(above, screen cap of Heathmap: Global disease alert map)

“Containment is not a feasible operation,” the World Health Organization said, as it raised the pandemic level from 3 to 4 (see WHO warns: No region safe). In Mexico City, the Catholic Church brought out the heavy ammunition:

Later in the day, an image of Christ on the cross — known as the “Lord of Health” — was removed from its spot in the cathedral for the first time since 1850 and carried in a procession around central Mexico City. The “Cristo,” as the image is known, has been credited with past miracles, including intervention in an 1850 cholera outbreak.

For updates and for local color on the goings-on in Mexico City, check out Intersections, the blog of Daniel Hernandez:

On Monday authorities here canceled school across the country and elevated the number of suspected swine flu fatalities to 149. The ’suspected’ there is important. Keep in mind Mexico is not yet equipped to test for and identify the virus. The number could rise, or just as well, it could fall. Also, more than 1,600 people have been treated for swine flu, but the majority of those have been released and sent home. So even if you do catch swine flu, it’s more likely you’d recover and live than it is that you’d die from it.

Also, in case you were wondering, it is still perfectly OK to eat pork. (I mean if that’s your thing.)
Yes, the swine flu could mutate and become more dangerous. It could spread farther and further. Things could change at any moment. But again, as I argue today, what’s more worrisome is the corrosive and contagious quality of the fear, not the flu. And frankly the economic impact of this outbreak has the potential to be even more painful and long-lasting for all of us.

The progression of the swine flu doesn’t seem to have reached exponential levels, but developments are enough to make things trackable day-by-day. Last night, if you consult H1N1 Swine Flu Google Maps, the result would have been this (purple balloons are confirmed cases; pink are probable cases; yellow, disproven cases):

Today, as I’m writing this, here’s the map, showing the newly-confirmed cases in Europe:

The World Health Organization lists three pandemics during the 20th Century: “Spanish influenza” in 1918, “Asian influenza” in 1957, and “Hong Kong influenza” in 1968 (see also History of pandemics). Recent articles (see Flu in Mexico City May Be Next Pandemic: Firsthand Account of 1918 and 1957 for example; more can be found in the PanFlu Storybook) haven taken to putting the present, and past, outbreaks in the context of the Mother of All Outbreaks: the 1918 pandemic.

Influenza 1918: The American Experience has this animated graphic of the spread of the flu in the United States, where the pandemic seems to have begun (it ended up being called the “Spanish flu” because Spain was the first and most open to report about the pandemic):

The flu then traveled the world, in waves.

Concerning the Philippines, here’s the relevant passage in America’s forgotten pandemic by Alfred W. Crosby:

The flu morbidity and mortality statistics of the Philippine Islands, which had a population of 9 to 10.5 million, depending on which authority you consult, are undependable. Something like 40 percent of Filipinos contracted the disease, and 70,000-90,000 died. By even the most conservative estimate, the pandemic killed 2 percent of those it made ill. In many villages in the worst days there weren’t enough well people to bury the dead. The pandemic seems to have wreaked the worst damage in the remote areas, such as in Cotobato province in Mindanao, where 95 percent fell ill.

Back in 2006, the Harvard School of Public Health warned Recurrence of a Flu Pandemic Similar to Infamous 1918 Flu Could Kill 62 Million. The article adds an additional insight into the Philippine fatalities in 1918:

For many decades, published epidemiological literature assumed that mortality rates from the 1918-20 pandemic were distributed fairly equally. A simple population count from that period would lead to the conclusion that about 20 percent of all fatalities occurred in the developed world. “But when you look at the data,” said Murray, “that number shrinks to about three or four percent.”

The disparities between the developed and developing worlds during this period are striking. For example, in Denmark 0.2 percent of the population succumbed to the flu. In the United States, that figure is 0.3 percent (based on data from 24 states). In the Philippines, the mortality rate was 2.8 percent, in the Bombay region of India, 6.2 percent, and in central India, 7.8 percent, which was the highest rate of the countries and regions analyzed. According to this data then, from Denmark to central India, death rates from the 1918-1920 flu pandemic varied more than 39-fold.

The researchers then took the relationship observed in 1918 between per capita income and mortality and extrapolated it to 2004 population data. After adjusting for global income and population changes, as well as changes in age structures within different populations, the research team estimated that if a similarly virulent strain of flu virus were to strike today, about 62 million people worldwide would die.

The article above was meant to herald the publication of Estimation of potential global pandemic influenza mortality on the basis of vital registry data from the 1918—20 pandemic: a quantitative analysis, which is freely available, in full, online.

