Revenge of the Dragon: China's New Opium War (Part 2 - The Philippines)

Click image to read Part 1.

In part 1 of this article I wrote of the Chinese government's 170-year-long grudge against the entire world over their laughably easy defeat by British forces in the 1840 Opium War, and of how China, unable to confront the United States toe-to-toe, has weaponized opium as a tool intended to destabilize the United States in much the same manner that they feared the British Empire was doing to them in the9th century. I wrote of the danger posed by China's presently preferred form of Opium, Fentanyl, and of the jaw-dropping scale with which this drug was entering the US, almost universally being traced to China. At this point, I hold several key points to be already.

1. That the Chinese government is complicit in this vast drug-pushing operation
2. That its motive is the weakening of American society, socially, economically, industrially and militarily by means of rendering our population unproductive and helpless while the cost of feeding their suicidal addictions pours into China's coffers
3. That the rationale behind that motive is the belief that they are entitled to vengeance upon the entire world for their perception of a 170-year-old British campaign against them which shattered their self-flattering facade of supremacy
4. That the concept of weaponization of narcotics for this purpose is in no way revolutionary in Chinese thinking, being present in both arcane culture and modern military discussions

Indeed, the idea of a population being undermined by rendering them insensate as opium addicts is not new to the Chinese. A fear of it seems to run throughout China's culture for centuries. As early as 1683, opium addiction was a wide-spread problem in China's port of Amoy (modern-day Xiamen) (World Drug Report, 173). In 1810, 30 years before the infamous Opium War, the Jiaqing Emperor issued an edict stating in no uncertain terms that he considered the drug a threat to not only people but an entire nation.

Opium has a harm. Opium is a poison, undermining our good customs and morality. Its use is prohibited by law. Now the commoner, Yang, dares to bring it into the Forbidden City. Indeed, he flouts the law! However, recently the purchasers, eaters, and consumers of opium have become numerous. Deceitful merchants buy and sell it to gain profit. The customs house at the Zhongwen Gate was originally set up to supervise the collection of imports (it had no responsibility with regard to opium smuggling). If we confine our search for opium to the seaports, we fear the search will not be sufficiently thorough. We should also order the general commandant of the police and police- censors at the five gates to prohibit opium and to search for it at all gates. If they capture any violators, they should immediately punish them and should destroy the opium at once. As to Guangdong and Fujian, the provinces from which opium comes, we order their viceroys, governors, and superintendents of the maritime customs to conduct a thorough search for opium, and cut off its supply. They should in no ways consider this order a dead letter and allow opium to be smuggled out!
(Fu Sholu, 380)

Nor have the Chinese shown any compunctions through the centuries regarding the weaponization of the drug. Chiang Kai-shek (Marshall, 10) and Mao Zedong (Xiao, China Uncensored both are known to have cultivated poppies and distributed them to territories outside their control while banning the drug within their borders. China's attitude toward opium has been rather consistent: it's something they want their enemies addicted to, without a trace of it in their own borders. What better way to win without fighting, as Sun Tzu so famously admonished his disciples to do, than to render its population helpless by means of an addictive drug which they empty their coffers -while filling yours- to provide?
Having already established in Part 1 that China is employing this strategy against the United States by means of the concentrated opiate, fentanyl, this article seeks to examine China's use of a similar strategy, albeit with methamphetamine as the drug of choice, against a nation it sees not as an enemy, but as a stepping stone to the Pacific to help it confront its enemy.

The Dragon Wants Out

The Philippines, therefore, is the only practical option for China. The Philippines would provide an excellent exit from the South China Sea and a usable one from the East China Sea. It is in many ways the perfect solution if China could access it.
George Friedman (2), Geopolitical Futures

At the risk of restating the obvious, throughout their nation's history, the Chinese have repeatedly proven incapable of grasping the concept of nations as equals (Kong Chan; Ford (1)). Their entire view of foreign policy is built upon recognizing hierarchy among nations (Ford (2)). This was manifested in Imperial China's "Tributary System" I briefly described in Part 1 of this article, wherein China's official state doctrines claimed their emperor had a "Mandate of Heaven" to rule "All Under Heaven" and any nation seeking to trade with the self-anointed "Celestial Empire" had to declare themselves vassals of the emperor. In 2010 at an ASEAN conference in Hanoi, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi proved that this mentality survives to the present day (Lowsen) with his infamous "China is a big country and other countries are small countries and that's just a fact" gaffe. China's foreign policy does not allow for the existence of "allies;" Only "vassals (that is, states who are under obligation to follow China's lead)" and "barbarians (nations which are not)."
With that having been said, it is worth noting that their goal of becoming a Pacific Power requires, among other things, access to the Pacific, from which they are currently blocked off (or would be in the event of a Sino-American conflict, anyway) by a ring of U.S. allied islands separated by tiny maritime choke points the overwhelmingly powerful US Navy could easily exploit. Beijing has decided since they can't gain this access by challenging the United States (Friedman (1)), they must make one of these allies switch sides (Friedman (2)). Well, their "charm offensive" failed (Leaf), so they realize their only way of gaining influence over one of these nations is to take it over, and the weapons of choice are Shabu, and bribery.
Since infiltrating Indonesia by way of drugs would be ineffective, given that possession of narcotics is a death penalty offense there, the chosen target was the Philippines.

