If P-Noy’s trip to China has any special significance for us, it’s this:
Nothing is more important than having a leader you can trust.
P-Noy’s trip to China should put to rest all that idiocy we’ve heard before and after the State of the Nation Address that nothing has changed since Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s time, that moral ascendancy cannot take the place of economic performance. Everything has changed. The whole world has turned around. It’s not true at all that moral ascendancy cannot take the place of economic performance. What’s true is that economic progress cannot happen without moral ascendancy. More so here than anywhere.
The Philippines began to “embrace the dragon,” as Francis Ricciardone put it in one cable Wikileaks revealed, long before P-Noy came to power, specifically during Arroyo’s time. But it managed only to piss off the dragon and get itself singed from its wrathful fire in the process. Jose de Venecia and the First Couple, Gloria and Mike, saw the immense opportunities offered by China, and took the first steps in that direction. And rightly so. The West was on the wane and the East was on the rise, with China at the lead. Why shouldn’t you scramble to knock on the doors of the Middle Kingdom? Even the West was doing so, the multinationals, like the vassals of old, trooping there, gifts and tribute in hand. God made the universe, as we now say, everything else was made in China.
De Venecia and the First Couple saw the immense opportunities offered by China—but not for this country, only for themselves. Indeed, they saw the immense opportunities offered by China—but not for the betterment of the country, only for the despoliation of it.
Specifically by putting bukols on the deals with the Chinese, the size of which was so gigantic they swallowed up the head. De Venecia and the First Couple magnified the cost of the deals several times, the difference to go to their pockets. You get an idea of the sums involved when Romulo Neri swore that then Comelec head Benjamin Abalos offered him P200 million just to approve the broadband project with ZTE. Whether Neri was tempted or not, we’ll never know as Jun Lozada blew the whistle on it shortly after being kidnapped from the airport and spending a few hours knocking at death’s door. The difference between the actual cost of the deals and the bukol-laden one was of course to be paid for by the taxpayers.
Until P-Noy came along, we were a country whose officials had a unique talent in the art of negotiation. That talent lay in not being able to drive the prices down but in being able to drive the prices up. And by the most dogged effort. Each time the Chinese met with their Filipino counterparts over the ZTE, their counterparts kept changing what the Philippine government theoretically needed to pay them—not downward but upward. And they call the Chinese inscrutable.
Indeed, and we call the Chinese, the Indians and the Moros magulang or shysters. Put yourself in the shoes of the Chinese: Would you trust leaders who think this way? Would you trust leaders who act this way? If these leaders do not particularly care to rip off their own people, would they particularly care to rip off another? No wonder the Chinese have been supercilious in dealing with us over the Spratlys. They’ve gotten used to dealing with a bunch of officials who will sell their grandmothers, quite apart from their country in whole or in part, for the right price.
In any case, what happened in the wake of NorthRail and NBN-ZTE was that it put the Chinese in a bad light in the eyes of the Filipinos. The deals fell through after being exposed and the Chinese got the blame along with all the slimy Filipino characters that made those deals the scandalous things they became. That does not augur well for the start of a beautiful friendship, as Humphrey Bogart put it in “Casablanca.” When Arroyo advertises herself as having blazed trails with China, she isn’t exactly telling the truth, though what else is new. Scorching the earth kaingin-style is more like it.
When P-Noy on the other hand says the next couple of years will usher in a new age in RP-China relations—a thing the Chinese Ambassador Liu Jianchao concurs with, predicting his visit will raise those relations to “new highs”—you are hopeful it might be so. You have a sense at least his and the Chinese ambassador’s statements go beyond mere formalities.
More importantly, you have at least a reasonable assurance the $60 billion the five-year bilateral trade and economic cooperation program between the Philippines and China is expected to generate in this country won’t just disappear into the bottomless pit of greed. Or be a bukol na tinubuan ng mukha on the head of Juan de la Cruz. If it was Arroyo who had just visited there and had announced that she had raised the bar in Philippine-Chinese relations, would you be convinced? If it was Arroyo who had just visited there and said she was bringing home $60 billion over the next five years, would you be elated?
That is the difference between a leader you can trust and one you cannot. Moral ascendancy and economic performance are not separate from each other, they are twined to each other. They are not strangers, they are lovers. It’s not true at all that moral ascendancy may not take the place of economic progress, it is the very guarantee of it. It is the very guarantee that the earth will yield its bounties, government dedicating itself to the betterment of the country rather than of itself, or its temporary stewards. It is the very guarantee that the bounties of the earth when they are gathered will not go to the few but to the many. It is the very guarantee of the start of a beautiful friendship:
Between government and its people.