PH ILIPPINE ISLANDS
Coming Plebiscite
INDEPENDENCE AND THE PRICE
Fear of Economic Ruin
By Gareth Jones
Manila,
Philippines, March/April 1935
When on May 14, Filipinos go to
the polls to record their vote for independence; they will be taking an
action, which will have a profound influence upon the Far East. In
voting for the Philippines Commonwealth, which in ten years
automatically becomes the Philippines Republic, they are bringing into
being a new nation in one of the world’s strategically most important
points, lying to the south of China, between the Asiatic mainland and
the wealthy and densely populated Dutch East Indies, and on the path to
New Guinea and Australia
Nothing illustrates so clearly the United States’ withdrawal from the
Far East and her trend towards isolation and self-sufficiency as her
voluntary abandonment of these islands, with 14,000,000 inhabitants and
with vast supplies of raw materials, including the richest source of
iron ore in the East. But although this abandonment of control over an
Asiatic people may appear a gesture of noble unselfishness it has really
been the result of the most unscrupulous and cynical lobbying of a
group of American sugar and farming interests who fear the competition
of Philippine products, and it is accompanied by trade restrictions
which bring dread of the future to all inn Manila who have the slightest
knowledge of commerce.
A visitor arriving on the day when President Franklin Roosevelt
signed the
Constitution of the Philippines and by a stroke of the pen, brought the
yearned for freedom to the Filipino people would expect to find signs of
rejoicing throughout the islands. Instead of gratification, however,
there was expressed in private conversations even with extreme
nationalists a gloom, which contrasted violently with the joy with which
most peoples in history have greeted the culmination of battles for
independence.
The Filipinos’ fear of the independence for which they have
long cried arises out of their expectations oh troubles in foreign
affairs, in commerce, in the Church, and in politics.
In foreign affairs Filipinos, Europeans, and Americans in
Manila fear that if the United States leaves the islands to complete
independence in 1945-6 Japan will be unrivalled in her supremacy over
the Pacific that she will be able to dominate the Philippines
commercially, that she may be tempted to intervene in the internal
affairs of the Philippines, and even take military and naval control of
the islands. That this fear has some justification was confirmed to me
by a conversation with a Japanese authority who said: “We shall want to
penetrate the islands commercially. There is no need for us to come in
any other way as long as the Filipinos are courteous and peaceful. But
if there is chaos in the independent Philippines then it will be the
duty of a civilised nation to step in and use force.”
BRITISH AND DUTCH ANXIETY
The possibility of Japanese control of the Philippines already
arouses alarm, among the British and the Dutch in the Pacific. The
British fear that Japanese domination in Manila would endanger the
possession of Hong Kong, that the Japanese, gaining naval, air, and
military control of strategic points, would be able to bring pressure to
bear upon the Chinese to raise high tariffs upon all foreign goods other
than Japanese, that the prestige of the white peoples would sink if the
biggest white nation, the United States, meekly abandoned territory for
an Asiatic Power to step in, that the United States, yielding to
Filipino nationalism will have nationalistic reverberations in British
India and in the Malay States, and that a path of expansion towards the
south and especially Australia, will be opened to the Japanese. The
Dutch fear that Japanese control of the Philippines would bring a
potential enemy within striking distance of the rich oil areas of
Borneo; they remember that Japan lacks oil as well as other raw
materials abundant under the Dutch flag, and they silently pray that the
banner of the Rising Sun will not replace the Stars and Stripes in the
Philippines.
The Filipinos themselves have little desire to exchange the
kindly, almost pampering, rule of the Americans for the possibility of a
more military over-lordship of the Japanese. But the blows which the
United States Act granting independence - the Tydings-McDuffie Act -
deals to Filipino trade may one day create a pro-Japanese trend among
the population. Indeed, at the present moment the fear that Filipino
commerce will be strangled by separation from the United States is the
main cause of among Filipinos. Since Free Trade was established between
the Philippine Islands and the United States in 1909, the Filipinos have
been made almost entirely dependent upon the United States as a market
for their goods.
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