The South China Sea (28 page)

Six hours later and 7 kilometres distant, in the shining, moneyed surroundings of the Makati business district, an equally noisy but better-behaved crowd gathers outside the Chinese consulate. Here the police
are awake and forewarned and the protest is marshalled safely away from vulnerable walls, signs and plate-glass windows. There's been a bit more organisation here – or at least more money. Rather than home-made banners and a crowbar, the few dozen demonstrators are wielding neatly designed placards in the shape of STOP signs – demanding that ‘China – back off!’ and end its ‘Poaching in Phil Waters’. The contrasts continue. Rather than wild-eyed revolutionaries, photographers pick out sweet-faced girls to grace the next day's pages, offering their editors a straight choice between contrasting images of protest and radically different worldviews.

That morning in Manila two Filipino nationalisms asserted themselves. The numbers involved were tiny: just a few busloads from a metropolis of 12 million people. But for the drum-bangers and symbol-shakers, the actions were vital assertions of national feeling in the face of apparently threatening displays of state power. The students at the embassy had timed their assault to coincide with the start of the annual US–Philippine military exercises known as
Balikatan
– Tagalog for ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’. In a conspicuous display of unity, over 6,000 marines, soldiers, airmen and sailors from both countries were about to practise the arts of war and humanitarian intervention on beaches and military bases around the country. The sweet-faced girls with the STOP signs, on the other hand, were incensed by the Chinese authorities’ efforts to annex the Scarborough Shoal, 230 kilometres off the coast of Luzon. A Philippine operation to detain eight Chinese boats suspected of illegal fishing, eight days before, had turned into a rout. Chinese Marine Surveillance ships had shown up, preventing the Philippine Navy and Coastguard taking any action against the fishermen who had collected hundreds of giant clams and large amounts of coral in defiance of conservation regulations. The impotence of the Manila government in the face of Beijing's might had been brutally exposed.

But for the defacers of the American embassy, Manila's impotence was the result of a century of domination by the United States. In the eyes of Bayan – a coalition of the radical left which includes the League of Filipino Students – US domination poses a much bigger threat to the country's future than the Chinese ships offshore. The word
bayan
means ‘nation’ in Tagalog and, when asked to describe what his movement stands for, its Secretary-General Renato Reyes is clear: ‘left, nationalist, anti-imperialist’. I met Reyes in a slice of Americana, the Yellow Cab Pizza
Parlour on the Manila seafront. He chose the location: conveniently close to the site of yet another demonstration outside the embassy and not far from the hospital where he was about to go and support striking healthcare workers.

As our conversation progressed it became clear how, for Reyes, socialism and nationalism are intertwined. There's a sense of violated pride, the feeling that the country cannot stand tall so long as it lives in the United States’ shadow, and that this second-class status is – or should be – felt as a personal humiliation for each individual Filipino. ‘A senator long ago characterised it as a “mendicant foreign policy”. You're always begging for scraps, always asking for help from your big brother, the United States, and over the past half-century we haven't really developed or modernised because of that.’ As he tucks into another slice of Italian-American-Filipino pie, Reyes develops his point: this dependency is a continuation of the colonial strategy to maintain the Philippines as a captive market for American goods in which the Filipino elite reap the rewards of maintaining the economic and political status quo.
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‘We are opposed to Chinese incursions but we feel that short term and long term the bigger threat would be the United States. If you're going to rank the bullies in this region, the bigger bully would be the United States.’

The organiser of the anti-China protest, on the other hand, is a reluctant nationalist. For decades Walden Bello has been known as a vocal opponent of Western neo-imperialism. But now his Akbayan party is often on the streets to condemn the People's Republic of China and its Communist leadership. (Akbayan plays on the word
bayan
, but
akbay
literally means to put one's arms around someone's shoulders, either in affection or solidarity.) ‘I'm not exactly sure whether you can call ours a nationalist position,’ he ponders, ‘given the fact that nationalist positions have often been associated with irrational nationalism.’ Bello denies that he has changed sides. ‘No, I think that it's just a bit more of a complex situation. I think that the biggest destabiliser in the area at this point is really the US pivot to Asia. But at the same time the US is making use of China's aggressive moves in the West Philippines Sea to make it appear like it's a balancer.’

