[From: Miclat, Beyond the Great Wall: A Family Journal, Manila: Anvil Publishing, Inc. 2006, pp. 212-223] 

More and more products traditionally made in the Philippines are now made by neighboring countries – soap and shampoo, instant coffee and cream, umbrella and batteries, angel figurine and kaleidoscope. No amount of exhortation to nationalism can ever assuage our consumers from buying inexpensive quality materials. This is globalization, we are told.  

In our country, we come to learn about a concept not for what is is, but for what is passionately ascribed to it by various interest groups, contending forces, and competing ideological molds. In a science textbook for high school that I was editing, for instance, a chapter on electricity opened with a box of do’s and don’ts. It says, “Do not touch wire with wet hands. Do not change light bulb without parental guidance. Do not plug-in socket unless you are accompanied by an elderly.” By the time electricity was defined, enough fear has been planted in the pupils’ brain, their curious thoughts smothered. What a dismal attempt at spreading scientific culture among our youth.
 

When I was in high school, a gasoline station opened in our street corner, to the delight of my progressive mom. An aunt hurriedly came to our house bearing the news. “You’re happy?” asked my aunt. “What if those tanks explode!” There’s our mass culture of fear.

When an experimental nuclear reactor was to be built in UP during the fifties, ghosts of bombing victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were summoned in the debates. I do not think anybody mentioned the difference between a bomb and what was then to be the cheapest and cleanest source of energy. Today, many of our neighbors – Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China – are benefitting from nuclear science and technology. Japan, which suffered from the atomic bomb, has 20 or so nuclear power plants fuelling its industries. The small island of Taiwan, which is nearer to Laoag than is Zamboanga, has about four. We stand in awe of their progress – no brownouts! We suffer from backwardness, fear, and darkness. Yet we won’t be saved if those reactors do explode.

Now that experts see specific provisions in the constitution as hindering our economic growth, and which similar points have already been addressed by many of our neighbors, we are again drowned in an outcry of sorts made by egotistic politicians, self-serving charlatans and bigoted megalomaniacs. One issue after another, we intensify our tribal, barriotic, individualistic, factional, sectoral, class struggles. Again, we suffer from misinformation, disinformation, and ignorance. 

As we muddle through, our very close neighbor to the north – China – is proving to be the fastest growing economy. Do we realize how fast is fastest? 

Asia’s biggest moneymaker in 2001 was PetroChina with its profit of $6.67B from petroleum products with its sales amounting to $29.23B. PetroChina is only the third largest company in China. According to Asiaweek (Nov 9, 2001), PetroChina ranks next to State Power (power generation), and China Petroleum & Chemical. Fortune magazine (Jan 28, 2002) comments that most of China’s 100 largest companies come from heavy industries, “almost one in five is in the steel, mining or refining sector,” and all of them are state owned.   

The same sources reveal that Meralco, the Philippine top enterprise, had profits only 8.5% of PetroChina’s, or $56M from sales amounting to $2.42B in electricity distribution. The two other top Philippine companies include NAPOCOR and San Miguel Corporation. Before the Asian economic crisis, the industrial sector served as the Philippines’ engine of growth. It has become more important than agriculture as a source of national income. Agriculture contributes around 25% of our GDP. Majority of our population now live in urban areas. The biggest chunk of investments, however, goes to the services sector. Meanwhile, semiconductor devices and microcircuits remain our major export earner.   

For about six years in the late eighties and early nineties, we took pride of the fact that we achieved about four percent growth annually. That growth was able to build mini-cities of skyscrapers like that in Ortigas Center in Metro-Manila or Ayala Center in Metro-Cebu. Imagine how many Ortigas and Ayala Centers is China’s economy (which is 12 times bigger than ours) able to build with a sustained GDP growth twice as high (around eight percent per annum since the mid-1980s).   

Visiting China in June 2002, a UP Asian Center delegation I headed held discussions with academics and researchers of Fudan University and the Academy of Social Sciences in Shanghai, Renmin and Peking Universities in Beijing, and the southern Shenzhen University. My wife and daughter went with us but toured on their own. My daughter commented, perhaps confirming a World Bank projection made in the 1980s, that the cities we visited seemed to be more modern than their US counterparts which we also visited just a year earlier: Shanghai than New York, Beijing than Washington D.C., and Shenzhen than Los Angeles. She has also been to Hirosaki and Tokyo a couple of months ago to appear in a Japan Foundation sponsored play, and again observed that the China she saw seemed to be more modern.    

