Why collaboration… and now China

Collaboration with the imperialist, the victor in war, is a common fact in history. All too often, it is the only way a subjugated people can survive. We have collaborated with the Spanish conquistador for 300 years, with the Yankee for 50 years and only three years with the Japanese. It is only with the Japanese that collaboration has really been stigmatized. Many of these who collaborated with them did so with nationalist sincerity. After all, during our revolution versus Spain, the Japanese sent us arms (unfortunately, the boat carrying them capsized) and also officers to train the revolutionary army (but they had to return to Japan because they could not communicate with the Filipinos).

For instance, Benigno Ramos in the 1930s appreciated the Japanese for their nationalism. And so did General Artemio Ricarte who spent more than three decades in exile there. As one of the leaders of the Katipunan, he refused to pledge allegiance to the United States when the Americans “bought” the Philippines from Spain. He was exiled in Guam together with Mabini, and when he returned to Manila, he resumed his revolutionary activity. Hounded by the Americans, he escaped to Japan where he lived harshly until the beginning of the war with the United States. The Japanese saw they could use him, so they sent him to Manila in February 1942 to assist the Japanese in imposing their rule.

I spent six months in Japan researching on his life there and was able to interview one of his Japanese companions who was with him in his last days. My novel, Vibora, is the fruit of that research. I had thought of him as a tragic hero. In a way, he was so very much unlike the other collaborators. He did not enrich himself or abuse the authority given him. He helped Filipinos afflicted by the Japanese. He truly believed that the Japanese were liberators. In the end, he retreated with them to the Cordilleras. In his old age, he was very vulnerable, and he died in Funduang, Ifugao. His monument stands in Batac, Ilocos Norte.

The nationalist icon Claro M. Recto was jailed in Iwahig by the Americans in 1945 for which reason he was very anti-American. He claimed that Manuel Roxas collaborated with the Japanese more than he did, but MacArthur did not jail him. Recto’s hatred of the Americans made him oppose Magsaysay and his land reform program, not out of principle but out of personal pique.

In a superb and outstanding gesture of magnanimity, President Quirino granted amnesty to all the collaborators. It must be remembered that his family was massacred by the Japanese in Manila in February 1945.

When Jose P. Laurel, the Japanese puppet president, was elected senator, collaboration as a political issue was settled, but not as a moral issue.

But what if those “considered” evil like Marcos in a society finds adherents, loyal followers who will do his bidding and profit from it? How about the Germans who supported Hitler and his “final” solution of the Jewish “problem?” These collaborators claim they were only following orders. With much righteousness, they even claim that without them, it could have been worse. And most of all, they were nationalists.

And now China.

Martin Jacques, in his bestselling book, When China Rules the World, predicts that within the next decade, China shall have surpassed every country in the world. Of course, like most predictions, this may not be accurate, but there is something indisputable about China. It has achieved tremendous progress in one generation; until 1949 before Mao’s revolution succeeded in uniting the country, with a population of only half a billion, China had famine every year. Except for the famine that followed the Cultural Revolution in the 1950s where thousands died, there is no famine in China now, although pockets of hunger still exist. It has not yet completely caught up with the scientific and technological advance in the United States, but it is heading that way.

Jacques states that China is a civilization, a continuum far ahead of the West. When Europe was peopled by primitive food gatherers, China already had a written language.

Why it did not forge ahead in the industrial revolution as Japan did, which also modernized in one generation, is a question the Chinese themselves have tried to resolve. Their failure to modernize betrayed the decay of their civilization, prey to imperial powers. Much of the development motive is anchored on this sense of failure, history.

There are several givens about China today which we must consider as dominant in the region. The first is China’s sense of history, how the people, particularly its leaders, think not in terms of decades but of centuries as evidenced by their measure of time in dynasties. They are patient, they can wait. It is also true that with its vast land area, the Chinese never really physically took over countries as territories; it merely demanded from them tributes and obeisance. Above all else, China believes in hierarchy and harmony, and the wall mentality, evident in the way their villages are built with walls and the Great Wall of China itself. Walls are not only to keep the barbarians out; they are also used to keep the people in.

One of the first, if not the first, manual on warfare is the Chinese classic, Sun Tzu’s Art of War. It posits not just strategies that can still apply today, strategies that declare the sweetest victory is when without the use of force, the enemy is subdued. No, China is not going to challenge America with force.

I think that all these traditional values are already embedded genetically in the Chinese people. To understand them will make us know how best to deal with them. We dealt with them long before the Spaniards came. They intermarried with Indios, and because they worked hard, they now control the economies of the entire Southeast Asian region.

We must not forget that today, now, it is official Chinese policy to use the ethnic overseas Chinese in the advance of China’s national interest.

But is China a friend? It has already grabbed areas within our sovereignty, and the Permanent Court of Arbitration has ruled in our favor with regards to the territories taken over by China. But it is one of those decisions that cannot be enforced simply because China does not agree with that decision.

This is perhaps the major quandary that our leaders must now face: how to deal with China without sacrificing our interest and at the same time maintain a harmonious relationship with this great and powerful nation.

I pointed out the stigma of collaboration with the Japanese. Considering our ancient ties with the Chinese and the fact that so many of them are really Filipinos, there will perhaps be little or no stigma at all if we collaborate with them.