The fascinating book Colonial Pathologies by Warwick Anderson mentions the 1918 flu pandemic. First, though, this extract concerning the at times heavy-handed efforts of the Americans in their campaigns against rinderpest, malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy, and cholera. He reproduces some extracts from an outraged letter by Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera (himself a physician, and a member of the Philippine Commission) to Governor-General William Howard Taft:

…the people fear the Board of Heath a great deal more than they fear the epidemic. The sanitary inspectors, white, brown, black, civil and military have committed and still commit all kinds of abuses… [there are complaints] against the barbarities of the health agents… [In Pasig, the provincial treasurer] set fire to a house where a victim of the cholera had died and the flames extended to two neighboring houses…. [while the provincial inspector] went about with a gun on his shoulder in order to intimidate the people in order to make them obey sanitary laws…

Anderson writes that American public health officials were often mistrustful of Filipinos and skeptical of the capacity of Filipinos to undertake public health, with every possible shortcoming being used as proof of the incapacity of Filipinos to govern themselves:

[Public health director] Hesier and most of his compatriots continued to find in the failures to enforce smallpox vaccination, the recurrence of cholera, and a rising death rate in the archipelago evidence of the unreadiness for office of the Filipinos they had trained. American papers unsympathetic to the Democratic administration declared that “the full harvest of the ‘new era’ is now in the reaping in the Philippines.” “The Filipinization wind,” warned the New York Herald, had caused the incidence of plague to “jump” in the islands. Even the increasingly Filipinized health service conceded that in Manila the mortality rate for each one thousand inhabitants -42.28 in 1903, at the end of the war, but as low as 24.48 in 1913- had risen in 1918 to 46.33, and in 1919 was 27.55. To Heiser this was a clear indictment of Filipino management. But Dr. Vicente de Jesus, the acting director of public health, had another explanation: the influenza pandemic of 1918 had exacted a heavy toll in lives and caused “a weakened organic resistance” to other diseases among the population.

Returning, briefly, to Crosby’s book, he says that the worst-affected populations in the world were those in the aboriginal populations of the small Pacific islands. See 1918 pandemic in Polynesia and Fiji in the blog Grassroots Science; and also, The 1918 flu pandemic in New Zealand History online; and finally, Our nearly forgotten pandemic by Emmy Fitri and Arie Rukmantara, which details Indonesia’s 1918 flu pandemic experience:

Around 1.5 million people died in Dutch East Indies, which was then home to just some 30 million people.

The first case was reported on the east coast of Sumatra. By July 1918, it had spread to Java and Kalimantan before reaching Bali and Sulawesi. It then reached the eastern part of the archipelago in Maluku and Timor.

It seemed to die down for several weeks, but soon reemerged.

The second wave came in October 1918 and was more widespread. Like the pandemic in the US and Europe, the second wave brought the most deaths. These deaths were recorded in the Dutch Kolonial Verslaag (Colonial Journal).

Some of Brown’s reports show the horror of the pandemic situation. In Southeast Sulawesi, a Catholic missionary was quoted as saying that “deaths are everywhere”. According to the report, in one Sulawesi village, 177 of its 900 people died in a period of just three weeks.

In Tana Toraja, 10 percent of the population reportedly died from the flu. Meanwhile, according to the Dutch regional administration, 36,000 people in Lombok, or 5.9 percent of the island’s population, died.

Statistics are scarce and it is hard to gain a sense of what truly happened. Brown’s research shows that most fatalities occurred in people aged between their mid-teens and mid-fifties, the same age bracket that has been most affected by the bird flu in Indonesia.

Now a brief word on the “vessel” in which the spooky combination of human, swine, and bird flus seem to have mixed: the pig. Also in the same year (2006), as the Harvard study, a marvelous article appeared in Harper’s Magazine titled Swine of the times: The making of the modern pig by Nathanael Johnson. It tells the story of modern breeding and farming methods for commercial pork in the United States, and the dangers that have arisen from these practices: briefly, unhappy, unhealthy pigs too susceptible to disease because too genetically uniform and raised by means of bombardments with antibiotics.

The past few days have certainly been full of surprises. Early yesterday afternoon, word started to circulate that the Supreme Court had issued a ruling immediately permitting 32 new party-list representatives to take their seats in the House. To my mind, the clearest summary of the Supreme Court’s decision can be found in The Business Mirror:

The decision, in effect, paved the way for the representation of 19 more party-list groups by 32 additional House representatives from the present 17 party-list groups with 23 representatives…

On the other hand, the SC affirmed its previous ruling in Veterans Federation Party v. Comelec disallowing major political parties from participating in party-list elections.

Under RA 7941 and the deliberations of the constitutional commission, major political parties may coalesce with certain sectors to be able to join in party-list elections.

“However, by a vote of 8-7, the Court decided to continue the ruling in Veterans disallowing major political parties from participating in the party-list elections, directly or indirectly. Those who voted to continue disallowing major political parties from the party-list elections joined Chief Justice Reynato Puno in his separate opinion. On the formula to allocate party-list seats, the Court is unanimous in concurring with this ponencia,” the Court said.

In its ruling, the SC maintained that the party-list election has four unbreakable parameters as clearly stated in the Veterans decision.

These include the 20-percent allocation in the membership of the House of Representatives; the 2-percent threshold; three-seat limit, and proportional representation.

However, the Court said the formula in Veterans has flaws in its mathematical interpretation of the term “proportional representation,” which compelled it to revisit the formula for the allocation of additional seats to party-list organizations.

