To be a Filipino nationalist now is to be anti-China imperialist

To be a nationalist in the 1960s and 1970s meant that one also had to be anti-US imperialist. To be a nationalist now, one has to also be anti-China imperialist.
This was a point I made to Michael Krasny in his National Public Radio show “Forum” on April 28, 2014 when I was invited, along with other guests, to comment on Pres. Obama’s visit to the Philippines and on the signing of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation (AEDC) that would allow the US military to use Philippine military facilities for ten years.
I explained that times change. As Winston Churchill once said, “there are no permanent allies, only permanent national interests.”A friend or ally today could be your enemy tomorrow and vice versa.
In my youth, I was a fervent nationalist who wanted the Philippines to unshackle itself from its colonial, neo-colonial and feudal moorings. The Philippines could never join the ranks of the advanced developed world if it remained a feudal state with an oligarchy that lived off the punishing labor of the peasantry.
The Philippines could never progress if we continued to be “fried in our own cooking oil” with our labor and abundant resources enjoyed by foreigners instead of by the Filipino people.
In a nationalist seminar I attended at the Diliman campus of the University of the Philippines in July of 1967, I learned about the Parity Amendment which the US imposed on a vulnerable new republic in 1947. Unless the Filipino people voted in a plebiscite to amend its constitution to grant American citizens the same rights to exploit the natural resources of the country, then the Philippines would not receive $620M in war damage aid from the United States.
This was pure unadulterated blackmail imposed on a country devastated by war. This condition was not imposed on Germany or Japan which had waged war against the United States and which received billions of dollars of reconstruction aid from the United States. No, it was imposed on a faithful ally whose soldiers had fought and died in hundreds of battles just to delay the Japanese advance and allow the US time to recoup its military capabilities in order to launch a counter-offensive.
Because of the Parity Amendment and other provisions of the onerous Bell Trade Act, the Philippine economy after independence was even more dependent on the US than it had been when it was a US commonwealth.
The United States also based its largest naval fleet outside US soil on Subic Naval Base in Olongapo City and its largest air force base in Clark Air Force Base in Angeles City. With the presence of thousands of US troops on Philippine soil, there were thousands of instances where Filipino women were raped by US servicemen who were then flown back to the US before they could be tried in the Philippines.
To prevent Philippine nationalists from denying the US from using its military bases in the Philippines to wage its war in Indo-China, the US supported and endorsed the martial law dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.
When then US Ambassador to the Philippines Harry Thomas spoke before the Filipino American community in South San Francisco in February of 2012, he was asked about past US support for the Marcos dictatorship. Thomas acknowledged that the US had committed “shameful” acts in the past but he counseled, “Don’t be trapped by history” citing his own personal example as an African American growing up in a South Carolina that had separate toilet facilities for whites and “coloreds”.
 China’s Communists suffered greatly from US support of its Kuomintang adversaries in the years before 1949 and in the years since. During the 50s and 60s, China’s most formidable enemy was the United States and its staunchest ally was the Soviet Union.
But after China and the Soviet Union engaged in border skirmishes starting in 1968, China needed an ally to use against its more powerful northern neighbor who was threatening to invade China’s northern territories. In 1972, Mao Zedong welcomed US Pres. Richard Nixon to Beijing and a new era in US-China relations began. 
The 30 largest mining corporations in the Philippines, extracting valuable natural resources of the Philippines and subverting its labor and environment laws, are China-owned firms. China’s People’s Liberation Army naval fleet patrols Philippine waters barring Filipino fisher folk from fishing in their ancestral fishing grounds. They have taken Philippine shoals and erected garrisons on them. They are in the process of occupying Ayungin Shoal preparatory to acquiring the oil rich Recto Bank.
If we want the resources of the Philippines to belong to Filipinos to be enjoyed by future generations, then Filipino nationalists must be anti- China imperialists.
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