China, the region, the Philippines

Heightened verbal aggression in the current political tit-for-tat between China and the Philippines, China and Taiwan, and China and Japan are now a cultural feature of the world of 2026.

These are culture wars at the moment, and for the foreseeable future — until military options change the field of conflict. Right now, the three relatively small island countries on the aquatic flanks of the behemoth China are upping projections of sovereignty erected on amplified cultural themes and shifts.

Pro-Taiwan Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said in November last year that a Chinese attack on Taiwan would be an “existential crisis for Japan” and “survival threatening.” Aside from raising the verbal firepower from Chinese spokespersons, the statement signaled boosted the willingness, on the part of the Japanese population, to amp up militarization.

Japan was held to non-militarized sovereignty by the Constitution imposed on it by General Douglas McArthur at Japan’s World War II defeat in 1945. From that decade until the ascension to power of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in the 2000s, Japan built a titanic economy without building an armed force, settling into half a century of acceptance of unarmed existence.

Taiwan, on the other hand, has created an armed crisis response and defense resilience of increasing power since it was established as a quasi-state at the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. Simultaneously, Taiwan also shaped itself as an assiduously working society of democracy advocates.

The “Taiwan miracle” of the late 20^th Century economic boom was produced by a Taiwanese culture of focus on survival on all fronts. Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and Hong Kong were together the Four Asian Tigers (from the 1950s to the 1990s) which created extraordinary growth from rapid industrialization and export orientation.

Each of these Tigers worked with calibrated authoritarianism (dictatorship-lite, so to speak) blended to American-style neoliberal values.

Each produced a different blend. Each blend grappled with various levels of corruption that, at certain historical moments, different for each, threatened to undermine their social fabric.

The Philippines is the unusual example in the region of frayed social fabric. No such inordinate tattering shows up in today’s Tiger nations.

The Philippines produced the oldest republic in Asia — preceding by 50 years the establishment of rest of the modern Asian nations — and has a Latino streak rather than whatever “Asian” might be.

In the ongoing, veritable shouting match between the People’s Republic official representatives and members of the Philippine Senate, Filipino pro-China voices take up a big part of the debate arena.

It is in this sense that a frayed Philippines is exposed. No equivalent pro-Chinese-aggression voice has a privileged space in South Korea and Singapore. Certainly not in Taiwan, of course. And in Japan, the cultural shift to greater militarization undergirds a society ready to put their new soldiers and weapons in support of anti-China rhetoric.

Some of the pro-China voices in the Philippines are entangled in the other fronts of China assaults, notably, the enabling and exacerbation by China of corruption at the highest levels of power in the Philippines. And, moreover, these bad faith actors are darkly empowered by the cyber-assaults that China (and Russia) has become a powerhouse of.

The Latino republic, the Philippines, began in 1945 with the same givens as South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. With postwar financial reparations funds, these vital nodes were created in the Pax Americana that is referenced with great nostalgia and despair in these days of the tattering of an international rule of law.

In East and Island Southeast Asia, democracy was shifted from being merely ideological to cultural. This shift was given huge momentum by the Cold War. On the Right (Western) half of the world, it came to pass that the best success — including viable sovereignty — was, and is, construed as financial success.

This Rightwing logic expressed itself in rabid consumerism in the Tiger economies, unmatched in many ways by the same drive in the West itself — until the buying power of the emergent Chinese middle class in the 2000s, created by Deng Xiao Ping’s turn to market forces, became phenomenal.

The Philippines careened into another direction. Its dalliance with authoritarianism was far more savage than would have been tolerable in the construction of even a flawed, democratic rule-of-law order of things, regionally and globally.

For while corruption was horrendous in Hong Kong (until fairly recently), Indonesia, Malaysia, among others, Philippine methodologies of corruption were, and are, so ingrained in the definition and exercise of power that sovereignty itself is well-nigh possible to sell. To China, to be specific.

Philippine democracy, since the postwar years and onwards, has been a mad blend of consumerism, neoliberal ideals, nationalism of a number of varieties, capitalist and Marxist impunity, techniques of subversion, dynastic self-entitlement, people powered ideas, and identity politics. At the moment, there is no center of gravity, culturally and politically.

Except that, because the Marcos Sr., Macapagal-Arroyo, and Duterte presidencies built foreign relations on the increasingly large scale of personal and oligarchic benefit, this mad blend is skewed in the direction of selling out the Philippines itself.

The current bad actors, on the Philippine side — who include themselves in the public discussion of China’s aggression — are protecting Chinese interests. That they can do so blatantly, comes from having become China’s assets in China’s bid to expand its sphere of control, now that the West and the Pax Americana are globally perceived to be imploding.

Clearly, this brazenness also comes from postwar materialism made monstrous by staggering corruption.

The Philippines can win the word war and the sovereignty stakes — just like Japan, Taiwan, and the rest of nations in the region are doing — by never for a minute decoupling issues of corruption from geopolitics.

Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator and critic of institutions. Her body of work addresses the intersection of culture and politics.