ALONG with the United States and the rest of the Western world, we celebrated New Year’s Day last January 1, with the usual fireworks and family gatherings at “Media Noche” midnight dinners. Today, January 28, we join China and much of the rest of Asia in celebrating the Lunar New Year (or Chinese New Year) also with fireworks and family gatherings.
In China itself, the Lunar New Year sees the world’s biggest mass migration as hundreds of millions of workers leave their factories and offices in Beijing, Shanghai, and other big cities to return to their ancestral homes mostly on the other side of the big country. This year, 414 million Chinese are expected to travel by train and by plane during the five-day Spring Festival that begins today. And with China’s greatly improving economy, six million of them will be travelling to other countries, notably Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia. One Chinese airline said it had added 400 flights to various Asian cities, including our own Cebu.
This year’s Lunar New Year celebration finds the Philippines engaging closely with China in planning several projects in the wake of President Duterte’s recent state visit to Beijing. Last Monday and Tuesday, a Philippine delegation led by Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez met in Beijing with Chinese officials led by Minister of Commerce Gao Hucheng on some 30 projects, involving $3.7 billion, to be undertaken in the Philippines. The projects involve railways, hydroelectric power plants, and irrigation systems.
China’s assistance is “among the concrete results of President Duterte’s foreign policy rebalancing towards accelerated integration with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its major Asian trading partners China, Japan, and South Korea,” Secretary Dominguez said.
This year will also see the Philippines taking a lead role in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). As this year’s chairman of ASEAN, we will stress the positive elements of the current situation in our part of the world. Our goal this year is to finally come up with a Code of Conduct in the South China Sea which, we hope, will help reduce the tensions over conflicting claims in the maritime area.
In this Year of the Fire Rooster – which is seen in the Chinese zodiac as confident, honest, hardworking, and responsible – we hope to join other nations, especially in our part of the world, in honest hard work, confident in our own capacity and ability to move forward, and ready to do our share in efforts for peace, development, and progress.