Opinion | US-Philippine ties fray further with Manila’s embrace of China’s Huawei

A century ago, the British historian Benedict Anderson observed, the “Americans installed, by stages, a political regime, modelled on their own” in the Philippines, their sole colony in the eastern hemisphere. The upshot was Asia’s first liberal democracy, with characteristic American-style corruption and paralysing partisanship. Soon after the second world war, the Christian-majority nation gained its independence, yet it simply ended up outsourcing many of its security needs to its former colonial master. Under President Rodrigo Duterte, however, this century-old pattern of strategic subservience is coming to an end. In open defiance of the US, the Philippines has decided to climb on the global Huawei bandwagon, wedding its technological future to Chinese telecommunications giants. Over the past decade, China has emerged as the Philippines’ leading trading partner and, now, as its major technological patron. The Sino-Philippine economic entwinement is largely facilitated by Filipino-Chinese tycoons who run many of the Southeast Asian country’s big businesses. As Stanley Karnow observed in his book, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, “Everybody who is anybody in the Philippines today, except for a few Spanish mestizos, has Chinese ancestors.” In open defiance of the US, the Philippines has decided to climb on the global Huawei bandwagon, wedding its technological future to Chinese telecommunications giants The Philippines’ telecommunication duopoly, Globe Telecom and Smart Communications, both led by Philippine-Chinese elites, are set to adopt Huawei’s next-generation 5G technology for their rapidly expanding service network in the country. Meanwhile, Mislatel, the new third player in the telecommunications industry led by Philippine-Chinese and Duterte ally Dennis Uy, is rolling out its services, which heavily rely on the engineering support and basic technology of China Telecom. US hits back at Huawei’s constitutional challenge to sales ban In fact, Mislatel is owned by Udenna Corp, in which China Telecom, a state-backed company, holds a 40 per cent stake. The decision to embed Chinese companies in the Philippines’ strategic sectors has riled political opposition and security experts at home as well as the country’s sole treaty ally, the United States. Critics argue that welcoming next-generation Chinese telecommunication technology allows Beijing to effectively monitor and manipulate the country’s communication flows with potentially dire national security implications. China Telecom, however, has rejected such criticism, maintaining that it is “deeply committed to the security of its network”, and will accordingly “ensure it handles user data in strict compliance with the data-protection regulations” of host nations. Mislatel is expected to commit up to US$5 billion over the next five years to carve out its niche in the Philippines’ booming market, which has suffered from one of the slowest and most expensive internet connections in the region. Huawei authorities, meanwhile, have reiterated that they are a privately owned company that adheres to the highest global standards. Philippines’ embrace of Huawei reflects China’s influence, US failure The Chinese telecommunications giant is currently in the midst of a major global expansion plan, establishing its technological footprint across 130 markets, including in Europe and in two American allies, South Korea and United Arab Emirates. Globe Telecom’s president and chief executive Ernest Lawrence Cu told Bloomberg earlier this year: “We’re very confident that we’re well protected” following Globe’s expected adoption of Huawei technologies, citing the “clean bill of health” audit recently conducted by Western cyber-consultants. The US, however, maintains a diametrically opposite position. During his visit to Manila this year, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo implored nations in the region to shun Chinese telecommunications technology, particularly Huawei. “We believe that competition, whether it’s in 5G or some other technology, ought to be open, free, transparent, and we worry that Huawei is not that,” Pompeo argued, openly questioning Huawei’s reliability and competitive practices. “Our task has been to share with the world the risks associated with that technology, the risks to the Filipino people, the risk to Philippine security,” he added. Why Trump’s Huawei ban deals a harder blow than his tariffs Pompeo went so far as to warn that Washington’s security cooperation with the Philippines would suffer if they were to adopt Huawei 5G technology. “America may not be able to operate in certain environments if there is Huawei technology adjacent to that,” he reiterated, raising the prospect of reduced intelligence-sharing with the Philippines. In response, China’s foreign ministry has accused critics of “trying to politicise normal business cooperation” between Chinese companies and their regional counterparts. The chief American diplomat sought to leverage Washington’s historical prestige and strategic momentum to influence Manila’s decision on the issue. After all, for decades, the Southeast Asian country lived within Washington’s strategic orbit. Beijing justified to stay cautious over lifting of some bans on Huawei Even though the Philippines gained formal independence in 1946, post-war Philippine leaders signed agreements, Benedict Anderson explains, which permitted the US to “retain control of its bases in the Philippines for 99 years” and gave “Americans ‘parity’ access to the economic resources of the ‘independent’ Philippines …” But the end of the cold war, which saw the removal of permanent American bases from Philippines soil and the subsequent re-emergence of China as a regional powerhouse, gradually changed the equation. Duterte’s rise to power, and his rapprochement with China in open defiance of the West, marks the culmination of this major strategic shift. The Philippine government has broadly dismissed Pompeo’s warning, announcing the establishment of the Cybersecurity Management System to monitor the activities of Chinese telecommunications personnel and companies. In June, the former Information and Communications Technology Secretary Eliseo Rio, a former general, told the Nikkei Asian Review that Manila will “make sure that [Chinese companies] will not be a threat to our national security or else they will lose their licence”. In short, the Philippines now feels sufficiently confident to embed Chinese companies in its critical infrastructure, even if this move could affect security cooperation with the US. Welcome to the post-American Philippines. Richard Heydarian is a Manila-based academic and author