THE filing by former ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales and former foreign affairs secretary Albert del Rosario of a crimes against humanity case against Chinese President Xi Jinping before the International Criminal Court for China’s abusive behavior, specifically against Filipino fishermen in the West Philippine Sea, must have worried the Duterte administration to no end. The President himself recently did some explaining about it to a Chinese official.
No, it wasn’t Xi Jinping he was talking with but someone lower in the totem pole that is the Chinese bureaucracy. The official, Song Tao, is a member, though, of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC). And he is no ordinary member of the Central Committee. He is head of its international department.
The communist party controls everything in China. Xi Jinping is its secretary general, or party head. As such, he is chairman of the party’s Central Military Commission, which practically controls the People’s Liberation Army, the police and the country’s militias.
Since Song Tao occupies a high position in the communist party, heading even its international department, President Duterte was correct in explaining to him the case filed by Carpio-Morales and del Rosario against Xi. Correct if we consider China as our landlord and we Filipinos as China’s serf. Our officials have to grovel to the right boss.
Our own Communist Party of the Philippines, which is an outsider in the country’s governance unlike CPC in China, describes the country as semi-colonial and semi-feudal.
Semi-colonial in the sense that, according to its analysis, we are a neocolony of the United States. (Although that may have changed a bit because we are also acting now like China’s colony.) And semi-feudal in the sense that a big chunk of the countryside, where the majority peasants reside, is controlled by the land-owning class.
Semi-colonial and semi-feudal are terms that do not only apply to the economy but also to culture and values. For example, the poor act like serfs to the ruling elite in almost everything, bowing down to its wishes like serfs do to landlords. In politics, that partly translates to the practice of patronage, where politicians grovel to the politically powerful personalities.
In our relationship with China, our top government officials act like serfs to what they feel is our landlord that is China. Like serfs, we do not want to court the ire of the landlord. Serfs are not slaves in the strictest sense of the word, but since they do not own the land they are tilling, they do what slaves do so they won’t be kicked out of the land.
China, on the surface, may not own the Philippines but listen to our top government officials talk. In the dispute over the Spratlys, we do not dare implement the ruling of the arbitral court that favors us because we are puny militarily compared with China. And just to get loans from the boss, we accept the onerous conditions the boss is imposing.
And when private citizens act based on their patriotic fervor and democratic rights, government officials explain that act to the boss.