“What is China’s secret for development?” I invariably asked our hosts. Their reply, “Quanqiuhua, globalization!” Executive Director Chen Zuming of CAIFIC (China Association for International Friendly Contact) told us, “We profit from globalization and are making full use of our WTO membership.” For the Chinese, the concept of globalization is a clear alternative for economic development. To put an end to many years of deprivation and isolation due to what has proven to be an inefficient socialist system, they have to go through a process of (1) liberalization and deregulation; (2) freeing the market; (3) privatization; and (4) transparency.  

Liberalization and deregulation. The Chinese leadership has seen that because of a very detailed government economic plan (instead of just giving a general direction for agriculture, trade, and industry), supply of necessities was almost always lacking, and economic development was at a standstill. For example, you could always find diabolo in the commune store even when it was the hula-hoop, which children want to play with. Hula-hoop could not be produced unless approved by government. Once approved and production of hula-hoop started, children were already looking for Rubic cubes, or frisbee, or yoyo. Meanwhile the hula-hoop would still be produced as it had been approved. What happened was that the hula-hoop found its way to warehouses or displayed side by side with the unsellable diabolo. The store would announce a chuli, selling at reduced price, people buying items currently of no use hoping that they could be useful sometime in the future. Now we are only talking of hula-hoop here, but what about other necessities? The state subsidized each and every item in the market. There were grain subsidy, housing subsidy, school subsidy, all kinds of subsidy which served as a big burden to government.Where would it get the funds? In a system where government regulated every aspect of the economy, there was perpetual shortage of funds, supply, and daily necessities. Liberalization and deregulation help lessen the burden.   

Free market. When agricultural production was based on commune plans, fieldwork became like a factory task. Except for some chosen and well-advertised models (labelled “pinxiazhongnong” or “poor and lower middle peasants), strict schedules for starting work, resting and going home were followed. Distribution of grain during harvest would be based on workpoints depending on one’s work in the fields (i.e. after deducting the set government’s share of the harvest). Peasants spy at each other’s assignment since one might not be working as required. Harvest time becomes time for retribution against one another’s claims, instead of a satisfying neighborly activity. Peasant enthusiasm was dampened. Discouraging sideline occupation, communal agriculture brought the most basic needs – grain – to the peasants’ tables; but that was about all. We know that agricultural production needs a flexible schedule based on the seasons, the weather condition, or just even the time of sunrise and sunset. By dismantling the communes, individual peasant families were allowed to make their own production plans and sell their products in the free market (again, after giving the government’s share of the harvest, by way of tax).

Privatization. Bureaucratic red tape is characteristic of governments. Public funds held by government need to be protected from graft and corruption. Disbursement of funds, therefore, requires signatures from various official levels. This practice makes government an inefficent economic manager, especially of trade and industry, which requires fast decisions. Many state enterprises in China are thus being privatized.

However, privatization is not limited to government corporations, but also includes public services. In socialized housing, for instance, government built apartments for rent to qualified citizens at low, low prices. Since government always lacked funds, even as it controlled most corporations, it could not provide decent housing for all. Intrigues, gossip, and destroyed friendship became the order of the day everytime points were counted on who to prioritize for housing. Families of three generations finally granted a house gratefully tolerated a ten-square meter room, sharing kitchen and toilet with neighbors. In privatized housing, those who could afford now felt it their patriotic duty to buy their own houses or condomium units.

As for education, it was a socialist promise to give free education from primary to tertiary level. But then again, due to the lack of funds, free education was reserved to a very few, well-chosen, strictly screened students who were mostly children of cadres and members of the Communist Party. In a population of one billion in the 1980s, mainland Chinese were always surprised to learn that more Filipinos in a population of 60 million were able to go to institutes of higher learning. Again, at present, those who could afford to pay tuition are able to go to college in China.

Transparency. To counter government bureaucratic requirements in the handling of funds, it is hoped that privatized corporations practice transparency over the accounts they own. This new system is brought about by developments in the stock market. One sees grave consequences in defying transparency requirements not only for China but even in the most developed economies as proven by the experiences of Enron and Worldcom of the United States, Sogo Co. of Japan, and Samsung Electronics of South Korea. In other words, all economies, be they advanced or backward, should follow this principle if their companies should compete globally.   

To some extent, China’s problems with centralized state planning found parallel with our problems during martial law caused by protectionism which only favored a few crony capitalists.

When the Chinese say they ride the tide of globalization, they not only start following the above principles, they also make it a point to go by the schedules of tariff concessions and the rules governing export and import as discussed in periodic WTO meetings. Members wanting to get good concessions from WTO Rounds give objective presentation of products and services they are ready to sell and buy. Meanwhile, those who gibber and cry (perhaps to cover up their weaknesses, ignorance, and lack of resolve) generally lose. 

