In the media for the past decade and a half, it has become fashionable to believe China is soon set to eclipse the U.S. as the leading world power. Most of the rank-and-file of self-styled "journalists" still take this line, and there are some who even tout it as something new and previously unseen. Simply put, it makes me laugh. I'll go into the long , long , long , long , long litany of reasons why I'm not worried about China in another entry. For now, suffice it to say there are only two countries in the world who China is successfully reducing to the same vassal-state status that North Korea has been in since its inception. One is Pakistan (as you can see here , here , and here ), and if I may be blunt, I'm not shedding any tears there. I'll go into the reasons why I view the end of the Amero-Pakistani alliance as a relief for my country and not a blow in another entry (jeez, I say that a lot, don't I?), but for now let it suffice to say that I'm quite glad Pakistan is now China's headache and not ours . The other, though, disturbs me. That is the Philippines. And if you wonder how China has managed to reduce the Philippines to subject-status, the answer is two simple words: Rodrigo Duterte.
So what happened with Duterte anyway?
To make a long story short, when Duterte was first running, I was thrilled. His bold, ballsy talk about standing up to China, coupled with his hard-line stance on drug cartels regardless of how unpopular it made him with the lotus-eaters in Brussels, had me hooked immediately. His unwillingness to take crap from Obama was icing on the cake. "I hope America gets someone like that in 2016," I remember saying, right along with "here's a man who will clean up the streets so my family can stop living in fear." Yes, I was paying attention when he went to Beijing and said "I have realigned myself in your ideological flow," but I was pretty convinced that was out of his disgust with Obama (a disgust I shared). I felt quite sure that once a more assertive American president, one who would stand up to China , came to power in Washington, then things would return to normal.
...Then, I got to Manila to visit my wife (pregnant with our son at the time) just in time to watch his S.O.N.A address , and my opinion changed quite a bit . While I have stated above that I do not fear China, It is crystal clear that Duterte does. I cannot fathom what his motivations are for spreading his country's legs to China, except that he has been either browbeaten into submission, bought off, or both. Let me be clear. China never has been, and never will be, any friend of the Philippine People, and any leader in Manila (or Davao, if they move the capital) who thinks otherwise is a God-Damned fool.
China Has NO Respect for the Philippines
Need I even remind the reader that China is currently engaged in the colonization of a huge swath of Philippine Waters? Territorial disputes are nothing new (China has had one with nearly every neighbor they share a border with since 1949), but what makes this one unique is the way China completely fails to even acknowledge there is a dispute. I wish I wore a bodycam when talking with Chinese about the issue so I could document their responses, because to even mention that there are any competing claims in the West Philippine Sea provokes a look from them somewhere between "you just said something blasphemous" and "you just said the sky is fuschia with chartreuse polka dots." Talking to the Chinese about any territorial dispute their country has is an exercise in how it would feel trying to explain the U.S. Constitution in "Oldspeak" to a citizen of Orwell's Oceania who grew up only knowing "Newspeak." It's not just that they disagree, or even that they fanatically disagree. It's that the mental framework to even have a conceptual grasp of what I said simply is not there. And before anyone says "that's a language barrier," I'm referring to conversations with Chinese English teachers who were Western-Educated, so you can hang that one up.
Nor is it necessary to remind the reader of the amount of damage Chinese drug traffickers do in the Philippines, only to have the Chinese government deny all responsibility despite every evidence to the contrary (again, anything to save that all-important 'face').
Anyway, all that is to say the Chinese have proven their lack of regard for the Philippines. But it is not just government-to-government. Open, blatant, personal racism toward Filipinos is absolutely rampant in China . One might try to refute this by saying "those sources are from Hong Kong, not the mainland." I would respond with "yeah, they're from Hong Kong, because on the Mainland it's dangerous to report it. China is absolutely INFAMOUS for suppression of information that costs them 'face.' " Of course, it's not only Filipinos who face racial discrimination in China; this country's bigoted disdain for Japanese , for example, goes back long, long, long before the WW2 occupation, and oooooh, try renting an apratment in Beijing (or getting an English teaching job) if you're black. You think you've got it bad in America? Come on over here and get a load of what real discrimination looks like. Of course, that is only to be expected from a country so deeply ethnocentric that even their language is racist (the Chinese name for China is "Zhong Guo," meaning "Middle Kingdom," derived from the Sinocentric Theory , and the government's official name for the Han Ethnic Group is "Zhong Hua," literally meaning "Central Race"). But for the purposes of this article, their racism toward Filipinos is my main focus.