Zhege Shabu, Ni Shabi!

The ones who died recently in Bulacan, 32, in a massive raid, that was good... If we could kill another 32 every day, then maybe we can reduce what ails this country.
-Rodi Duterte (Thomas Sturrock, South China Morning Post)

When you ask any member of the Philippine National Police Force what country comes to mind when you mention "shabu," the colloquial name for Methamphetamine, they will say 'China.' The Reuters quotes a report from the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency as saying "Of 77 foreign nationals arrested for meth-related drug offenses between January 2015 and mid-August 2016, nearly two-thirds were Chinese and almost a quarter were Taiwanese or Hong Kong residents (Chalmers (2))." As of 2018, the figure had climbed to 90%, according to PDEA Director General Aaron Aquino, with over 800 Chinese Nationals having been arrested for drug trafficking since 2001 (O'Rourke). This statement came after a high profile raid on a Chinese meth lab in Cauayan, capable of producing 400 kg of shabu every 10 days, in which the Chinese Nationals running the lab were gunned down. Chalmers quotes PDEA spokesman Derrick Carreon as saying openly “It’s safe to say that the majority of the meth we have comes from China."
And yet, despite China's primacy over the trade in narcotics (ownership of which is harshly punished in China itself, of course), when it comes to working with the Philippines to solve the problem, the Chinese government has offered little more than words. Despite their insistence that “China understands and supports the Philippines’ policy under the leadership of President Duterte to fight against drugs, and is willing to proactively cooperate against drugs with the Philippines (Chalmers)," Philippine DOJ Drug Task Force chairman and senior deputy state prosecutor Richard Fadullon says "there has been very little action on the part of the government of China." His words eerily echo the former Mexican Ambassador to China, Jorge Guajardo (Levin), who lamented how China just didn’t see what was in it for them to look into their own industries."
In fact, not only has China refused to cooperate with the Philippines in any way to stem the drug traffic from China to the Philippines, but they have actively blocked it. Chalmers' article also notes how China's response to the arrest of Chinese citizens running the Arayat meth lab was the classic Chinese script: deny, get offended, make threats. Despite the fact that all four were ethnically Chinese, with Chinese passports bearing recent entry stamps, despite flight records of those same passports being used for recent flights from China, and despite the fact that all four men had Chinese HuKou cards on them, China's ambassador to the Philippines vehemently denied that the men were Chinese and swore the passports had to be fake. What evidence did the Chinese ambassador have of this? Well, the fact that it would make China look bad if they were Chinese, therefore they could not be. In the mindset of the "Great and Glorious Middle Kingdom," that kind of "logic" actually makes perfect sense. And of course, predictably enough, these same denials featured heavily in the Chinese script when four more Chinese nationals were arrested running another major meth lab in Batangas in April of 2018 (CNN Philippines).
Two years later, Derrick Carreon says China remains the largest source of meth coming into the Philippines (Orellana), with a total of 2.5 million kilos of it, valued at 13.24 Billion Philippine Pesos (at the time of this writing the exchange rate is 53.63 Pesos to one USD) since July of 2016, when Rodrigo Duterte was sworn in. The issue came to a head in August of 2017 when 6.4 billion Philippine Pesos worth of shabu was intercepted on its way from China, by way of Chinese courier Hong Fei, to a warehouse in Valenzuela City owned by Chinese businessman Richard Chen (Interaksyon). This was the straw that finally made Philippine Senate blue ribbon committee chairman Richard Gordon say it was time to press China for an answer, saying the Philippines' shabu problem "begins in China, and must end in China (Elemia)." Barely more than a month later, Philippine authorities named the 3 most powerful triads in Southeast Asia as the ones responsible for the smuggling (Dumlao), which would put China, the home of the Triads, at ground zero of the blame and lay the burden of providing information squarely on their shoulders. Unsurprisingly, China has not been forthcoming with any assistance.
It would be bad enough if China was simply hiding the embarrassing fact that they have failed to keep their drug traffickers under control, but to say they have failed to do this misses the point. There is ample evidence that the Chinese Communist Party is not simply turning a blind eye to this trade but is actually involved in it. First, we have already established drug warfare as a tactic deemed legitimate by the PLA (Qiao & Wang, 146). Second, we have already established a pattern (both in history and in the present day) of the actual, not merely theoretical, use of drug warfare by Chinese strategists. Third, we have established multi-tiered motive (the need for dominance over the Philippines, and the belief that it will in some way be "vengeance" for their views of the Opium War). And finally, there is the matter of the Communist Party's long and intimate history with the Triads (Vines; Garnaut), who have already been named as the masterminds of the China-to-Philippines shabu trade.
Well then, the obvious response becomes "if the Philippines have a China-backed drug problem, be glad Duterte is fighting to clean up the drug situation by force," right?
Well, it's not that simple.