But it is not only China that profits from globalization. Ahead of China came Singapore, Hongkong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Malaysia, not to mention Japan, Israel, and South Africa. Boldly following them now also are India and Vietnam, which are fast surpassing us in the fields of information technology and in the production of basic consumer goods. On the other hand, like our country, many Latin American nations have joined the GATT/WTO even as their citizens are not quite aware of the implications. Argentina, Bolivia or Columbia just refuse to rise, or fall, but always find themselves in turmoil. (It is interesting to note that the last three societies are also diglossic like us, so much so that politicians speak an official language, Spanish, while the masses speak their own native Guarani, or Quechua, or Avmara).   

At one extreme of the world economic scale are countries which consider the global system as anathema to their very existence. Strictly following an autarkic policy of national economic independence are countries like Burma, Laos, Cuba, and North Korea. These countries believe, more or less, in a 1917 thesis of V.I.Lenin that a world economic order based on imperialism was going to be the highest stage of moribund capitalism, and they better be out of it. Lenin asserted more than 80 years ago that imperialism completes the territorial division of the world among the biggest capitalist powers. This is brought about by the following features: (1) a high degree of concentration of production and capital which created monopolies that play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital into what is called “finance capital” that created a financial oligarchy; (3) export of capital instead of just exporting commodities; and (4) the formation of capitalist monopolist corporations which share the world among themselves. According to this viewpoint, a weak country loses to the strong power within the system. 

The Chinese are proving that they can ride the tide and be the winner. They have had enough of autarky and so-called economic self-sufficiency. As Deng Xiaoping observed, during the time of Mao Zedong the Chinese indeed led an equalitarian life – they were equally impoverished.  

But if man does not live by bread alone, so is globalization not limited to the economy. It is not only the shift from state planning (protectionism in our case) to market economy, which brings about tremendous changes in our globalized world. We also witness the great wave of non-party-led democratic mass movements. Since our People Power Revolution of 1986, more and more countries give birth to (1) people initiated structures which take over previously strong government functions; (2) a more vigorous role for civil society; and (3) computer-based knowledge revolution.    

IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION, is there a need for a national language? Does embracing an international language as its own make a nation more globally competitive?  If language is the repository of knowledge and culture, what disadvantages do we want to redress and what benefits do we want to achieve, in trying to embrace one language over another? 

I need not mention here how UNESCO has proven in many studies that the best way to impart basic knowledge to children is by means of their native tongue. I shall not point out here what I already have before, that international mathematics and science surveys show that perhaps with the exception of Singapore, the countries which topped the list (including South Korea, Japan, Flanders Belgium, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Austria) use their national languages as medium of instruction (while Englisg-speaking Canada, New Zealand, England and the United States ranked only 18th, 24th, 25th and 28tj respectively in the Third IMSS). I do not want to over-emphasize the fact while our present bilingual education policy requires using English in science and mathematics, our students are ranked lowest side by side with Colombia and South Africa.  

We go around the world begging for investments, taking pride in our English-speaking workforce. China gallops with 8% GDP growth, while less than 1% of its workforce are able to speak English. We can also see from economies like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Israel, Vietnam that their strength and progress do not depend on their grasp of the English language. On the contrary, these countries use their national languages as a matter of course.  

Do our products really become competitive because we use English? At our favorite convenient store, don’t we buy products even when we see Thai characters on familiar toiletry labels or containers? How we gobble up Indonesian and Malaysian products in Davao’s Aldevinco even as their brands are in idioms we barely understand. Just like any other consumers in the world, we Filipinos want to buy quality products at competitive prices, not the English label. Don’t we sometimes even prefer French?  

The Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, Spanish, Germans find it natural to produce computers and develop programs in their own languages. Using their computer programs, they produce a thousand and one consumer and capital goods from meat, grains and vegetables to cars, audio-visual components and toys, which flood our market. They use their intellect for profit. What we use are only our basic senses just to be able to choose consumer goods. It is a shame that we snobbishly laugh at the Japanese, or Korean, or Taiwanese CEOs in our export processing zones for not being able to speak English on a level that we expect. And yet, they are the chiefs.  

This is not to say that other countries do not struggle to learn foreign languages and international lingua francas, especially English. However, knowledge production and bequeathing wisdom to the succeeding generation through the school system are done in their national languages. Spreading scientific, national and pluralistic culture through a popular language makes their nation more productive. And they sell their products to the world.