In determining the allocation of seats for party-list representatives under Section 11 of RA 7941, the Court said following procedure shall be observed:

• The parties, organizations, and coalitions shall be ranked from the highest to the lowest based on the number of votes they garnered during the elections.

• The parties, organizations and coalitions receiving at least 2 percent of the total votes cast for the party-list system shall be entitled to one guaranteed seat each.

• Those garnering sufficient number of votes shall be entitled to additional seats in proportion to their total number of votes until all the additional seats are allocated.

• Each party, organization or coalition shall be entitled to not more than three seats.

The Court noted that in computing the additional seats, the guaranteed seats shall no longer be included because they have already been allocated, at one seat each, to every 2-percenter.

Here is the Majority Decision in  G.R. No. 179271 , and here is Chief Justice Reynato Puno’s G.R. No. 179271 Concurring and Dissenting Opinion.

Among the newly-authorized party-list representatives is Mong Palatino, who just very well might be the first Filipino blogger to make it the House, and a national position.

In fact, he may have overtaken Jeff Ooi, the Malaysian blogger turned Member of Parliament, who sits in the assembly for the State of Penang (incidentally, you may want to read Ooi’s tale of woe concerning his economic difficulties as an MP, with a Philippine Peso equivalent of 79,762 monthly salary and 93,000 in allowances! and how the Malaysian tax authorities scrutinize officials and also, grant tax writeoffs for the purchase of books and computers by any citizen!), as the highest-ranking blogger-turned legislator. Palatino’s fellow National Democrats may also be celebrating his representing the fourth generation of their movement to assume national prominence and position.

What was interesting about the Supreme Court’s decision (besides junking the Panganiban formula), was that it was widely interpreted as representing a complication for the administration’s ongoing amendments efforts.

An interesting analysis of the alliances (pro and con) in the House, as well as an exploration of whether amendments can still be accomplished before the 2010 elections, is provided in Chacha is Dead? by Joel Rocamora:

Retired Supreme Court Chief Justice Artemio V. Panganiban says he has information that they only have 178 votes for the Villafuerte resolution. He doubts that they can get the remaining 18 signatures. Of the 238 incumbent congressmen, 89 belong to the Lakas, 52 to Kampi, 30 to the Nationalist People’s Coalition, 20 to the Liberal Party, 10 to the Nacionalista Party and the rest are distributed among the LDP, PMP, PDSP, PDP-Laban and Uno, and party list members.

Even if we assume that all 52 Kampi members will vote for the Villafuerte resolution, the official position of the leadership of Lakas, NPC, the LP, and the NP is against a “House only ConAss”. The NPC, LP and NP are deep into preparations for the 2010 elections for which they’ve already spent several hundred million pesos. We cannot assume that the members of these parties can all be bought by Malacanang. Any combination of congress persons from these parties plus some of the more progressive party list representatives totaling 42 will frustrate Villafuerte.

The April 21 decision of the Supreme Court adding thirty five new party list representatives does not make it any easier. Most of the new party list reps are local trapo and rabid anti-Left people like Jun Alcover of Anad and Jovito Palparan of Bantay Party. Even if GMA people manage to get three fourths of the new party list reps to sign on, however, they still can’t make up for the missing signatories that six months of solicitation have failed to produce. They can’t make up for the obvious hesitation of the largest fraction in the House and the party of the Speaker.

The Speaker, interesting enough, pleaded lack of physical space and budget, and raised a constitutional question, when informed of the Supreme Court’s decision. He certainly didn’t immediately issue a summons for the affected party-list representatives to materialize in his office so that they could be sworn in forthwith.

Then, today, news began to circulate in the late afternoon that an interesting resolution has been filed in the House. Here it is:

House Resolution No. 1109

Yesterday, Dean Jorge Bocobo had some choice things to say about the line of reasoning of the Villafuerte Resolution, but for my purposes let me just reproduce his summary of Villafuerte’s line of reasoning and ostensible motive for creating a “justiciable issue”:

Speaking to Pia Hontiveros (Strictly Politics, ANC) Rep. Luis Villafuerte, President of the Kampi Party of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, said he wants to trigger “a justiciable controversy” to get the Supreme Court to rule definitively on the meaning of Article 17 Sec. (1). For this purpose he has drafted a resolution on which he says he only needs 198 signatures to trigger that justiciable controversy. But Rep. Villafuerte informs the audience that his resolution does not contain any specific amendment or revision of the Constitution as such, but only “establishes the mode” by which Congress is to exercise its “constituent power” to propose such changes for ratification at plebiscite.

The leitmotif of the Villafuerte mode of exercising constituent power is the concept of a “Constituent Assembly (Con-Ass).” Notice that in the 1935 provision, Congress “in joint session assembled” proposes amendments with House and Senate Members voting separately and obeying the three fourths majority rule. The Villafuerte Resolution however contemplates an entirely different entity altogether than that found in the 1935 Constitution. He envisions a Constituent Assembly whose Members are all the Members of Congress with no distinction as to whether they are Senators or House Members.

