ANOTHER year approaches and in common with past generations, we attach special significance to its arrival.
Many pagans were sun worshippers; faced with the winter solstice and the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, they created rituals that sought to ensure the sun would again return to generate new crops.
In the western world, Jan 1 is recognised and most western societies celebrate New Year’s Day on that date.
What might the coming year hold for Papua New Guinea on the international level?
On the world stage, there will be a continuing growth in the economy and the global influence of China.
Emphasised by the coming Olympic Games, this is China’s decade.
It heralds the increasing liberalisation of many aspects of Chinese society and a growing level of awareness of China by the rest of the world.
For the best part of the last century, the country was riven by internal conflicts and external invasion.
Within that century, the fabric of Chinese society experienced the last of the Manchu rulers, followed by the overwhelming support for physician-turned-nationalist Sun Yat Sen.
But the Kuomintang, the party created by Dr Sun and his supporters in 1911 and carried forward by Chiang Kai Shek, was eventually routed by the Red Army of Communists under Mao Zedung.
Chiang and the Chinese Nationalists retreated to Taiwan and established the republic of China there in 1949; they continued to represent the whole of China in the United Nations until 1971 when recognition switched to mainland China under Mao.
China today appears more unified and united than it has at most other points in its modern history. The nation’s ability to learn and then build upon the technologies of the West has brought an ever-growing global economic interaction.
Inevitably this has been accompanied by the slower but nonetheless marked influence of western political philosophies and culture. China’s Olympics will further underline those influences and possibly speed the development of democracy and a more liberal attitude towards human rights.
Today, the revolutionary era of Madam Mao and the Gang of Four seems almost as remote as that of Tz’u Hsi, Dowager Empress and the last Manchu ruler of China at the beginning of the past century.
Today’s China is determined to become a world power, one that will exercise a global influence in keeping with its huge population.
That determination is finding clear expression in the South Pacific.
It is obvious that China is determined to turn this region into a vast ocean of support for its view of the world.
The nations of the South Pacific may be tiny, but their importance far outweighs their size.
Papua New Guinea is by far the most populous of these nations and has the largest land area. It also has a range of raw materials that must be of interest to any industrial nation and particularly to one as huge as China.
The Chinese thirst for minerals and energy supplies to underpin its burgeoning economy is insatiable.
Since PNG briefly ended diplomatic recognition of China in favour of Taiwan, only to later revert to the original arrangements, Chinese investments, aid packages, grants and training opportunities have virtually swamped our country.
The most obvious response to this influx has come from the United States. Given the military and naval interests of the US to our north, it is clearly in America’s interests to reinforce its traditional interests and make its growing influence in our region very clear to all concerned.
Today the US is bustling to match the markedly increased impact of Chinese aid in PNG; the current US profile here bears little relationship to America’s lacklustre image in PNG since independence.
Such an influx of aid from the world’s most influential nations does not come without strings and in the year ahead a sharpened awareness of that fact will serve PNG well.
Whatever the future of our people and our country may be, there is one certainty; we need never be the pawns of other nation’s chess games.
For that to hold true, we must work to achieve the future that we want for our own people and our nation.
May 2008 witness such a process.