By Marian Pastor Roces
THE People’s Republic of China (PROC) under Xi Jinping is not the first country to invade the Philippines, of course.
Each invasion had a different compelling logic. Different technologies of aggression.
Spanish conquest was driven by a triumphalist Islamophobia and expansionism over little-known planetary space. Three hundred years later, brash, newly minted American imperialism re-tooled racism to justify conquest with a democratizing imperative.
Both conquests had evangelical missions: the harvest of souls for, in turn, Christianity and liberal democracy.
Japan had no need to rationalize its occupation of Southeast Asia. It modernized itself by joining global war, as did the United States. But, fighting a kind of Japanese jihad serving a divine emperor, they were compelled differently from the Americans.
The PROC, on the other hand, invaded Tibet and occupies Xinjiang with a cold Sinification project. These conquered peoples are obliged to transform themselves into likenesses of the Modern Han Man, who surrender civil liberties for the permission to build wealth.
Chinese imperialism of the present vintage serves the same territorial thrust of bygone imperialisms. This time, however, invading armies seem superfluous.
No less brutal, trolls replaced the conquering hordes. Wielding virtual blades and throwing incendiaries, they tear into systems of truth. Whatever obstructs PROC interests are routed.
The weapons are outsized loans and consequent debt traps; the promised tourist arrivals by the millions, that can be withdrawn to instantly cripple tourism momentum; magically materializing infrastructure. Private PROC vessels ram Filipino boats, and leave crews for dead at sea, in proxy military provocations.
Online gaming staff transplanted to the Philippines comprise colonial resettlement. Paying bribes instead of proper taxes on the scale of billions, these POGO operations replicate, today, an old and apparently un-exhausted idea of colonizer privilege.
PROC territorial expansion is no longer a debatable discussion point. Given the PROC military facilities built on islands within the country’s Exclusive Economic Zone at the West Philippine Sea, Philippine sovereignty is seriously in question.
And while techniques of annexation changed in the 21st century, the PROC’s imperial spirit remains as Medieval as its dynastic forerunners. Its logic is extractive: sands, trace elements, metals, contraband rare species of fish, echinozoa, molluscs, and small mammals; indeed the entire biomass of the Sulu-Sulawesi Marine Ecoregion.
Impunity is pervasive in the operations Chinese companies let loose in the Philippines. Their rapacious activities can trigger the collapse of ecosystems. In one vessel alone, caught by the Philippine Coast Guard, was found 400 tons of frozen pangolins, the rare mammal whose scales are medicine in China. The haul is not unusual for this animal and other endangered species.
Destruction at the atolls claimed by the PROC in the West Philippine Sea includes crushing hundreds of mature giant clams, Tridacna gigas, which scientists and environmentalists seeded decades ago to rescue the species from extinction.
Entities proxying for the PROC are advancing its interests in the vital Philippine sectors: water supply dam construction, telecommunications, transportation, energy, tourism, road-building, shipping, real estate, and, most insidiously, politics-as-business.
What Xintillating xchange compels the Filipino leadership to welcome de facto invasion? At the very moment that President Xi Jinping leads the PROC in revving up the momentum of its empire-building, are there benefits to being a vassal state?
President Duterte thinks so. He says as much. The principal advantage, according to his dark humor, is not being dead. From Chinese military attack. Either death or rape, he insists. War or vassalage.
Glossing over the feisty resistance of the dozen-some countries with border disputes with PROC, the President keeps to his either/or view of foreign relations and is all but saying: might as well enjoy the rape. The logic is not incompatible with his misogynist’s attitude to actual rape.
Meanwhile, the stay in power of the President and his political heirs is at least in part guaranteed by Xi’s support. Under Xi, the PROC is impatient for single superpower status, and will not camouflage its moves with niceties. PROC global ascendance is performed with no apologies for human rights abuses, environmental destruction, and leadership in cyberwarfare.
Like President Duterte but on a far larger scale, Xi is himself a princeling. Fifth-generation leader (counting from Mao Zedong’ 19th-century-born generation), Xi is among the sons of the Deng Xiao Ping era, the late 20th century, third-generation leaders who relaxed social controls to achieve global economic success.
Xi, removed by 50 years from the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, has of late shown an inclination towards a Mao Zedong ideological revival, and Cultural Revolution revisionism in line with references to it as a “struggle style Rectification Movement.” This rectification justifies the agony China went through in the 1970s.
In both Xi and Duterte, therefore, vintage 1970s authoritarianism trumps the democratizing developments that transpired in either country from the 1980s to the turn of the 21st century.
Xi channels Mao, albeit reformatted for the 21st century; Duterte, Marcos.
Xi and Duterte are resurrecting the centralizing imperatives of the Cold War but without ideological overdrive. The accommodation between the two men, although of course unequal, pivots on a common cultural bent for escalating the cult status around their persons.
Both see development as autocratic rehabilitation. Dissent is tamped down as a matter of course.
However asymmetrical their power relation, President Duterte assumes the role of a Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive. Like Lam, the Philippine President (or Proconsul) presides over a restive population that takes pride in a history of anti-authoritarian expression.
Duterte and Lam both presided over the enactment of security laws that are nearly identical, at nearly the same time.
The Philippine Anti-Terror Law and Hong Kong’s National Security Law, in equal measure draconian, makes the best sense — and of course scary reading — as a Greater China consolidation episode. The scintillating exchange of a pliant Philippines that President Duterte appears to have made with Xi’s PROC, is for the scintillating prize of cult figure status, perpetrated.
Marian Pastor Roces is a cultural theorist, critic, and independent curator.
