Selling out

BEFORE Mahathir Mohammad decided to rule Malaysia again, his country was like what the Philippines is now, having a leader that was too pro-China for comfort. Najib Razak willingly pushed his country into the debt trap China laid down, forcing the retired Mahathir, already 92 years old, to challenge him in the polls. Najib got pushed out of power and is now facing corruption charges.

Supreme Court senior associate justice Antonio Carpio recently exposed some of the questionable provisions in the loan that the Philippine government got to fund the Chico River dam project. These include using our natural resources as collateral. Carpio said that could include us losing the oil-rich Reed Bank to China.

Reed Bank, also known among others as Recto Bank, is within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. Or at least that was what the United Nations arbitral tribunal ruled in 2016. But it is near the Spratlys whose ownership is also claimed by China. We might end up finally losing that territory if we default on our loan payments to China.

The terms of the loan have other onerous provisions but these have been brought to light only recently, beginning with Carpio’s expose. In Malaysia, after Mahathir’s return and Najib’s fall, the terms of every loan have already been subjected to deeper scrutiny. That is not being done in our country. Instead, our officials are one in lawyering for China on the loan agreements they entered into.

Beggars, they say, can’t be choosers. But even beggars have dignity. Our officials apparently want us to lose that dignity when it comes to China. We allow ourselves to be abused and exploited because we supposedly do not want to be at the receiving end of China’s ire. By “we,” I actually mean only our leaders. Because the overwhelming majority of Filipinos still have their dignity intact.

That is not even our only problem with our government officials’ tight embrace of China. Because every time we get the services of Chinese contractors, one of the conditions in getting Chinese loans, we are also forced to allow those contractors to hire Chinese workers. Meaning that we are displacing our own workers. Worse, those Chinese workers get paid handsomely.

All these, of course, start in us having leaders that are puppets of the Chinese, something that Mahathir sensed in the case of Malaysia with Najib Razak. And those Chinese puppets rose to power not through the use of force but through elections. Which should also remind us of what happened to the United States in the case of Donald Trump and Russia.

Is it possible that like Russia in the case of the US, China is also influencing the outcome of our elections? Did China influence the outcome of the 2016 elections? Nobody is looking into that, but we now know that some candidates did visit China during that time. And was China’s online presence capable of influencing the thinking of the voters here in our country?

Those are rather interesting questions.