China’s immediate target isn’t Taiwan

Plus: A trip to St. Paul’s Cathedral and more [Bloomberg]( This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, an astronomic (though not lunatic) telescoping of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. [Sign up here](. Today’s Must-Reads - A French bank says, “[Go ahead, work from home.](” - Britain mourns a beloved [sycamore](. Why was it felled? - The almost 600-year-old Italian bank that isn’t a [national treasure](. - China’s troublesome [billionaires]( may now face jail time. - The [hottest tech IPO]( of 2023 is ... China vs. the Philippines This week was the celebration of the Moon Festival in China and much of East and Southeast Asia, but Beijing still got pretty ornery. Maybe someone’s had too much mooncake? Mooncake Photographer: Zhang Peng/LightRocket Consider the quarrels it’s picked. A top [Chinese scientist]( grumbled that India’s recent landing in the moon’s polar region wasn’t technically southerly enough to qualify as such (New Delhi’s spacecraft also happened to break the previous record for the southernmost moon landing, held by, ahem, China). Mainland tech consumers predicted that iPhones made in India would be of suspect quality (Apple Inc.’s [moving more production]( of its most popular product to India from China). Meanwhile, a Chinese spokesman declared that the Philippines — which sent a diver to cut a rope demarcating Chinese control of an island the Hague had awarded to Manila — was making a nuisance of itself. There’s also been reports that China [barred an executive at a US firm]( from leaving the mainland. And if all that’s not enough, Beijing said all the [giant pandas]( it’s loaned to US zoos will be back in China by next year. Of all these, the confrontation with the Philippines is the most ominous, even as China’s air force skirt Taiwan’s airspace. The US is not obliged to come to Taiwan’s defense if it is attacked (Washington prefers to be strategically mysterious about its plans, if it has any). On the other hand, the Americans and the Filipinos have had a mutual defense treaty since 1951. It hasn’t served the Philippines well, so far. In 2012, the Chinese virtually annexed the Scarborough Shoal — and the US did not come to Manila’s defense. The Philippines took its case to an international court in the Hague and won a historic [decision in 2016](: global recognition of its rights to the atoll (which China calls Huangyan island). In fact, the court said China had no basis for its claims to the huge “nine-dash” loop it claims in the South China Sea. Ironically, the government of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte — well aware that its American ally hadn’t come to its aid — made nice with Beijing. After all, China, which has the world’s largest navy, is much closer. This time, however, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has warmed to the US, which now has five bases in the Philippines — hence the boldness of cutting the Chinese cord. China said the photos documenting the incident are merely Manila being self-important — and that Beijing had already removed the barrier itself. Still, the Philippines is feeling assertive. [And, says]( Karishma Vaswani, “Beijing is not used to this kind of push back, and will not want to set a precedent in the contested waters, or worse still — lose face — while it is distracted at home with the slowdown in its economy.” The question is: Will the Americans respond if China decides to launch some kind of military reprisal for Manila’s impertinence? So far the Biden administration has been publicly silent on the fracas. If Washington wants to calm the tensions, says Karishma, “it must do so in a way that gives the Philippines the independence it needs to keep navigating this relationship. It should encourage more dialogue between all parties to keep the peace.” The trouble is that all of this, in the end is about another island, much larger than the few rocks that make up the Scarborough. China may now see the Philippines, in effect, joining the US in planning the defense of Taiwan. As James Stavridis [writes](, “The spat over Scarborough Shoal may die down, but the underlying tensions are likely to increase this fall and winter, in the lead up to Taiwan’s national election in January.” “The US is... working hard in the broader region,” says James, “to bring better harmony between South Korea and Japan; to align the so-called Quad of the US, Japan, Australia and India; to provide nuclear submarine technology to the Australians; to open new embassies on small island nations in the Pacific; and to strengthen US bases in Guam, South Korea, northern Australia and the Japanese island of Okinawa. All of this is anathema to Beijing.” A broader coalition to counter China in the region may deter the territorial ambitions of the People’s Republic. Or not. If it chooses to be belligerent, Beijing could, among other things, raise ethnic tensions in Southeast Asia, which has a significant population of people of Chinese descent or extraction. I count myself among this group — born in the Philippines to ethnic Chinese parents and never yet a visitor to China. Indeed, Marcos’s father (who was president from 1965 to 1986) claimed descent from a notorious 16th century Chinese pirate. No matter who administers them, loyalty tests would be repugnant and more difficult to swallow than bad mooncake.  