When some radio or television commentators say that English makes us more competitive, I suppose they invariably refer to our export of manpower, not economic products nor quality consumer goods. They limit our competitiveness to just the sale of our brain and brawn. They mimic the politicians who proceed from a very short-term goal of finding jobs for the masses of our unemployed either abroad, or here in foreign-driven interests as those in the EPZ’s and some call centers. 

The trade and industry secretary, Mar Roxas, made claims in his radio program that the Chinese are now exposing their young to a 100% English environment as training for modernization. He, therefore, called for massive Anglicization of the medium of instruction at all levels in all schools. I am sure that what he saw in China was just a small group of fresh graduates from language institutes, not the entire youth population nor the entire school curriculum. It took many years of research, studies, and experimentations to develop our present bilingual curriculum, in which some courses like civics and culture are thought in the national language. Changing it means retooling a big number of our public school faculty and rewriting some textbooks anew. Unless we again use ready-made American textbooks which reflect realities in a temperate continental country, rather than in our tropical archipelago. The new batch of students schooled in such a curriculum will take at least ten years of primary and secondary education, plus another four years of tertiary. By the time we have our first batch of all-English graduates in 2017, China would have graduated at least 10 batches of language students specially trained in English, if they are indeed already starting now.  

As of now, we still see in our midst the graduates of the all-English curriculum of the past. Have we not heard enough from our congressmen and senators? How many of them murder whatever language they use! 

EMPIRES WITH THEIR lingua francas have come and gone, but the national languages remain as the source of any nation’s strength. When a country becomes the new power, it gives the world its national language as the new lingua franca. At one point in history, every citizen of the known world (or a small portion of the population, usually the ruling elite) thought that Latin was so global it would last forever. When the Roman Empire fell, its colonies reverted to, or developed their own, national languages. During the Islamic expansion, Arab intellectuals developed algebra, chemistry, and astronomy; the whole intellectual world seemed to speak Arabic in the 10th century. Then the Castillians and other Europeans had to take over the Arab schools of Toledo in the 15th century. We saw the glorious days of French in the 19th century. In the 20th century, we saw how American English and Russian contended with each other for world dominance, until American won. Finding expression in the native tongue, it is a country’s national, scientific, and pluralistic culture that predisposes its capacity to embrace a global and cosmopolitan culture. Then and now (that UN debates on Iraq seem to usher in a new balance of power in the world), well-prepared nations would be the ones to overcome adversities.   

A national language does not come easily; it does not develop as spontaneously as some wishful academics think. Israel in the 1950s had to revive an extant language, Hebrew, even as many of its citizens already knew English. For all the protestations by some Okinawans about their being colonized by Tokyo, Okinawan children simply have to use Japanese or the national language based on the Tokyo tongue. Economies of scale make it a practical necessity that even while a Shanghainese director speaks a different native tongue, all films produced by the Shanghai Film Studio should be in Mandarin Chinese based on the Beijing dialect. The same principle goes in having Hindi as the language of films produced in India’s Bollywood. Films in other Indian languages are reserved for award-seeking experimentations. But using a national language goes beyond economies of scale. It encompasses the whole gamut of a nation’s intellectual capacity, production of knowledge, cultural achievement, and contribution to world heritage.

English, as it were, had to start somewhere. A 1517 poem written by an Englishman named John Rastell, called on his countrymen, both noblemen and those of “mean estate” to use their own language – English – in writing “works of gravity” just as other “cunning” people did. The poem (as quoted in Neville Alexander and David Szanton, “Towards the Intellectualization of African Languages,” 2003) goes:                       

                        The grekes the romans with many other mo
                                    In their mother tongue wrote workes excellent
                                    Then if clerkes in this realm would take pain so
                                    Considering that our tongue is now sufficient
                                    To expound any hard sentence evident
                                    They might if they would in our english tongue
                                    Write works of gravity sometime among
                                    For divers pregnant wits be in this land
                                    As well of noble men as of mean estate
                                    Which nothing but english can understand
                                    Then if cunning latin books were translate
                                    In to english well correct and approbate
                                    All subtle science in english might be learned
                                    As well as other people in their own tongues did 

In an earlier article, I have shown how translation played a most important role in the development of both East and West. The richness and maturity of a language is favorably viewed vis-a-vis translations of the Bible, the Q’uran, Oriental classics, Western philosophies, Shakespeare or Omar Khayyam. The Chinese translated from Sanskrit, the Romans translated from Greek, Arabic and Sanskrit; the Arabs translated from Roman and Greek; the Castillians translated from Arabic; the French, the Germans, the English translated from all the rest; and in full circle, the Chinese and Japanese translated from the Western classics. [see Mario I. Miclat, “Translations into Filipino: Defining Self, Defining the Other” Sanghaya 2001 Arts & Culture Yearbook, (Manila: NCCA, 2001) pp. 116-120]. In the 19th century, Jose Rizal translated Eastern fables, Schiller, and Hans Christian Andersen into Tagalog. 