The Resolution above, filed this morning, adds a “pledge” by its signatories, that should the Supreme Court rule favorably, they will not extend their own, or the President’s, terms, or create any sort of mischief, including canceling the 2010 elections. Scout’s honor, your honors.

Anyway, Rep. Risa Hontiveros-Baraquel was able to get the resolution stricken from today’s order of business in the House. But the gauntlet has been thrown down by the leadership. The Senate, perhaps, can refrain from legitimizing the ploy by refusing to be drawn in by running to the Supreme Court; however, this does not prevent someone else (paging Atty. Oliver Lozano!) from going to the Supreme Court, creating the “justiciable issue” the resolution proclaims as its reason for being.
Besides that, the filing of the resolution sets aside the question of the new party-list representatives and therefore, leaves intact the original administration coalition computation of the votes required to propose amendments -regardless of whether or not the Senate agrees or disagrees.

Note to readers: in moving servers, some comments seem to have disappeared. My apologies. If you find your comment missing, kindly re-post it.

That seems to be the way the pendulum of public opinion has swung, concerning Ted Failon and the death of his wife. Two things, after the initial flurry of details (some of them wildly off the mark) concerning the whole thing.

The first is put forward by Rina Jimenez-David in her column, Celebrities have rights, too:

[On]the morning of April 15… Ted Failon, then doing a solo turn, took note of how, in Quezon City, “not one, not two, not three, but four” cases of carjacking had taken place not just “over four days, three days, or two days” but overnight!

…Failon proceeded to skewer the newly-appointed OIC of the Central Police District who was hard put to explain this boomlet in crime. Then, as most everyone knows by now, Failon cut short his program to rush home and there, as he says, found his wife with a bullet wound in the head.

The QCPD would, of course, subsequently take a lead in the handling of the investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Failon’s wife.

And there is Patricia Evangelista’s marvelous column (read the whole thing), The Failon incident:

When the men behind the badge dragged Trina Etong’s sister Pamela screaming out of the New Era General Hospital, a short while before Trina breathed her last, they made Failon the victim.

This is what Kaye Etong, Failon’s daughter said while sitting in the ABS-CBN newsroom last Thursday to the police: My mother killed herself. She ended her life and died alone. My aunt and uncle were hauled off to jail. My father is being accused, and is attempting to bring our jailed helpers and relatives together to be with my mother.

The police are hounding us. I am here, on national television, announcing that I believe my mother chose to leave us and die. Now, is there anything else you want to put us through?

Understand that this is what that admission means: that one girl has been pushed to a corner to a point that she is announcing to the public that this woman, the mother who gave birth to her, who was supposed to love her and cherish her and stand by her, has chosen instead to die, knowing the consequences to the two daughters left motherless and guilt-stricken.

The consensus then is that, setting aside what might have actually transpired -or not- in the death of his wife, the police handling of Failon and family has turned public opinion squarely against the police. In general, our culture expects a wide latitude to be given even to one’s foes in times of family celebrations (baptisms, weddings) or tragedy (illness, funerals), and for a predominantly Christian (indeed, Catholic) country, suicide in particular is something treated with kid gloves because of the stigma that remains attached to that act. And whatever official scrutiny takes place concerning the prominent, we expect some consideration for their underlings. Whether tangling with the doctors over a proposed Paraffin test, dragging household help to jail, and then depriving a distraught sister of the cultural imperative of nursing her dying sister -well, how many cultural norms could the police have possible defied in a single week, concerning a single case?

It only reinforces the notion that the police are less interested less in law and order than in publicity and getting even.

After the grisly murder of Iglesia Filipina Independiente bishop (and former Obispo Maximo) Antonio Ramento, I remember his son describing to me, during the wake, how the police bungled the investigation into the murder of his father. One detail in particular stands out: the policemen brought their coffee and snacks to the murder scene and subsequently added the remainder of their merienda to the scene of the crime. Of course to this day, no one has been apprehended in the case of the bishop’s murder, the police considering a robbery gone awry.

The problem -for the police, anyway- is that once cases hit the headlines, police conduct is subjected to intense public scrutiny, regardless of whether that scrutiny is informed or not. There is, perhaps, an instinctive desire for the public to play amateur sleuth, a desire emboldened by all the detective shows people feast on in movies and on television. A few months ago, I picked up a marvelously entertaining book. “Beating the Devil’s Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal Investigation” (Katherine Ramsland) which gives a brisk rundown on the development of Forensic Science and criminal investigation procedure since the Middle Ages. The testing of a suspect’s hands for gunshot residue, according to Ramsland, first took place in 1932, and was done by a certain Thomas Gonzales.

I bring this up, because of one particular aspect that looms over anything the police do or don’t do, concerning their investigating the circumstances surrounding the death of Ted Failon’s wife: the politicization of the police, and with it, the prioritization of the political aspects of crimes, to the detriment -even abandonment- of scrupulous police procedures. The police are perceived to be neither professional, nor fair; put another way, the capacity of the police to engage in neutral investigations is hobbled and inevitably compromised, by political considerations that affect, in particular, high-profile cases: either things can be hushed-up if the case involves someone with access to the authorities, or taken in all sorts of unhelpful directions if the case involves people not in good odor with the present dispensation.

