ONE OF the controversies these past weeks was Bamban, Tarlac’s Mayor Alice Guo and her alleged connection with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). A quick search on social media reveals that a lot of Filipinos seem to think this is a big deal, but the truth is that this is just another symptom of living in our modern world.
Whether or not the allegations against Guo are true, she is undoubtedly partly Chinese, which brings up the issue of immigration and foreign influence.
Immigration is a serious matter for any country. The ability to identify who belongs in the ingroup and who is in the outgroup is one of the fundamental aspects of nationhood and ethnicity.
In the past several decades of peace and relative prosperity, there was little need for the ingroup-outgroup distinction. Citizenship became hyphenated (e.g Filipino-American, Filipino-Chinese, Filipino-Lebanese,etc…) and no one was bothered by it, because there was peace.
Recently, however, that has become less true. Certain global events, particularly those involving China, have woken up Filipinos to the issue of dual-loyalties, and dare I say, people with dual heritage which give rise to dual-loyalties.
Consider this. If you are a Filipino-American, who will you side with if there was a conflict, the Philippines or America?
The same question can be directed on other hyphenated citizens. In the past, most countries and states avoided this problem by simply maintaining a homogenous population, but the modern world has proclaimed that measure obsolete.
Guo is suspected of being a CCP agent, and whether that accusation is true or not, what is more telling is that Filipinos are feeling a primal emotion: the urge to exclude the outsider, and that is a healthy emotion. We have rediscovered the very natural feeling of xenophobia, the fear of the alien, and it is a feeling that has evolved across millennia to protect human groups from outside threats and subversions. It’s this feeling that has driven humans to build walls and distrust outsiders. The post-war order has driven it underground and with the end of that order, it’s making a comeback.
The investigation on Alice Guo is an emotional symptom of the changing winds, and the more unstable and dangerous the world becomes, the stronger these emotions will be./PN