Telltale Charts “The Kremlin's sympathizers in the West will have plenty to work with. They can point to the burden of hosting some of the 6.2 million Ukrainian refugees still abroad, or the €250 billion ($265 billion) in military, humanitarian and financial aid that, according to the Kiel Institute for World Affairs, was either given or promised to Kyiv, between January 2022 and July this year … Add these costs to a narrative crafted around the supposed inevitability of Ukraine’s defeat and Western responsibility for Russia’s invasion, and you get a powerful populist cocktail.” — Marc Champion in “[Europe Needs a Makeover to Outlast Putin’s Long War.](” “Three decades after the opening of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, the Chinese have become hard-nosed investors. They no longer want to be the fools catching the falling knives. For evidence of that changing sentiment, look no further than consumers’ savings data and the central bank’s quarterly urban survey. As of August, household deposits totaled a record 132 trillion yuan ($18 trillion), blowing past China’s entire gross domestic product last year. People keep on putting money into banks even as the People’s Bank of China cuts deposit rates.” — Shuli Ren in “[Finally, There’s More Money Than Fools in China](.” Further Reading Shouldn’t there be more private equity [bankruptcies](? — Chris Bryant Yup, Modi knows the [US needs him](. — Hal Brands What? [The Fed worry]( about China? — Daniel Moss The evidence piles up for [long Covid](. — Lisa Jarvis Let’s retire [“acts of god.”]( — Lara Williams Don’t you [“ho, ho, ho!”]( me right now. — Andrea Felsted Walk of the Town: A Visit with “Chinese” Gordon. Many of today’s crises have a British connection, if from centuries ago. For example, the Scarborough Shoal, the center of the ongoing Philippine-Chinese dispute, is named for a merchant ship of the East India Company that ran aground on the atoll in 1748. But so much of British history has also faded into the past. I walked into St. Paul’s Cathedral to find one example among its memorials and tombs. Among the names — Florence Nightingale, Horatio Nelson, Christopher Wren, the Duke of Wellington — that, for now, resound with immortality is the monument to Charles George Gordon. The memorial to Charles Gordon Photograph by Howard Chua-Eoan It isn’t massive like Wellington’s — who, apart from a weighty tomb down in the cathedral crypt, has a slightly creepy wedding cake-like tower right across from Gordon. And it says very little about Gordon’s fame and the admiration ordinary Victorians had for him. He had the kind of round-the-world, White, mad Christian heroism that Lytton Strachey would look at with a jaundiced eye when he published Eminent Victorians in 1918 (which examined both Nightingale and Gordon). Gordon certainly fit the bill: idealistic, foolhardy, sexually repressed, incorruptible to a fault, fervently religious, belligerent and unbelievably brave. In 1860, he volunteered to fight in Britain’s second Opium War against China but arrived when it was over. He stayed on, developing empathy for the people of the gigantic empire he had sailed to fight. He’d go on to help the Qing Dynasty put down the Taiping Rebellion — led by a self-proclaimed younger brother to Jesus Christ — that was coming close to toppling the emperor. He transformed a ragged mercenary militia called the “Ever Victorious Army” into an outfit that deserved the name, commanding it to victories that also helped secure the Western concessions in Shanghai. (The army was made up of a few thousand Chinese, a number of Europeans and also a couple hundred Filipinos.) Gordon, who would walk into battles armed with just a rattan cane, was idolized by his troops — and his enemies. He was almost violently opposed to the Qing practice of summarily executing prisoners of war. The emperor awarded him the right to wear an imperial yellow robe and promoted him to the equivalent of a field marshal. His fellow Brits admiringly nicknamed him “Chinese” Gordon.  He is most sentimentally remembered by his countrymen for his last exploit: The siege of Khartoum, the Sudanese city he defended against the proto-Islamist Mahdi and his followers.[1](#footnote-1) As the enemy finally broke through, Gordon walked out to confront them. Speared, killed and beheaded, his body was thrown down a well. The tomb in the cathedral is empty, bearing little more than his effigy and a brief description of his life put up by his brother. Britain is very different from the one that mourned Gordon in 1885. Tourists walk by, hardly paying attention to his cenotaph. But, for some reason, I remembered him and his war against the Taiping. And, so, in a world with enmities as intense as the ones he lived through, I decided to come by to spend time with his ghost. Drawdown Thanks for bearing with me. Your presence is out of this world. ”With so many people throwing in their two cents, we’ll have his tuition covered through college.” Illustration by Howard Chua-Eoan Notes: Please send two cents and feedback to Howard Chua-Eoan at hchuaeoan@bloomberg.net. [Sign up here]( and follow us on [Instagram](, [TikTok](, [Twitter]( and [Facebook](. [1] It was turned into the movie Khartoum in 1966, starring Charlton Heston as Gordon and Laurence Olivier, alas in blackface, as the Mahdi. Follow Us You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Opinion Today newsletter. If a friend forwarded you this message, [sign up here]( to get it in your inbox. 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