it was still a Third World country and in the throes of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. We asked our hosts, where are our peers, the youth. They told us: They are in the countryside, working among the peasants. We were also brought at some point to the countryside where we did some farm work, but not full-time, just for half a day. China was then undergoing a period of scarcity. A system of rationing was put in place to feed the whole population, with ordinary Chinese given ration cards so they could buy grain, meat and bread, aside from clothing. Today, China has consumer goods in abundance, and they export steel, cement, glass and other industrial products. It is now considered a middle-income economy.
I left China for home in 2010 and when I came back as ambassador in 2016, I was surprised to find the country had already developed into a cashless society. People use smartphones to pay taxi fare, or purchase goods from convenience stores, and so on. I don't carry cash anymore.
Another thing, when I came back here, the railway system had vastly improved and covered more areas. All the provinces now have new airports. The Chinese have given much importance to building infrastructure, such as roads and bridges. They have more expressways here than in other countries. They have built another huge international airport here in Beijing that will connect the capital to other areas in the country. Hunan province in central China even has a magnetic levitation train system aside from bullet trains that travel at average speeds of 300 kilometers per hour. The bullet train system was started in the past decade and now covers various points in China.
China's sustained economic growth in the past 20 years has been fueled by exports, allowing them to overcome the global financial crisis in 2008 and to become an economic powerhouse at present. This is what will shield them from the trade war with the US.
China is on track in achieving its goal of eliminating absolute poverty by 2021. The target year is significant as this would be 100 years after the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. Most of the very poor are in the mountainous areas, and they represent 5 or 6 percent of the total population. In the urban areas, there are no more shanties. Migrant workers who had settled in Beijing were sent back to their home provinces.
The issue of sending Filipino domestics to China is still under discussion, but there is some resistance on the part of the Chinese government as they also have surplus labor. They would rather have skilled workers. Now that the Chinese middle class has become more prosperous, they want to hire domestic workers who can take care of their children and do housework. They envy the Hong Kong people who have Filipino domestic workers who can do the housework, teach their children English, and take care of the elderly. Because of the one-child policy in the past, the number of elderly in China has risen. The Chinese want to hire English-speaking caregivers.
The goal of the Chinese leadership is to reach by 2035 the status of a high-income economy and by 2049, become the top economy in the world. The goal of the US in its ongoing trade war with China is to stop or at least delay the pace of China's economic development. Basically the US does not want to be the Number 2 economy. That's why the US has been trying to stop other countries from dealing with Huawei, a leading IT giant. The US advantage is high technology, but the Chinese are catching up. I expect an interim agreement on the trade war, particularly as we approach the US election. The Chinese would be very interested in the result of the coming election. The anti-China mood in the US is very strong, so Xi Jinping would have to face this challenge head on.
With regard to the ongoing political crisis in Hong Kong, it is quite clear that the Chinese approach to the protests is not to do another Tiananmen and send in the tanks but rather to allow them to hold more demonstrations despite occasional violent episodes so that public opinion would turn against them. China's approach seems to be to isolate the hardliners and win back the population, especially the young people. Basically, it is to give them enough rope to hang themselves. This is a challenge to the policy of "one country, two systems," and this also applies to the case of Taiwan, which China considers a province. Elections are also scheduled in Taiwan next year and the last thing that China wants is for another pro-independence candidate to win as president.”