At a time when business is longing for a resurrection from the global recession, China is reporting an average 7.7 percent growth in Gross Domestic Product.

In the third quarter ending September, GDP was an even more remarkable 8.4 percent, Chinese Ambassador Liu Jianchao told “Bulong Pulungan” at Sofitel recently. An earthquake of good news that ought to trigger aftershocks of positive value.

To pull off such incredibly robust growth, China’s appetite for and production of fuel have to be just as large, with more than enough to spare for friendly little neighbors like the Philippines. Last week, as cars queued up at gasoline stations to take advantage of “cheap” oil before EO 839 was set to be lifted after the weekend, I could not shake off the memory of longer lines waiting for rationed gasoline during the oil crunch in 1974. The shortage forced President Marcos to send his First Lady to China to negotiate with Chairman Mao for oil to balance our nearly total dependence on “black gold” from the Middle East.

Today the oil that fills our pumps and feeds our cars “is generic,” to use President Arroyo’s word, so we may safely assume that some of what we buy comes from China. But China and India are being blamed as great polluters by the Western world, when it is the West, said Ambassador Liu, which consumes more fossil fuel than anyone else and as such should take responsibility for discharging the carbon emissions that trigger climate change, to which small nations are highly vulnerable.

China is a giant of a phenomenon in the eyes of developing countries, but her problems are massive.

Ambassador Liu listed the following: 19 million people poor, living on less than US$.50 a day; 60 million disabled; and even with 88,000 km of railroads connecting the country, regional development is uneven. Per capita income is still low (although dollar reserves are the highest in the world, US$2.1 trillion) Her $580-billion stimulus package has been spent largely on creating jobs in infrastructures, a program that Mr. Liu said was neither a palliative nor tentative. If we cannot get more investors after the ZTE brouhaha, we should just focus our sights on pulling in at least 100 million tourists from China before 2012.