PEACE-MAKER
We traveled recently to the Chinese cities of Xiamen and Lijiang with wife Gina, our friend Tetta Agustin, and our assistants on long-standing invitation by our old friend, Chinese entrepreneur Chen Youhou, who owns a hotel in both cities.
Xiamen is a port city in southeastern province of Fujian, where the ancestors of many Filipino-Chinese in the Philippines originated. Our national hero, Dr. Jose Rizal, has an 18.61 (based on his year of birth) feet tall shrine in this province, at Jinjiang City. We remember that on January 2023, as Speaker of the House of Representatives, we led a wreath-laying ceremony before this Rizal Monument with Ilocos Norte Congressman Roque Ablan, the descendants of Dr. Jose Rizal, officials of the Knights of Rizal, and Filipino-Chinese business community.
From Xiamen, we visited the historic and culturally-rich city of Lijiang, located on northwestern Yunnan province and home to 22 of the 56 ethnic groups of China. In ancient times, Lijiang was an important station along the Southern Silk Road, leading through Tibet into India and Nepal.
We then flew to Beijing, which was freezingly cold, with a temperature of as low as -12 degrees Celsius. We first visited this Chinese capital in the 1980s, during the time of Deng Xiaoping, the general architect of the “Chinese economic miracle.” We have traveled to this country numerous times as part of our modest foray into parliamentary and political party diplomacy, as then Speaker of the House and as founder-chairman of ICAPP, the International Conference of Asian Political Parties, which is now composed of 352 political parties from 52 countries in Asia. The Communist Party of China sits in ICAPP’s 39-member governing council.
In Beijing, our Philippine Ambassador Jaime FlorCruz and his wife Ana so thoughtfully tendered dinner for us and wife Gina and our group. The good Ambassador has been residing in China for 50 years, since his college days at the prestigious Peking University, where his classmates included distinguished Chinese leaders Premier Le Kequiang and Minister of Commerce Bo Xilai. Ambassador Cruz became bureau chief of Time magazine and of CNN in China.
We reminisced to our good Ambassador that in October 2015, we had the privilege of conferring with President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People, where we also both spoke before more than 200 senior delegates on China’s Silk Road revival. A day before the said meeting, we addressed some 500 international and Chinese political and business leaders on the overland Silk Road and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. We also served as moderator at a subsequent Political Forum attended by former and incumbent heads of state.
We also recalled the Third general assembly of the International Conference of Asian Political Parties, ICAPP, that Beijing hosted on September 2004, where Asian political leaders had extensive discussion on regional security and multilateral cooperation, economic development and social progress, and party building and national development. It was attended by more than 80 political parties from 35 countries in Asia, including the Philippines. Then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Chinese President Hu Jintao addressed the conference.
We also remembered that in 2008, then Chinese President Hu graciously invited us and wife Gina to the opening of the Beijing Summer Olympics.
The welcome banquet for some 100 guests from around the world was tendered by President Hu at the Great Hall of the People. We were seated in the same table as then Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, former Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, political leaders Sonia Gandhi of India and Bilawal Bhutto of Pakistan, who later became foreign minister and who is the son of our old friend, the late Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
Seated at the table nearby were President Hu and his wife, Liu Yongqing, US President George W. Bush, then Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda.
Also present were President Macapagal Arroyo and our old friends former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and former African Union president Jean Ping, among others. We also spotted Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who spoke fluent Mandarin, Israeli President Shimon Peres, and Prince Albert II of Monaco, son of the late Prince Rainer III whom we had the privilege to meet in the late 1970s when we were a pioneering businessman in the Middle East and North Africa.
Our wife Gina told us then that it was such a gargantuan task to work out the seating arrangements to make sure that nobody sat next to a political rival. She explained that the choices of food to be served the dignitaries from around the world was an equally gigantic job.