It's not limited to social racism either. Filipino workers who make the mistake of accepting work for Chinese employers havd a history of suffering inhuman treatment , being held captive by employers who hold their passports hostage (and when Chinese employers are questioned about this, their lawyers play for sympathy about the EMPLOYER's rights having been placed at risk). The risks don't stop there. Employers have a history of "hiring out" their domestic helpers (and for the record, the employer is paid for this but the domestic isn't; sounds like rental of livestock to me). This situation is hugely dangerous. For one thing, being brought across the Hong Kong - Mainland border without a mainland visa (Hong Kong and the Mainland have completely separate visa laws, in case anyone back West is reading this) is a criminal offense, and if the employee is caught doing so, the employer isn't the one who goes to a Chinese prison for being an illegal alien. It's the employee. But if you DON'T comply, you get fired and sent back to the Philippines at your own expense, because the authorities will not help you. Of course, being in this situation (illegally present in China and helpless, or at the mercy of an employer who has confiscated your passport) brings with it an immense risk of being prey to Human Traffickers , which is an even more prevalent problem in China than most other places in Asia .
And don't expect China to solve these problems any time soon either. For one thing, the very concept of "Universal Human Rights" is regarded by China's government as an "invasive foreign ideology ," and anyone, Chinese or not, who dares to call them out on their litany of Human Rights abuses tends to get arrested .
So What is Duterte's View on This?
In short, imagine this situation. You're a Filipino laborer working in China. Your employer has your passport, and you have to obtain their permission to "borrow" it, making you in essence a hostage. Your employer treats you as a dog, expecting you to obtain permission for even basic necessities such as using the air conditioner in a South China summer. further, they rent you out like a horse, putting you in danger of being sold into a brothel or arrested (or sold by the police into a brothel, since police corruption is rather rampant in China too) , and the entire society around you holds an unmasked, undisguised disdain for you, not bothering to hide the fact that they see you as inferiors. One day, while silently (for you dare not speak) serving dinner to your employer, you overhear a conversation where your employer and some wealthy muckity-muck are casually discussing what they are going to do with "their" territory in the West Philippine Sea. Disgusted with the insult, you have finally had enough and you speak up, saying "that is MY country's territory, not yours!"
Immediately, your flabbergasted employer picks up a broom, beats you within an inch of your life, and then calls the police to have you thrown in jail, claiming you attacked them. the police, in turn, end up trafficking you out to some whoremonger in Dongguan, and reporting that you "escaped."
This is a scenario that can become pretty commonplace for Filipinos who find themselves working in China. So one would think that Duterte would take steps to shield his people from this, right? WRONG! He is not only allowing it, he is quite literally begging his Chinese master to allow Filipinos to subject themselves to debasement like this!
sigh Okay. To be fair, maybe not ALL the news is bad. It has been said that one of the two classes of workers China would allow in from the Philippines would be teachers. Teachers, I will say from experience, do not have it quite that bad. Don't get me wrong, there are some shady schools in this country, and a teacher can find themselves exploited, but there are at least SOME protections in place by the Foreign Expert Bureau. China does at least have sense enough to show at least a modicum of respect for foreign professionals.
But domestic helpers?
Let me be clear. Rodrigo Duterte is begging a dictator, who has threatened him with war if he tries to drill for oil in seas that the World Court has already said belong to the Philippines, to allow Filipinos (already viewed as inferiors in the eyes of the Chinese) into helpless positions as a lower labor caste, in a country infamous for Human Rights abuses.
Yeah. China may not have conquered the Philippines yet, but they are working on it. The most ironic part is that Duterte has invited them right in, while pushing out the United States, whose military (which could swat the PLA Navy like a bug and put the Philippines' destiny back into their own hands), is, in Charlie Puth's words, "only one call away," if Duterte would just give us that call. The Chinese are a paper tiger, but they have definitely extended their Nine Dash Line around the Presidential Palace.