This not to say that the State had no right to get involved; or that charges shouldn’t be filed. In Ramsland’s book, she puts the involvement of the authorities in suicide (or alleged suicide) cases in context:

They were… the keepers of the king’s pleas. Those who held the office, soon to be called coroners, collected taxes, but they also summoned inquest juries for people who were seriously wounded or who had died from “misadventure.” Since these officials were there to protect the king’s interests, they could confiscate animals or objects implicated in accidental deaths and take over goods found in accidents or wrecks, although they could not themselves render verdicts.

…One’s manner of death had implications for taxes, because in certain types of deaths the king confiscated the property.

A suicide is no longer an outlaw, except in the religious sense (for Catholics, hence the lingering social stigma in our society involving suicides; though the Church more often than not, tempers this by giving wide latitude to the assumption that a suicide might involve temporary insanity, mitigating the circumstances in the eyes of Church authority). However the State requires all deaths to be certified and registered; and death by suicide is the kind of thing that requires ruling out other possibilities, such as foul play. All these certifications and necessary inquiries, too, necessarily involves taking notice of the financial implications (and motivations) of alleged suicides.

But this brings up the possibility that what violates the law may not be worth the persecution involved. Consider the established fact that the site of the suicide was cleaned up; and that, since it is reasonable for the State to inquire into the circumstances, cleaning up the scene obviously makes a determination one way or another more difficult. Therefore, an obstruction of justice. But there is also the possibility that if the cleaning up can be considered a sign of foul play, it might also have been a very human response to the grisly nature of the event: what normal person wants a reminder of the event to remain? If the former is determined, then if done alone or in cooperation with others, the cleaning up was certainly a crime; if the latter, it does not seem either reasonable or beneficial to the public to insist on a persecution leading to conviction.

The police could have come out smelling like roses out of this one, precisely because the QCPD had been criticized by Failon. Instead, they did practically everything possible to alienate public opinion and render a dispassionate, professional finding after a scrupulous investigation.

In this, the only counterpart of the police in terms of unprofessional behavior was large segments of the media. The airwaves were cluttered, from the start, with misleading or patently false information in some cases. There were pious requests for privacy to be respected, followed by a showbiz-style extravaganza that passed itself off as news coverage: network muscle was wielded to monopolize the news in favor of ABS-CBN’s coverage, which may or may not have been motivated by the manner in which the rival network tried to peddle its own scoops, including the broadcasting of the alleged suicide note.

Baratillo@Cubao pointed out in a recent conversation that what seems to have been overlooked, in the mania for amateur sleuthing that accompanied the event, was the element of justice. For Failon’s wife and the real circumstances, whatever they might be, surrounding her death; and for her family. The public’s interest is, of course, to ensure that if foul play resulted in her death, that it be punished -and conversely, for the family and friends of the victim to be cleared of any potential, unwarranted, stigma attached to that death.

The police blunders means whatever they determine will be clouded by public skepticism; and for Failon and his network, that ratings and protecting one of their own trumped all other considerations.

aside from masticating quotes CSI: “a… family burdened with tragedy that put you under a microscope. That close, nobody can look good.” Indeed. Some reactions giving a sampling of public opinion can be found in Smoke, in Purpose Driven Paul, and Now What, Cat? in pakshet 101 and Touched by an Angel.

This marvelous video comes from a 1946 United Newsreel:

Today marks the 61st death anniversary of Manuel Roxas, who died in Clark Field, Pampanga, in 1948. I’ve been working on a political biography of the man for eight years now (more off than on), and it’s proving to be a difficult but rewarding task, not least because having died so soon, he didn’t live long enough to see many of his initiatives bear fruit. While it is said that history is written by the victors, the opposite is the case in the Philippines, or at least, that is the case when it comes to Roxas; after he passed from the scene, his critics wrote the enduring epitaph to his administration. In my draft second chapter, I proposed that instead of viewing the peaceful campaign for independence (circumscribed as it was, by the reality and consequences of military defeat for the First Republic) was actually the logical progression of the independence movement, a blueprint laid out by Apolinario Mabini at the end of his life.

(Roxas was the second Philippine president to be on the cover of Time Magazine; the portrait clearly shows his hazel-colored eyes)

For most of his political career, he was portrayed as a kind of wunderkind of politics, even when he ran for the presidency and broke up the prewar monolith that was the Nacionalista Party: the existence of a two-party system was not an American legacy, they had failed (or perhaps it might be more accurate to say, were powerless to prevent) the emergence of a one-party state prior to the War; if it hadn’t occurred, more likely than not, one-party rule might have survived until well into the 1960s, much as other Asian countries that went through a similar process of achieving independence peacefully brought forth single-party rule for decades (Malaysia and India are some relevant examples, their independence parties achieving half a century or more of political dominance).

