(VOVworld) – China’s illegal placement of oilrig Haiyang 981 in Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone has become a hot international topic and sparked a wave of protests in Vietnam and around the globe. It is certain that many Chinese people have asked themselves about this issue. Let’s imagine how an ordinary Chinese might think about it.

Since President Xi Jinping was elected, he has often mentioned the “Chinese dream” and peaceful development as China’s strategic choice. We wonder what his dream is about. The dream of ordinary people like us is very simple: to earn a living. The so-called “Strategic opportunity” that the leaders have been supporting simply means to us that currently there are many opportunities to “emerge peacefully” and that it is necessary to “be patient to wait for opportunities” to serve our long-term target of making China the leading nation in the world.

It is hard to understand why the leaders have done the contrary by causing disturbances in foreign seas and so revealing their true nature. Is it true that our superior position and great scheme have been lost?

This ignores the many domestic problems that the new generation of leaders has been dealing with, such as economic growth slowing down, China’s newly-started in-depth reform, people’s indignation at the widening gap between rich and poor, serious environmental pollution, widespread corruption, and bombings and stabbings. Why not concentrate our efforts on solving these problems instead of provoking other countries? Does someone want to create a chaotic global situation so ordinary people like us will forget our daily hardships?

Our leaders have often stated that China is not pursuing a dream of expansionism and hegemony. This is reasonable because we ourselves have been colonized and understand the humiliation of being oppressed. Our predecessors taught us that if there is something we don’t like, we shouldn’t impose it on others. We don’t want to be intimidated so why should we provoke hostilities? The issue of oilrig Haiyang 981 has undermined our efforts to persuade the world that China is not bent on domination.

We are not in our little world and, like it or not, we have to co-exist with other nations. Co-existence, of course, requires obedience to law. If the law of the jungle is the only law, what would this world become?

China’s actions have alarmed our neighbors. We ordinary people were happy when our leaders convened a conference on good neighbor policy at which they adopted a stance of being friendly and peaceful with our neighbors and together enriching ourselves. By contrast, we have lately been damaging our cooperation with one after another of our neighbors, causing disturbances in the northern and southern seas. In response to our actions with oilrig Haiyang 981, the ASEAN countries have got together out of concern for regional peace to denounce our aggression. We have preached about “chasing away the tiger from the front door and receiving the wolf at the back door” but it turns out that our actions have made people wonder just who is the tiger and who is the wolf!   

Our “over-assertiveness” has sparked, or at least justified, a new costly arms race in the region. History has shown that a wealthy country with a strong army will weaken if it continues to overspend on its military.

One more thing we ordinary people don’t understand is why we chose Vietnam to be the object of our provocation? We share with Vietnam the same continent, the same race, the same culture, and the same target of pursuing socialism. The two countries have had a close bond and helped one another in difficulties and we have declared our intention to be their good neighbor, good friend, good partner, and good comrade. Some people have accused them of being ungrateful or plotting this and that, but over thousands of years they have never invaded us at any time while many of our dynasties Qin, Han, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing have invaded them, occupied them and insulted their national pride. In the modern era, we have helped them fight foreign invaders and have used their issues to negotiate with other world powers. We took advantage of the period in which they were engaged in a national resistance war to occupy their Hoang Sa (Paracel) archipelago, which we call Xisha, and even waged a war “to teach them a lesson” and jumped on the islands of Truong Sa (Spratly), which we call Nansha. They have never threatened us at sea and what we did was to arbitrarily draw our own extensive marine area and begin acting as if we owned it. Let’s ask ourselves, if another country behaved like that with us, how would we feel?

We should consider what is right, what is wrong, and what we can win or lose, because if “we do not concede small things, we will lose bigger things”. We can install the oilrig, which is relatively big in size, but we will lose bigger things. We ordinary people hope that the leaders will think things over and stop, because “everything has its breaking point”.