China's past maritime glory
It is good to know that Mr. Santo does not believe the Chinese are evil, but he believes that China is seeing increased opportunities to reclaim its past maritime glory and, like any other nation, China strives for power.
As one in three pirate attacks last year took place in and around Indonesian seas, could we conclude that China and Indonesia have ganged up together to extend Chinese and Indonesia maritime jurisdiction through establishment of a reign of terror by pirate attacks?
China's past maritime glory was a peaceful one. At the acme of its maritime glory, emperor Yong Le of the Ming dynasty (1368 A.D. to 1644 A.D.) sent the Muslim-Confucian scholar Zheng-He as the admiral to lead the seven epic voyages, with 62 vessels carrying 28,000 men, from 1405 to 1433, to Indonesia, India, Arabia and Africa, including a side trip to Mecca. China could have easily seized not only the South China Sea but the whole of the Philippines and Southeast Asia but it did not, nor was it involved in any pirate attacks.
The appointment of a Muslim as admiral was also significant because it was meant not to be an offensive but a trip to befriend many Muslim states along the way. A century later, Southeast Asia was divided among Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal and Britain, later to include France but not China. It is apparent that even when China was strong and had military power and resources, it did not seize territory for colonization. Boats with rudders dating back to the Han dynasty (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.) have been excavated and the compass was also a Chinese invention, but all these did not lead China or the Chinese to be seafaring pirates and a colonizing maritime power in history.
There was no war between the two world's great civilizations, India and China, as neighbors for more than four millenniums, but the war since 1962 over what is known as the McMahon Line is a legacy of colonialism. For more than 350 years during the South- North disunion period (220 A.D. to 589 AD), Tibetans and other major nomadic people were on the rampage and looting in Western and Northern China. Tibet was brought under Chinese sovereignty during the Tang dynasty (618 A.D. to 907 A.D.).
In his last book China, a new history, which he submitted to his publisher on Sept. 12, 1991, before suffering a heart attack in the afternoon and dying two days later, J. King Fairbank wrote: "In size and military resources the Song more than equaled the Jin (and later the Mongols) but the Song civilian officialdom had little taste for violence ... They could foresee that resorting to violence would breed more violence ... Behind this lay the Confucian disdain for the military ... regarded the practitioners of wu (violence) as their mortal enemies ...
"Why have Chinese scholars for 2000 years gone along with this Confucian refusal to accept the military establishment as an occupational class ... our refusal to look at them as a military class suggests that Chinese scholars are still under the sway of the great Confucian myth of the state, government by virtue. Looked at from another angle, we see here one of the glories of old China, a reasoned pacifism."
But I would say it is cultural pacifism.
But, Mr. Santo, I cannot change your beliefs, if you believe otherwise.
SIA KA MOU
Jakarta