China's Agent in Malacañang

Rodrigo Duterte... Just mentioning the name provokes strong reactions all over the world. Some groan, some roll their eyes, and others toss their hats in the air. As for me, I have already stated my opinion of him (Reminisci (2)). Either way, the thing he is most famous for (other than handing the entire West Philippine Sea to Xi Jinping on a silver platter) (Reminisci (1)), is his no-holds-barred war on drugs. If one takes the body count into consideration, it would appear Duterte took the "war" part of this phrase a bit literally (Palatino). To be blunt, that would be forgivable if he was willing to acknowledge the actual source of the problem -China- instead of spreading his country's legs for Xi and insisting China is not to be blamed (Chalmers (1)). The Philippines would not be the first nation in Southeast Asia to bring force to bear against drug cartels. Indonesia and Vietnam, for example, both have zero-tolerance policies toward narcotics and neither one is shy about applying the death penalty, and as harsh as this may seem to soft Western ears, it works. Neither country has anywhere near the drug problems they had thirty years ago, Indonesia's Bali notwithstanding. Killing drug pushers in droves may not make him very many friends among Western lotus-eaters, but it could work. Indeed, a argument could be made that a harsh drug war was the only tactic that would work, given that the distribution of shabu throughout the Philippines by Chinese pushers ws, as Duterte rightly pointed out, a national security threat (Gulla).
Unfortunately, Duterte's fire-and-brimstone seems to go cold when it comes to criticisms of his Chinese master. "Many of those running the drug trade are Chinese triads, which are criminal syndicates. These are not government officials," Duterte was at pains to say when the previously referenced article from Reuters named China as the principle source of shabu in the Philippines. Earlier this Fall Duterte went so far as to exonerate a wealthy Chinese businessman implicated in a major drug investigation by stating rather flatly that he could not be involved in drugs, because he had close ties to the Chinese ambassador to the Philippines (Ranada). It would seem that this connection, if anything, should serve less to exonerate him but to further implicate the Chinese government, especially in light of the connections between the Chinese government and Triads, or the Chinese government's unwillingness to do anything to help, as stated by Fadullon and Guajardo.
The evidence makes it plain that China is deliberately using shabu to undermine Philippine society, just as they are doing with fentanyl in the US, but when Duterte is added to the equation, the pieces add up to a still more chilling picture. When one looks at the contrast of Duterte's brutality toward Filipinos involved in drugs and his soft-spoken approach to the Chinese who run the industry, the repeated signs pointing to high-level Chinese government involvement in the shabu trade in the Philippines, and the seemingly paradoxical fact that the trade seems to have grown under Duterte's drug war, it begins to appear that Duterte's "war on drugs" is not designed to clean up the Philippine drug problem, but to eliminate local competition so his Chinese master can carry on their drug-based attack with greater ease.

Works Cited

Books

Fu Sholu/ Documentary Chronicle of Sino-Western Relations 1644-1820. Tucson, 1966. University of Arizona Press.
ISBN 978-0-81650-151-9

Qiao Liang & Wang Xiangsui. Unrestricted Warfare. Beijing, 1999. People's Liberation Army Arts and Literature Publishing House.
(Translation from Echo Point Books and Media) ISBN 978-1-54951-052-6

Government / International Organization Documents

2008 World Drug Report, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Jun, 2008, https://www.scribd.com/document/14286975/World-Drug-Report-2008. Web, 28 Oct, 2018

Journals

Marshall, Jonathan. "Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism in Nationalist China, 1927-1945." Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, vol. 8, no. 3 Sep. 1976.

From the Web

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Ranada, Pia. "Duterte Clears Wealthy 'Drug Pusher,' Cites Close Ties to Chinese Envoy." Rappler. 4 Oct, 2018. Web, 27 Oct, 2018.
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Sturrock, Thomas. "For Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, it was Another Year of Sledges, Threats and ‘Rape Jokes’." South China Morning Post. 24 Dec, 2017. Web, 28 Oct, 2018.
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Vines, Stephen. "Triads and China do Hong Kong Deal." The Independent. 12 May, 1997. Web, 29 Oct, 2018.
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