Doomed to be China’s province?
Author’s Note. To China and Chinese groups: Please do not attempt to make any offer to us. We will refuse any gifts or “extra income.”
Please read first the previous StarGazer article dated 22 April 2024 entitled Ongoing Chinese Invasion Unstoppable Due to Bribes: https:// tribune.net.ph/2024/04/22/chineseinvasion-unstoppable.
In that article, I said the Chinese are “unstoppable” because they offer gifts and income to every person, rich or poor, or institution, government or private, who “cannot refuse.” There were many reactions from readers saying this was not totally true. There are still many honest Filipinos; but where are they?
The Chinese modus operandi is simple. Offer gifts to the license givers not to renew the licenses of Filipino businesses. They can stop any business by not renewing their license. They can replace Filipino companies with Chinese companies through this deadly technique. Their ultimate goal is to control all our businesses — a scary prospect.
I pose this challenge to all Pinoys.
Are we capable of abandoning this way of surviving, even in our utter poverty? Is it really so hard to refuse when you are hungry? There is a wide gray area between poverty and greed. The destiny of the nation is at stake. Will we sacrifice the nation for our pockets? We are now at a stage where if we cannot stop this practice and we give everything that the Chinese ask for, we are doomed to ultimately be a mere “province” of China, and they will lead us by the nose. It is a form of Chinese invasion using money rather than bullets, which is succeeding terribly. We are at their mercy. We have to stop this.
They are actually laughing at us now because they see we are so easy to fool and tempt.
We have no integrity, only pockets to fill. They think they can lead us by the nose forever.
But there are ways to solve this problem. We can identify and shame the culprits. We need to get organized, create a movement led by a brave charismatic leader. Idaan sa hiya (Shame them). The most powerful way to stop them is to make them lose face, better than jail or the use of force.
There was once a group of fishermen who organized themselves into a cooperative in order to meet the minimum volume of tilapia (native freshwater fish grown in ponds) required by a big Japanese buyer. It was going smoothly for a while. Then one evening, a cooperative member got drunk and decided to make pulutan (finger food) out of the mother tilapia which spawned millions of eggs at a time.
They almost lost the contract because their total production went down dramatically. The Japanese gave them a second chance, on one condition, that it will never happen again. The cooperative members conducted an investigation and found witnesses to the deed. They decided to punish the culprit not by mauling him (physical) but by shaming him (spiritual). They confronted him during a meeting. He was silent in his shame. It was worse than jail. The poor guy lost face and was forced to leave the community with his family. He could not stand the stigma.
We should also be ashamed of ourselves in front of the international community — that we are a bunch of conscience-less people willing to sell our nation for a song.
Marcos Jr. has a critical role in stopping this “unstoppable” practice. But the real solution lies in the low and middle classes doing a different kind of EDSA to shame the criminals, whether they are government officials, governors, or universities out to quadruple their income by offering English courses to thousands of Chinese “students” who do not speak English. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) should unite to meet this head-on.
The greatest weakness is hunger. That is why the Chinese are laughing at us. For them, a million pesos is peanuts. But for us, it is everything.
I therefore challenge all Pinoys to help stop this “invasion” before our nation goes to the dogs.
“The greatest weakness is hunger. That is why the Chinese are laughing at us.
“Are
we capable of abandoning this way of surviving even in our utter poverty?