Ambassador Tar Baby

Since 2006, I’ve periodically returned to a scene straight out of Walt Disney’s “Song of the South,” in particular, the fable of “Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby.” A fox gets the goat of a rootin’ tootin’ but rather vain rabbit by setting up a baby made of tar on the roadside. The rabbit, spotting the tar baby, tries to strike up a conversation and gets frustrated over the tar baby’s silence. The rabbit tries to beat up the tar baby, but with every kick and punch, he gets more and more stuck until the fox comes out and taunts the rabbit.

Today’s tar baby is the Chinese ambassador. What he has accomplished is to reveal three things about the Philippines. The first is the absence of a means to achieve a national consensus in response to his provocations. Instead, we have the second, which is related to the first: noisy, aggressive extremists (essentially racists on both sides) for and against China with few audible voices counseling sobriety and moderation anchored on a strategic vision. The third is how those forming whatever passes for Philippine public opinion are woefully unequipped to get across to the public what’s what.

First, the absence of consensus: if you were to ask public opinion, Filipinos prefer to hold the line but in a peaceful manner. That is a consensus. It’s the power blocs incapable of achieving one.

Second, the extremists. Ambassador Tar Baby has shown there is a passionate constituency he’s mobilized and it’s not purely ethnic.

Third, our unequipped institutions. As I understand it, the question of “suspicious” teachers entirely skipped the real reason the teachers were suspicious in the first place. The teachers had been brought in to teach Chinese by a business association which approached the exercise, bluntly speaking, the way too many businessmen still treat business: as a series of official obstacles to overcome by dubious means. In this instance, the dubious means involved bringing in the teachers as tourists, because to follow the rules would take too long, and settling the whole problem at the end, by a generous “donation” to immigration officials when it was time for the teachers to go home. When the secretary of national defense started growling about espionage, the business association fell silent because it couldn’t, or wouldn’t, risk having its cutting corners looked into. So it became a virtue-signaling contest, with the secretary of defense having to backpedal because he realized angry young Chinese Filipinos are voters, too; but it also gave too many examples of Chinese Filipino chauvinism or simple money-grubbing to ignore.

Investigative journalism failed, as did a wider discussion of the security situation. All the internal arguing going on in Manila, for example, obscured the reality that in Antelope Reef, new construction is being undertaken by China, closer to Vietnam. So Ambassador Tar Baby can report Manila bogged down in essentially pointless internal strife, the region saw Philippine disunity, and the stealthy creation of a 600-hectare reclamation with possible runway and harbor facilities in the Northern South China Sea was becoming an accomplished fact.

Focusing on being in the Western web of alliances ignores the alternative, represented by the two countries representing the Chinese alternative system: Cambodia (the Ream Naval Base, Funan Techo Canal, utter economic and security domination) and the Solomon Islands (access for military and police forces and providing China’s “Fengqiao” grassroots surveillance/community management system, including biometric data collection, household registration, and village mapping).

It was American dominance that kept the Philippines and the Republic of China from clashing over competing claims in the Spratlys, and it was the American security umbrella that allowed Asean to focus on the economy instead of an arms race among its members. It is what contained China until the Taiwan Crisis of 1996, which led to China developing the strategic combination of missile, aircraft, submarine, and carrier technological development to counter the American 7th Fleet and embark on building its own first and second island chains as an answer to the American first and second island chains.

Filipino leaders in exile during World War II, whose living memory stretched back to the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and the rise of Imperial Japan, saw where things were headed. A defeated, demilitarized Japan, they believed, would be a better regional partner; a reinvigorated China, on the other hand, would revert to its imperial habits and insist on a revival of the centuries-old dominance of the region it had enjoyed prior to the rise of the Western colonial powers.

In their minds, what set apart Chinese from Western colonialism was that territorial expansion was not a Chinese priority; instead, the Chinese style of imperialism was to have vassal states, who acknowledged Chinese hegemony and paid tribute. The West preferred outright annexation and the direct extraction of resources. An argument can be made for the post-1945 world order instituted by the United States during its period of unrivaled world dominance, which lasted from 1945 until 1960 (the era when its gross domestic product represented 50 percent of the world’s; before and since, it’s averaged 25 percent: money is power).