(The famous 1946 Free Press cover of Roxas being in a hurry; Osmeña would have preferred not to break up the NP, at one point considering not even running for presidency to preserve party unity; Roxas, said by some of those close to him to be haunted by the idea he might not live long enough to succeed to the presidency in 1949, couldn’t wait; the party split and the two-party system born)

It is even possible that had Roxas lived long enough to achieve re-election in 1949, as was widely expected to happen, he might have begun working to reunite the Liberals with the Nacionalistas; Magsaysay, certain of re-election in 1957, was also said to be planning to either found a new superparty, or preside over the reunification of the NP and LP (both parties were inclined to make him their common presidential candidate, as he was considered unbeatable). Death scuttled that possibility; but Ferdinand Marcos achieved a temporary restoration of one-party rule from 1978 onwards, and the superadministration parties since 1987 -LDP for Aquino, Lakas for Ramos and Arroyo- points to one-party instincts remaining strong within the political class.

(May, 1946: after taking his oath of office in front of the ruins of the Legislative Building, Roxas ascends the main stairs of the presidential palace in the ceremonial taking of possession of the presidential residence; he’s with his wife and his mother)

There’s an entertaining profile of the man circa 1946 by Sol Gwekoh, titled Roxas the Man. Politically, what’s interesting is how Filipino writers (mostly his critics) have conflated the immediate postwar period with the Cold War, when they represent two distinct stages and reflect widely different American attitudes towards the Philippines, in the context of American priorities. A Philippine president, then, having made certain strategic decisions and embarked on the tactics required to achieve them, would have been confronted with his assumptions suddenly being invalidated; and that is exactly what happened to Roxas. Not enough has been done, to my mind, to explore how he handled this change in the global scheme of things.

The first stage of American reactions to the end of the war coincides with the presidential campaign here at home in 1946 and on to 1947, the year of the Parity Amendment. The onset of the Cold War only began in the closing months of Roxas’ life, and it was in terms of positioning himself and the country, to reflect this changing reality, that he ended up in Clark Field to deliver a speech, after which he suffered a heart attack and died.

As it was, it would have been during Roxas’ second term beginning in 1949, that the Cold War would really be felt, with the invasion of South Korea by the North, and the United Nations effort that saw Philippine troops being sent to South Korea.

Roxas gained his reputation as an economist, so here’s an interesting paper by former national treasurer Liling Briones on how Roxas handled deficits in his time (a summary can be found here).

Life Magazine’s photo archive was recently made publicly available on Google; here is, perhaps, the most famous photo of the man, taken in the Reception Hall of the Palace (it was demolished and rebuilt, without the pillars, during the Marcos 1978 renovations):

There’s another photo which suggests how Roxas aged in office:

My first chapter draft actually begins with the arrival of Roxas’ body in Manila. Only in my draft eleventh chapter do I describe the last day of Roxas, how he died, and the highly macabre refusal of his wife to accept he’d died.

In the draft twelfth chapter, I look into the twist of fate that meant that Vice-President Elpidio Quirino, widely expected to be discarded as a running mate by Roxas when he ran for re-election in 1949, ended up as President.

In the photo below, Quirino, having arrived from an ocean voyage meant to help him recuperate from heart trouble, ascends the stairs of the Palace, flanked by Senate President Avelino (of subsequent “What are we in power for?” infamy) and Speaker Eugenio Perez (natural father of Speaker Jose de Venecia, Jr.).

Below, Quirino is shown signing his oath of office in the Council of State Room in the Executive Building (Carlos P. Garcia would later on also take his oath of office here, when Magsaysay died):

The wake of Roxas was only the second presidential wake and the first one held in the Palace that was open to the public: here’s a series of Life photos of the lying-in-state, which took place in the Ceremonial Hall of the Palace (the room was greatly enlarged during the Marcos renovations of 1978 and the chandelier is now in Bonifacio Hall, more familiarly known as the Guest House):

(Roxas’ son, Gerardo; Aurora Quezon; Roxas’ daughter, Ruby, at the wake)

The necrological service was held in the Philippine Congress, at the time still squatting in a former schoolhouse in Lepanto St., Manila:

And then, the state funeral.

Here is a Life photo of Aguinaldo together with veterans of the Revolution, awaiting the passing of the funeral procession. What follows are more Life photos, this time, in color, of the funeral procession and the internment:

Roxas’ tomb was remodeled in the 1990s.

Recently, In two columns, God on trial and The inner light of a man, I mentioned the BBC film, God on Trial (this is different from Elie Wiesel’s play). The scene above is the culminating argument made by a rabbi, condemning God. The film is actually a series of powerful dialogues on faith. In Losing my religion, the movie’s script writer, Frank Cottrell Boyce, described how he wrote the script.

