China needs lesson in humility, neighbourliness and good manners
Re: “Deceptive China is trying to gobble up Bhutan”, Have Your Say, July 7.
Letter-writer Karma Chime calls for philosophers to answer the question: “How much land does a huge country like China need?” A more pertinent question to ask is: “How much land AND sea does China WANT?”, to which the answer is, “all of it”. Motivated by greed, intoxicated with power, and without the nuisance of democracy, this loutish country seems to think it’s on a long march to global hegemony.
Within Southeast Asia, China has made vassal states of Laos and
Cambodia, and is trying to do the same with Myanmar and Vietnam (which recently have shown some resistance), and also here in Thailand with the submarine deal and its self-serving railway. Further east, it has bribed the Philippines into accepting its ludicrous “nine-dash line” that purports to make the entire South China Sea its own, and within the last few weeks it has waved two fingers at any notion of sticking to the agreement with Britain over the governance of Hong Kong. Throughout the region, it has chopped down our trees and eaten most of our endangered species, and has now turned to Africa where it is doing the same on a monstrous scale.
Further afield, China has bribed Panama and other small countries into ditching relations with Taiwan, and coerced the incompetent and supine British government to yield swathes of the country’s communications and power generation to Chinese control.
With regard to Bhutan, which is the nearest to paradise among all the countries I have ever visited, it can at least count on India’s support in this latest incursion, so fingers crossed for now.
And what of the future? The best thing that could happen is for China to erupt into civil war, from which it emerges as a number of separate autonomous states. But that isn’t going to happen any time soon. What is more likely is that its current debt bubble bursts, the financial system and the economy collapse, and the country receives a much-needed lesson in humility, neighbourliness and good manners.
Nigel Pike
Phang Nga