In the late sixties, some professors and students started using Filipino in intellectual fields traditionally reserved for English in this country – psychology (in UP), philosophy (in UP and Ateneo), chemistry (UST and UP), and general science and agronomy (Araneta University). The first quarterstormers started publishing books on political-economy in Filipino. In 1996, the UP System’s Sentro ng Wikang Filipino started publishing Filipino books in the natural sciences, mathematics, philosophy, and art studies. But the key word in all these is “started.” Now that we have barely “started” something, many of us want to revert to English. (Can we Filipinos ever finish something we start? And where do we “revert to” when the school system as a whole has not even used the intellectual products we have “started” to make? Meanwhile, universities in Africa are making a concerted effort and are about to make UP a model for how to get out from under the total domination of colonialism by way of using and developing their national languages.) 

If it is any consolation, Philippine mass media targetting the b, c and d crowd (i.e. b for bakya, pa rin; c for chinelas sa bahay; and d for de-sandalyas sa five-star hotel) or the great majority of Filipinos, have been using Filipino in an unprecedented scale. Entertainers and entertained; university professors and kindergarten teachers; workers, entrepreneurs and capitalists; writers and readers; fault-finders and the faultless confront each other over radio and television discussing in Filipino the latest issues, problems, and gossip. From Kris’ latest love affair, public works anomalies and the impending Iraq war, to the murder of former activists by their own comrades, terrorism in urban centers and Lisa Macuja ballet dancing the tinikling. Surely there are problems, questions, and issues we must discuss as a nation, for our own sake and our children’s. And we know that there are times they are better done in the native tongue. [see also Mario I. Miclat, “Pagsulong sa Ortograpiyang Filipino bilang Salamin ng Kasaysayan at Kulturang Pambansa,” Bulawan 3: Journal of Philippine Arts & Culture (Manila: NCCA, 2001) pp. 20-37].     

When he was still the DECS Secretary, Dr. Andrew Gonzales of De La Salle University stated that 98% of all Filipinos understoood Filipino. Our Foreign Secretary, Ka Blas Ople, has said that our national language based on Tagalog ranked eighth among languages spoken at home in the US, surpassing that of German, Italian, or French. Our language can also be heard in public address systems advertising consumer products in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Dubai. Meanwhile, a 1998 SWS survey asked a representative national sample as to what language they preferred primary school textbooks be written in. The open-ended questionnaire did not ask the respondents from a prepared list of languages. The survey showed “49% of the respondents answered Tagalog, 31% said that it should be Tagalog and English, and only, [my emphasis] 20% said that it should be English.” (Mahar Mangahas, “People Prefer teaching in Filipino” Manila Standard, May 28, 1999). Do such surveys mean anything to us at all? 

We Filipinos are now scattered all over the world. What makes us Filipino even in foreign soil? What made Ninoy Aquino conclude that the Filipino was “worth dying for”? More than the rosary or whatever beads we always keep in our pockets; more than the scent of lanzones, ube, pickled mango, or tuyo in suka’t bawang; more than the memory of the amihan at Christmastime and Ramadan – what keeps our spirit alive? Well, here is a commercial: “Does the Filipino language ever play a role when we conceive our dreams for our families and our people?”  

I mentioned above the gas station at the street corner. Every other Filipino seems to dream of owning a house on the strategic street corner so he could open a station, a sari-sari store, or a billiard parlor. But as a whole people, we share a property that is more strategic than a corner lot. It is none other than the great Philippine archipelago. The United States made use of our strategic location and became a Pacific, nay world, superpower. Centuries earlier, Spain also made use of our strategic location to launch the Galleon Trade and be the world’s superpower during her time. From1565 to 1813, it monopolized trade between Asia (thru Manila) and Europe and the Americas (thru Acapulco). Before Spain, people of Luzon took their merchandise to Borneo and Malacca, while Borneans go to the islands of Luzon to buy gold and foodstuff. Visayans, Mindanaoans, and Tausogs went to China for trade.   

Today, in this era of globalization and the World Trade Organization, we Filipinos are, at last, again in charge of this archipelago. How do we make use of our strategic and comparative advantages to ride on globalization for the benefit of the nation as a whole?  Suppose we start, like the English did half a millennium ago, by using our national language? But, alas, Rizal and Ninoy have died. And we find in us a people with no national will.