The two leaders are bitter political rivals. Reyes’ party has described Bello as a ‘special agent of the Aquino regime’ and Bello describes Reyes as
being stuck in the politics of the 1960s. Both, though, share similar views on the role of the United States in world politics. As Reyes explained, ‘we don't really see China at this point as having the same imperialist intentions as the United States. Of course it may be headed there, it may want to expand its economic and military force and influence but it hasn't reached the level of the United States wherein the US is prepared to wage war, to colonise and occupy other countries just so they could advance their economic interests.’
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But in espousing an ‘anti-China’ position, Bello is also trying to keep the United States out of Filipino affairs: ‘if you bring in one superpower to oppose the other, then superpower dynamics begins to push the issue and marginalises a peaceful settlement. I think that balance of power politics is really dangerous because it often ends up with people running out of control, with arms races just like the First World War in Europe.’ What appear to be clear ‘anti-US’ and ‘anti-China’ positions in the Philippines are not contrasting attitudes to the great powers but something different, rooted in the country's hybrid history.

By the late nineteenth century, two different nationalisms were challenging Spanish rule in the Philippines: one from the elite, the other from the middle class. For centuries Spanish rulers had discriminated against Chinese immigrants and their descendants. The details are long and inglorious but, broadly, the immigrants had a choice. Those who converted to Catholicism were allowed to take up permanent residence, marry and travel around the Philippines – but not back to China. Those who didn't convert were able to travel back and forth to China but the only place they could live in the Philippines was the Manila ghetto known as the Parian. They were barred from either marrying or permanently settling in the Philippines. Until the late 1880s the Spanish officially classified the children of those who converted and married as
mestizo
– ‘mixed race’.
Mestizos
took Spanish names, spoke Spanish (unlike 95 per cent of the inhabitants
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) and adopted Spanish ways, but no matter how wealthy or educated they became, they could never advance to the top of society. From their ranks sprang the ‘Ilustrados’ – the ‘enlightened ones’. José Rizal, the author of the seminal nationalist novel
Noli Me Tángere
, was the paramount example. They began to call themselves ‘Filipino’ – a term previously reserved for the ‘full-blooded’ Spanish – and demanded equality.

A different movement emerged from the urban middle classes, partly in response to Spain's brutal response to the Ilustrados – Rizal was executed in 1896, for example. The leadership of the ‘The Highest and Most Respectable Society of the Sons of the People’, better known as the Katipunan, came from the ranks of office workers and shopkeepers and was predominantly
indio
– native – rather than
mestizo
. Whereas the Ilustrados wanted to be accepted as equals by Spain, the Katipunan fiercely rejected Spanish rule and set out to consciously formulate an alternative national identity. But this national project was also based on chauvinism. Coming mainly from Manila, the Katipunan elevated Luzon culture, in particular the language of Tagalog, to the status of national culture and sought to impose it on the rest of the country. In many places it was – and still is – resisted as an alien intrusion into local life.

When the Katipunan revolted against the Spanish in 1896 many of the Ilustrados fought with them against their common enemy. They sought support from another country that had also thrown off the chains of colonisation. But after the United States had won the battle of Manila Bay, American commanders went on to strangle the infant Republic of the Philippines at birth with a vicious counter-insurgency campaign. Many Ilustrados, alarmed by the rise of the Katipunan and other militaristic groups, abandoned the ‘national’ interest in favour of their own: they entered a symbiotic relationship with the country's new colonisers.
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Being highly educated, these Ilustrados (mainly, though not exclusively, descendants of
mestizos
) were well placed to assist the Americans and equally well placed to receive the rewards as the vast ‘friar estates’ of the Catholic religious orders were expropriated and redistributed. Election laws were written to benefit those with property and education.
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For half a century American administrators ruled the islands, crushed the opposition and built up the power of the elite. A fraction of the Philippine population – no more than 5 per cent – went on to dominate the entire society. It still does. Presidents Roxas, Laurel, Quirino, Magsaysay, Marcos, Cory Aquino and Benigno Aquino were (or are) all descendants of
mestizos
, for example, as are many of the country's richest families such as the Ayalas, the Aboitiz and the Razons.

