FOCUS ON THE PHILIPPINES

Pao Ching-ming
30 December 2024

This is the first installment in what I hope to be a regular column, Tsé-tse Burétse, which in Tagálog means something like "blah, blah, blah." I am very proud to say that it was published as part of the fifth issue (for Spring 2025) Tteoks (떡) to Watch Out For, a Korean lesbian zine based in the belly of the beast, Amerika, and rooted in LGBTQI+ and pan-Asian solidarity.

My heartfelt gratitude is to Abi, the zine's editor and creator, for having me on as a columnist—I've always wanted to try but had no "real" reason to until she invited me late last year—and for initiating and maintaining a genuinely admirable project for and among oppressed peoples. That she saw value in something that centres the Filipino people and what US imperialism has done to exploit us, keep us down, arrest and pervert our development speaks volumes. I hope you as readers see something similar.

Pao Ching-ming
15th April, 2025

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“THEY who know not to look back to whence they came shan’t ever get to whither they are going.” So goes the classic Tagálog proverb: Ang hindî marúnong lumingón sa pinanggalíngan, hindî makarárating sa paróroonan. For this first column then, allow me to take a more historical approach. The question at hand, and the question that has been at hand for decades, is: If the Philippines is so rich, how come the Filipino people are so poor?

The Philippines has been under continuous colonial occupation since 1565. But it was the 1850s that saw the emergence of the Philippine economy as we know it to-day: export-oriented, import-dependent, and subject to the whims of global market forces. Cash crops like sugar, abacá (hemp), tobacco, and coffee would come to make up 90 per cent of total exports. Britain and the United States accounted for 70 per cent of the trade, Spain for 22 per cent.

The half-century’s various export-crop booms produced a new bourgeoisie, whose wealth and power were based in the haciendas: large tracts of land producing single crops for export. Significant profits were also made acting as middlemen between foreign production and the domestic market. As money and ideas flowed in from the industrialised West, and as Madrid became increasingly more protectionist, the Spanish “frailocracy” (rule by friar; in most towns, the friar was the only representative of colonial authority) began to look more and more like something of an anachronism to this landlord-comprador class. Demands for reform were made, demands necessitating a concrete, definite people to represent—the Filipino.

Things were direr down below. The shift from agricultural self-sufficiency to production for a world market was a radical one, and what followed in its wake was hunger, disease, and the upheaval of basically everything that was. Smallholders were forced into tenancy; British imports destroyed native manufacturing, especially weaving; rice monocultures replaced more varied, more nutritious diets, and then sugar replaced rice as the Philippines became the world’s third-biggest sugar exporter. Soon enough, contradicting interests found unified expression in national struggle, and revolution broke out in 1896.

A republic, the first in Asia, was set up in Malolos, Bulacán, three years later. American interest in the Philippines insured it would be short-lived. Malnourished and overworked, over a million Filipinos died in the ensuing invasion—one for every seven.

Recolonisation meant the continuation of the archipelago’s previous trajectory. In exchange for hundreds of thousands of tons of sugar, abacá, and other raw exports, the Philippines became the biggest or second-biggest market for such US-made goods as cotton textiles, steel bars, nitrogenous fertiliser, processed rubber, wheat flour, and so on. The hacienda system was propped up by necessity. Sharecroppers were expected to live on less than two centavos daily; “unlimited usury” as a permanent fixture of rural life was perfected. Cash was used for exchange but, as in Spanish times, so too was rice. Feudalism was used as the social and productive base of imperialism, hence the term “semifeudal.”

Thanks to the US line of semifeudalism, the Philippines was completely unprepared when the Japanese invaded in 1943. Japan was an industrial state; the Philippines “could not even produce a toy gun.” American bombs and Japanese arms reduced the country to rubble, and Manila was all but destroyed. The devastation was worse than in Dresden or Warsaw.

Having left the war virtually unscathed and the world’s sole nuclear power, America finally felt secure enough to grant independence in 1946. $800 million in reconstruction aid was also offered, on the condition that the Bell Trade Act, giving American citizens equal rights to exploit resources, do business, and own property in the Philippines, be signed. And of course it was. The bases were another indignity: 199,580 hectares for 23 bases. The Navy’s Súbic and the Air Force’s Clark were the largest in Asia.

Bell nearly bankrupted the country. By 1949, its dollar reserves were almost out. Fearing a Communist takeover, the US relented and let the government place restrictions (“controls”) on trade. Consequently, the Philippines placed second only to Japan in terms of economic growth, and steps to develop heavy industry were taken, particularly under President García’s Filipino First programme.

In 1961, García was unceremoniously booted off by the Central Intelligence Agency and replaced with the more pliant Macapagal, who promptly ended the controls and devalued the peso, from ₱2 = $1 to ₱3.90 = $1. The International Monetary Fund had denied García a $25 million loan; now it offered Macapagal $300 million. From then on, the Philippines has been a country governed by debt: from $150 million pre-Macapagal, foreign debt ballooned to $600 million in 1965, his last year.

Soon, he was out and Marcos, promising an end to the economic crisis, was in. Debt more than tripled during his first term, reaching $1.9 billion. Again, the peso was devalued, this time to ₱5.50 = $1. Crisis gripped the country as half the population found themselves unable to meet “minimum food needs.” The Communists made a return. Sympathetic students, linking up with workers and peasants, took to the streets in their tens of thousands. 1970 saw the First Quarter Storm, 1971 the Dilimán Commune. Ambassador Byroade told Nixon there was a “60 per cent chance” Marcos would be assassinated in office. When asked about the possibility of martial law, Nixon said he would “‘absolutely’ back Marcos up, and ‘to the hilt.’”

Martial law was declared in 1972. By his overthrow in 1986, external debt had grown to $26 billion. 38 years and seven presidents later, it is now at $139.6 billion. Marcos’s Presidential Decree 1177, reënacted by his successor Corazón Aquino as Executive Order 292, provides for automatic appropriations from the national budget for debt servicing. The Philippines is the only country in the world with such a law. In 2005, 94 per cent of national revenues (₱686 billion) was allotted to debt servicing. As a whole, the country is still preïndustrial and semifeudal.

Limits of space prevent me from writing more, though I acknowledge the absolute inadequacy of the foregoing. At all events, the best teacher is practice. If you are overseas and interested in the Filipino people’s struggle for national and social liberation, there is BAYAN, Anakbáyan, Migránte, Gabriela, Friends of the Filipino People in Struggle, &c. For my next column, I might do something on the Philippine revolution/s or on the diaspora specifically; we’ll see!