Post-Colonial Statecraft in South East Asia: Sovereignty, State Building and the Chinese in the Philippines by Pak Nung Wong (review)

According to the author, Pak Nung Wong, this book is a historical ethnography, one that looks mainly at frontier “governmentality” (using a Foucauldian concept) as applied to the Philippines. He argues that “the gist of the Philippine post-colonial statecraft” hinges on how “frontier strongmen” are coopted into becoming the state’s ruling instruments, particularly in serving or subverting the centralizing state in “hegemonic processes of monopolizing physical force and symbolic violence” (p. 25). Looking at the cases of three strongmen in the Cagayan Valley in the northern Philippines, he concludes that — perhaps contrary to expectations — strongmen are not necessarily a threat to state rule, but may be “successfully contained” as well as “caught in the centralizing state’s governmental technologies and the ruled majority’s countergovernmental technologies” (p. xxvi).

Frontier governmentality, Wong argues, involves diverse tug-of-war processes and multiple areas of contestation where, across the Philippine archipelago, the sovereign state has decentralized to strongmen the authority to generate internal revenue, pacify unrest, and resolve disputes and conflicts. They do so — oftentimes successfully and to the benefit of the central government — through implementing state laws such as in counter-insurgency, land reform, elections, and education (p. 26). The process entails techniques described by Wong through his case studies as networking, identity-switching and brokering, among others (94).

In the case of the former military counterinsurgency expert–turned-governor-turned mutineer Rodolfo Aguinaldo, the strongman is co-opted and initially serves the objectives of the centralizing state, but he eventually does present a challenge to state-building when he declares secession of his province from the Republic. Revered as a legendary Robin Hood-like figure by the Cagayan populace when he served as governor from 1988–98, but loathed by others for his abuse of military power and then civilian authority, Aguinaldo exemplified both the local strongman’s critical role in capacitating the state to conduct discipline and surveillance, but also its need to maintain a careful balance between central and local power. Wong further explores the theme of discipline and surveillance in his discussion of the Mamba clan in the border town of Tuau, who belonged to the ethnic group Itawes. Fighting a communist insurgency, Cordilleran self-determination movement and vigilantes, the Mambas (with three generations involved in politics) employed governance techniques that further illustrate how frontier governmentality works.

A second theme of the book is the important role of ethnic Chinese individuals and clans in the local economy and politics in some parts of the Philippines. As in much of Southeast Asia, capital-rich ethnic Chinese are, to the author, “most wanted frontiers” of the state, who, as transnational actors, are also expected to present a potential challenge to state sovereignty. In the Philippines, the launching of a land reform programme in the 1950s broke landlord dominance over the peasantry and gave way to new patron-client ties between tenants and Chinese capitalists (p. 35). Many of these Chinese had, however, intermarried with locals, and, in Cagayan, they counted among their kinsmen Ilocanos or even indigenous Itawes and Ibanags. When President Ferdinand Marcos allowed the ethnic Chinese to become naturalized citizens, they gained more access to political office.

Here, Wong presents his readers with the interesting case of Delfin Ting, a former mayor of Tuguegarao City, who drew his influence in part from ethnic Chinese networks, business patrons in Manila and his family’s own participation in key economic activities such as rice milling and grain trading. Delfin launched his campaign against the other strongman Aguinaldo by moving to eliminate jueteng, a now-widespread illegal numbers game that had itself been brought by southern Chinese migrants into the Philippines but which later produced large slush funds for local officials, including Aguinaldo, who used it to fund counterinsurgency operations. Delfin Ting, the book tells us, used his “Chinese” credentials...