But their ascendancy is bitterly opposed by the many groups who claim to be political descendants of the Katipunan. They exist across the political
spectrum: from Communist revolutionaries to disillusioned army officers. What they have in common is the belief that members of an elite that ‘sold’ the country to the United States in exchange for personal gain have no right to call themselves leaders of the nation. In rural areas there has long been a tradition of militancy against landowners and the state they control, dating from the independence war and through the Hukbalahap guerrilla movement of the 1940s and 1950s. The rapid expansion of education in the Philippines in the 1960s helped spread this anger to urban areas. As migrants flocked to the cities, their children grew up politicised by the injustices they saw around them: monstrous social inequality, rampant corruption and ruthless political brutality.

Following the cue of leftist thinkers, such as the historian Teodoro Agoncillo, this radical generation argued that the only true Filipinos were the masses – those at the bottom.
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Those at the top – members of an elite who had acquired their position from an alliance with the American colonisers – were not truly ‘of the nation’. In a country that had only become independent in 1946, comprising a disparate collection of islands forced into a unitary state with little in the way of a ‘national’ culture, they argued that it was suffering that united the people of the Philippines. The radical left, the forebears of both Bayan and Akbayan, based their appeal to the masses on the argument that the people as a whole were suffering because of abuses being committed by a foreign-backed and, to a degree, alien elite. It was, at its heart, a nationalistic message. They tried to create a national identity for the people – ‘Filipino’ – out of an economic identity – poverty. For them, to be ‘Filipino’ was to be anti-American. It was a popular argument that reached deep into the urban slums and the rural plantations. But whereas the political ancestors of Akbayan sought to wrest control of the state through politics, the ancestors of Bayan decided there could be no compromise with a state controlled by the elite and took up arms against it – eventually forming the Maoist New People's Army.

Their different positions on the South China Sea are therefore only the latest in a long series of disputes between opponents of the Filipino elite. From time to time these groups have been able to forge a narrative that unites them and also wins support from the wider population. But the power of anti-American or anti-Chinese rhetoric is inconsistent. At certain moments it can bring huge numbers to the streets but the huddled masses
of the Philippines generally pay more attention to religious festivals and escapist soap operas. The story of the suffering of Jesus Christ has more resonance with most Filipinos than the argument that their country is being crucified by a modern-day Pontius Pilate. Three months before the events of April 2012, the procession of the Black Nazarene at the Basilica of Quiapo on the outskirts of Manila drew a crowd estimated at between 6 and 8 million – numbers the left can only dream about.

These personal narratives of suffering and redemption are much more important to most Filipinos than a national narrative of oppression and liberation. That's reinforced by a school curriculum which tells children that their history only began when Magellan arrived in 1521 and which often teaches by using the United States as an ideal against which the Philippines must try to measure up. Seen in this light it's less surprising that, despite a century of colonialism and unequal relations, repeated surveys indicate that Filipinos are the most pro-American people on the planet. Polls by the Pew Global Attitudes Survey and BBC/Globescan from 2002 to 2013 consistently found 85 to 90 per cent of the Filipino population holding positive attitudes towards the US. The 2013 Pew Survey also found that 85 per cent of Filipinos believe the United States takes the Philippines’ interests into consideration when formulating its policies.
¹⁰
There is a general assumption that the US will be there to support them in any future hour of need.