Let China sleep, for when she awakes, she will shake the world. -Napoleon

The East is Red! -Mao Zedong (upon reaching the summit of Mount Taishan)

If capitalism is restored in a big socialist country, it will inevitably become a superpower. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which has been carried out in China in recent years, and the campaign of criticizing Lin Piao and Confucius now under way throughout China, are both aimed at preventing capitalist restoration and ensuring that socialist China will never change her colour and will always stand by the oppressed peoples and oppressed nations. If one day China should change her colour and turn into a superpower, if she too should play the tyrant in the world, and everywhere subject others to her bullying, aggression and exploitation, the people of the world should identify her as social-imperialism, expose it, oppose it and work together with the Chinese people to overthrow it. -Deng Xiaoping (circa 1974, quoted in Time’s The China Blog)

Over the Christmas holidays, a friend recounted, with some concern, having dinner with a Filipina who has essentially abandoned her Filipina identity, adopting, instead, a Chinese cultural supremacist attitude that extends to weeding out what she considers her former, inferior, culture. My friend and I discussed the enthusiasm with which some Filipinos jettisoned their own identity in order to take on the characteristics of a culture they viewed as the “up-and-coming-one,” and hence, superior. No different from the worship of Spanish culture in the past, I suggested; and in the case of today’s Sinophiles, no different from the debates on Asiatic Monroeism in the 1930s in the wake of Japan’s expanding prestige and power in the region, and the Japanophiles during the War. In the case of China, as far back as the 1920s, the rise of Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalist government led to proposals, in the Philippines, to orient the independence movement towards China, in an effort to counterbalance American influence.

Since the closing of the US bases and the banishing of the Philippines to the periphery of American strategic and other concerns, Filipino leaders have been at a loss to make up for their shortcomings at home no longer being lavishly subsidized by Washington. When the United States started showing concern over the resurgence of China, in the late 1990s, Filipino leaders sensed an opportunity (shared by many countries in the region, also nervous over the growth of China) to reburnish old alliances with Washington.

The problem was that Washington blew hot and cold, and after courting Asean governments (Singapore and Thailand, most notably), during the Bush, Sr. and Clinton years, the Bush, Jr. years saw a dwindling of American interest in the region, which it seemed content to delegate matters to Australia as far as the Western presence was concerned. The Americans oriented themselves, primarily, towards neutralizing Islamic Extremism (see this Japanese article, Hu Jintao’s Strategy for Handling Chinese Dissent and U.S. Pressure from 2007, on the lack of American interest in the Chinese ploy to assert Beijing and Washington as the ultimate arbiters of Taiwan’s fate).

The Philippines, having achieved favored nation status by climbing onto the Coalition of the Willing bandwagon, promptly hopped off for domestic reasons, and this led, in turn, to the government playing the “China Card” as a foil to Washington. A kind of modus vivendi ensued, in which Washington remained content with focusing on Mindanao, while making noises from time to time to remind Manila not to fall too firmly in Beijing’s pocket. But the pockets of Beijing are deep, and somehow, despite domestic crises, Manila and Beijing’s relationship seems to be fairly stable.

This has raised repeated questions about how the Philippines will be affected by the rise of China to, potentially, Great Power status.

This detail (below) of a wartime American speculative map (found at Strange Maps) shows how the Americans envisioned our region as victory seemed imminent in World War II. The Philippines was portrayed as an American protectorate, with added territory from the then-Dutch East Indies. Note how Indochina and Thailand are given over to the Chinese sphere of influence, while Burma belongs to an undivided India’s sphere of influence.

From the same site (see China as a World Power: How Big?), comes this map, showing China’s potential sphere of influence in the world:

In the case of a “Regionally Dominant Greater China,” the Philippines lies just outside the informal borders of China; in the case of a “Greater China as a Global Power,” the Philippines lies firmly within the Chinese sphere of influence. It’s interesting that in the New World Order Map, the “United Republics of China (URC)” was envisioned by the Americans, even then, as federation composed of China, Korea, Indochina, Thailand and today’s Malaysia.

Back in 2008, I’d pointed to Waving Goodbye to Hegemony, and it’s well worth reviewing what Parag Khanna said was taking place:

Aided by a 35 million-strong ethnic Chinese diaspora well placed around East Asia’s rising economies, a Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere has emerged. Like Europeans, Asians are insulating themselves from America’s economic uncertainties. Under Japanese sponsorship, they plan to launch their own regional monetary fund, while China has slashed tariffs and increased loans to its Southeast Asian neighbors. Trade within the India-Japan-Australia triangle — of which China sits at the center — has surpassed trade across the Pacific.

At the same time, a set of Asian security and diplomatic institutions is being built from the inside out, resulting in America’s grip on the Pacific Rim being loosened one finger at a time. From Thailand to Indonesia to Korea, no country — friend of America’s or not — wants political tension to upset economic growth. To the Western eye, it is a bizarre phenomenon: small Asian nation-states should be balancing against the rising China, but increasingly they rally toward it out of Asian cultural pride and an understanding of the historical-cultural reality of Chinese dominance. And in the former Soviet Central Asian countries — the so-called Stans — China is the new heavyweight player, its manifest destiny pushing its Han pioneers westward while pulling defunct microstates like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as well as oil-rich Kazakhstan, into its orbit.

And the process is continuing.

All right, so apparently Deng Xiaoping did not say “to get rich is glorious,” but the China’s that emerged since Deng was at the helm has come closer to the kind of Great Power he warned about, when still toeing the Cultural Revolution line in the 1970s. The rise of China, too, has been put forward in the context of the decline of the United States. But what if they’re joined at the hip?

