From BBC-Singapore, 20/08/2018 00:08
Red Chinese ‘Pan-Asia’ proposal rejected at Bangkok Conference
Historic proposal from Peking for a supranational trade union denounced as a ‘crude veil for a simple power-grab by the People’s Republic’.
Red Chinese delegates walk out from Asian Economic Conference.
Japan, India, America and Great Britain lead critique of Red Chinese propositions.
The 2018 Asian Economic Conference has opened with a shocking scenes as the extravagant Red Chinese delegation headed by General Wenchang himself, announced their much-anticipated and controversial plans for a ‘Pan-Asia Trade Zone’, faced a subsequent hail of criticism from several other attendees, and ultimately walked out of the convention. This is the latest in a series of diplomatics standoffs between China and its geopolitical rivals India and Japan, which are supported by the US and Great Britain who had dispatched observers to the AEC.
Following a brief opening ceremony, the Red Chinese Premier General Wenchang stepped up to the speaker’s podium and with little deliberation enthusiastically made his proposition, supported by a series of infographics, of ‘an Asia free to determine its own course, no longer undermined by the capitalist imperialists of the Anglosphere, and united in common cause to support itself’ through the Pan-Asia Trade Zone. This agreement would encompass every country in Asia aside from Japan and India, and would establish a single trade and labour market to be administered by a ‘Pan-Asia Congress’ in Nanjing, with a unified ‘Pan-Asian Renminbi’, while all external trade would be locked out behind a 100% tariff wall to ‘eliminate the influence of the Western capitalist classes’, that would also immediately terminate Britain’s protectorate agreements with the states of Malaya and Borneo, alongside their memberships of the Commonwealth, as ‘relics of a bygone imperial age, now to be swept aside for a new order’. The anti-Western rhetoric was topped off with proposals for a ‘multi-step procedure to establish a unified army to defend the Asian people from outside aggressors’. According to Red Chinese estimates, Pan-Asia would have a combined GDP of $6.04trn, making it the fourth largest economy in the world behind the US, Japan, and the USSR, but ahead of Great Britain. To add to this, the bloc would have a total population of 1.26 billion people and a hypothetical pan-Asian army would also apparently consist of ‘10 million active personnel, equivalent in size to the United Red Army of the Minsk Association’.
The presentation received a less than enthusiastic reception, with both Asia’s largest economies, Japan and India, immediately responding with firey denunciations of Pan-Asia as ‘A proxy for direct rule from Peking’ and ‘A crude veil for a simple power-grab by the People’s Republic’ respectively. Their critiques focused on the fact that the bloc would consolidate all China’s periphery states into a single political-economic area that only it, as the largest and 2nd most populous nation in Asia, could dominate. Parallels were also raised by the Japanese as to how ‘the Soviet Union cemented its nature as a superpower by incorporating all Eastern Europe into the Minsk Association: an economic bloc of its own design that was engineered so that Russia could dominate without competition. From thereon, political supremacy across that swathe of territory was but a formality. What Wenchang proposes here is nothing but stealing from the playbook of old Marshal Stalin’. Subsequent requests from the Korean, Indonesian and Thai delegations as to further details of the bloc’s implementation were disregarded as ‘queries to be settled when more appropriate’, and the observer delegation from Great Britain commented that ‘there was an overall mood of hostility to what appeared a blatant effort of extreme geopoliticking on the part of the Red Chinese’.
The discussion was followed by a vote at 22:00 on whether to grant Red Chinese proposals support of the Conference, which passed nigh-unanimously against. Only Red China, Indochina and the Phillipines voted in favour; Japan, India, Korea, Burma, Indonesia, Malaya, Sarawak North-Borneo, Brunei and Afghanistan all voting against. General Wenchang’s delegation responded to this ‘affront and worthless act of self-destruction’ by choosing to immediately walk out from the conference, describing it as ‘nothing but a front for the zionist-capitalist overlords of Asia to manipulate us with!’, departing in an armed motorcade for Bangkok International at 22:10. At 22:32, the diplomatic office of the Republic of China issued a statement from Chiang Kai-Shek City in support of the AEC’s ruling, adding that “the President of the Republic now hopes the Conference can recognise Moscow’s puppet on the mainland as the crude sham it is: a far cry from the true Chinese state that should now be permitted to assume its rightful seat at Bangkok alongside fellow confederates against the Red Menace!”. There has been no joint-statement of response from the AEC as of yet.
BBC infographic of Red Chinese proposals at Bangkok: Red China in maroon, Republican China in blue, the Soviet Union in red, 'Pan-Asia' in light pink, British Crown Colonies in dark pink and other Asian states in grey.
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Analysis
The Pan-Asia scheme was known to be in the works as early as 2010, and anticipation had been growing in the lead-up to the AEC this year in hopes that the People’s Republic of China could finally assume a stable place in the international community, perhaps even the coveted role as the dominant geopolitical force in Asia that Japan has held for so long. However, it was evidently not to be. While the governing junta in Red China is a far cry from the radical Maoist cabal that preceded it, the out-and-out bluntness of their rhetoric, naked ambition of regional dominance and absolute impatience for gradual improvement appears to be a holdover that bares no signs of abating. It is quite possible that several of the proposals of Pan-Asia, such as a combined trade and labour market and joint customs-policy, could have been real clinchers if presented with much more tact, much less ideological ranting and certainly not alongside such extreme propositions as a united armed forces and 100% tariff barriers. If it had resembled less the Minsk Association and more the Western European Economic Space, the announcement could have marked a new era in Chinese foreign policy toward pragmatic cooperation with its periphery states and further beyond, that could have yielded great fruit on a longer timescale.
Instead, with such an obvious attempt to consolidate those periphery states into little more than territorial annexations as part of a continent-wide hostile takeover, General Wenchang has most likely set that foreign policy back by decades, as this calamity and humiliation is certainly unlikely to be forgotten in a hurry. Indeed, it is quite possible that the old man is dead before China can claw back even a dreg of the potential that was squandered tonight.
Already there is talk of the Japanese and Indians making a joint-proposal that takes the Chinese concept, enormously moderates it and incorporates themselves and the
Republic of China (aka Formosa) as the largest economies in Asia, while excluding the bellicose and aggressive
People's Republic of China, in what has been dubbed ‘Pan-Asia minus C’. Indeed, word has it that such a scheme, which is modelled extensively on the Western European Economic Space, is to be announced in the next few days or may even conclude the conference. Whatever the case, it’s likely to be a considerable degree more successful than the farce Beijing offered tonight.
