VietNamNet Bridge - Chinese President Xi Jinpingrecently advised the US to read each other’s strategies exactly so as to avoid ‘Thucydides’s Trap’.

The ancient Greek history reminds people of thedanger when a rising power challenges a ruling power like Athens challengedSparta. As Sparta made hectic preparations for its army, Athens also had to runan arms race.

With the use of the Greek historian’s metaphorand the implications in the speech on the China-US relationship Xi read at thebanquet hosted by Washington and the US-China friendship community, Xi tried to show his deep knowledge about the US as a person who studied in the US, read US literature and loved Hemingway’s ‘The Old Man and the Sea’.

All these aim to ‘detoxify’ the American public which now is worried about the increasing power of China, which may develop into animosity and collision as warned by Harvard Professor Graham Allison.

Those who prepared Xi’s speech not only extracted western histories but also used western-style metaphor and western traditional propaganda technique to enhance the persuasiveness of his speech.

Xi said China's national defence policy targets defense, while the military strategy is based on a more active defense. Hetried to say that no matter how well China will develop in the future, it will never seek hegemony or throw itself into the expansion in the world. He repeated the statement he made not a long time ago that 300,000 Chinese troops would be cut.

The Chinese leader also promised that China iswilling to work with other countries on the building up of a new international relations based on the cooperation for mutual benefit.

This will replace the confrontation anddomination with a new thinking about the relationship, aiming to together opena common development outlook and security in the world.

Xi’s incentives sound very convincing, but they have not been proven in reality. Regarding the troop cut, other countries have been ahead China in cutting the number of soldiers as a part of their national defence modernization plan they have been following over the last 20 years.

Meanwhile, it is modernization which has raised the Chinese budget for national defence to a sky-high level.

It would be unreasonable to come to the conclusion that the Chinese national defence is based on the defence with just troop cuts.

The conclusion will be rejected by China’sstrong development of air force and naval force, including the aircraft carrier fleet it is hurrying to build.

Particularly, China is deploying an aggressive campaign on filling up the reefs it has illegally occupied on the East Sea in order to turn them into front bases.

China’s ongoing activities are the follow-up of its ‘nine-dotted line’ which it fabricated in an attempt to turn the East Sea into Chinese territory.

China can only prove its ‘historical sovereignty’ if it can show convincing evidences before international courts. And before it does this, it must stop the use of force in the sea.

The peace of the world in the 21^stcentury is not to be determined by only big countries, but by other countriesas well.

Translated from Tuoi Tre