Niall Ferguson’s been plugging the concept of “Chimerica” in his book, “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World” (Niall Ferguson).

Here’s more on the themes of his book and “Chimerica”:

Aside from “Chimerica,” there’s even, as Brad Setzer proposed on December 21, 2008, Chieuropa. Europe is part of the equation: “Chimerica only works, in some sense, if China lends the (large) surplus it earns with the non-Chimerican world (and Europe in particular) to the US, allowing the US to run a deficit with the non-Chimerican world.”On one hand, cash-rich, China has continued going shopping, essentially buying futures in minerals and oil for when times get better; there’s also the effort to start building up the Yuan as a Reserve Currency, see China to Boost Yuan Swaps, Payments on Dollar Concern.

In “Inside the Red Mansion: On the Trail of China’s Most Wanted Man” (Oliver August), there’s a scene where the author talks to a Chinese citizen who remarks that China’s mistake was that it confused paper with power; that is, it bought American debt but in the end, even though it ended up holding vast amounts of that debt, the Americans, indebted as they are, still held on to the tangible manifestations of power: China might have paper, America continued to possess nuclear aircraft carriers for projecting influence -even to China’s shores.

So, the game plan seems to be:

1. Strong currency, strong country. Build up the Yuan.

2. Rich country, strong country. Use the vast amount of cash reserves to get plugged into the economies of many nations.

3. Armed country, strong country. (see Tony Abaya, on the Chinese buying the HMAS Canberra for scrap, but making blueprints for future reference.)

Ferguson in his documentary mentioned how “crisis-free” China’s growth has been. That was before recent news that 20 million migrants have lost jobs, China says. There therefore remains the serious problem of maintaining internal peace.

Back in 2007, Cheng Li (see China’s Inner-Party Democracy: Toward a System of “One Party, Two Factions”? ) pointed out the era of party purges seems over and instead,

For the first time in the history of the PRC, the ruling Party is no longer principally led by a strongman, such as Mao or Deng, but instead consists of two competing factions or coalitions. These two factions cannot be divided along typical ideological lines, such as liberals versus conservatives, or reformers versus hardliners. Rather, a more accurate set of labels would identify the two factions as the “elitist coalition” and “populist coalition,” with the former led by ex-President Jiang Zemin and current Vice President Zeng Qinghong and the latter by President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. These new factional dynamics have three main features: (1) the two coalitions represent two different socio-political and geographical constituencies; (2) the coalitions have contrasting policy initiatives and priorities; and (3) they compete with each other on certain issues but are willing to cooperate on others.

Now in this more recent article, China’s Team of Rivals: Cheng Li says,

Of the six members of the fifth generation serving on the Politburo today, three are tuanpai and three are princelings. The policy differences between these factions are as significant as the contrasts in their backgrounds. To a great extent, their differences reflect the country’s competing socioeconomic forces: Princelings aim to advance the interests of entrepreneurs and the emerging middle class, while the tuanpai often call for building a harmonious society, with more attention to vulnerable social groups such as farmers, migrant workers, and the urban poor….

Despite their many differences, the fifth generation of tuanpai and princelings share a common trauma: They are part of China’s “lost generation.” Born after the founding of the People’s Republic, they were teenagers when the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966….

If there is another event that approaches the importance of the Cultural Revolution in the lives of these men, it is undoubtedly the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989….

These events taught the fifth generation two lessons: First, they must maintain political stability at all costs, and second, they should not reveal their fissures to the public. Although these leaders wear their differences on their sleeves, there is solidarity at the highest level, inspired by past unrest, to avoid any sign of a split in the leadership, which would be dangerous for the party and for the country….

…Barring something entirely unexpected, though, the populist policy platform will prevail over the next three to four years, and the ongoing global financial crisis will likely push Chinese leaders to increase government intervention in the economy. Yet there may be a swing in the opposite direction in 2012 as princeling Xi Jinping succeeds Hu Jintao, similar to the transition from Jiang to Hu.

RGE Monitor on February 4 noted,

IMF: Asia’s growth forecast for 2009 reduced to 2.7% with further downside risks. Developing Asia will grow 5.5%, the slowest pace since 1998. China will grow 6.7% though an additional stimulus package could help China reach the 8% target. India will grow 5.1% while South Korea’s growth will contract by 4%. The region may expand 6.9% in 2010. Given high trade and financial linkages, Asia will recover (rapidly) only when global recovery begins. But improved fundamentals and considerable room for counter-cyclical policies are pluses.

What the hell does that mean? Two blogs I find essential reading are China Financial Markets ,which covers the present-day economic development of China (two recent entries, as a sampler: Did China experiencing January hot money outflows? and Trade, CPI and other numbers came in this week, about whether the global crisis is seeping into China’s “real economy”), and Frog in a Well, where all sorts of historical topics concerning China are explored.

For us, there remains the question of how, exactly, do we define our national interest? Does a consensus exist? Could one be put together?