One China, Two Perspectives: Rethinking What the Policy Means for the Philippines

One China, Two Perspectives:

Rethinking What the Policy Means for the Philippines

Source: the Economist

The “One-China Policy” is often invoked in Philippine foreign-policy discussions as though its meaning were self-evident. The conventional formulation is familiar: there is one China, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the government representing China, Taiwan is part of China, and countries that recognize Beijing are expected to observe that position in their diplomatic relations.

There is, however, a problem with treating that formulation as the complete explanation. The phrase “One China” has a history that predates the PRC’s present diplomatic formulation. It emerged from a much longer contest over who had the political legitimacy to represent China. For much of the second half of the 20th century, the relevant dispute was not simply between Beijing and Taiwan as two separate political entities. It was a contest between the PRC in Beijing and the Republic of China (ROC), whose government relocated to Taiwan, with both governments claiming to represent China.

That history is important because it changes the question being asked. The issue is not merely whether there is “one China.” It is also which conception of China, which government’s claim to representation, and which historical interpretation provide the basis for saying that there is one China.

For Beijing, the answer is clear. The PRC is the sole legal government of China, Taiwan is part of China, and there cannot be “two Chinas” or an independent Taiwan. Taipei's position has evolved considerably over the decades, particularly as Taiwan developed its own democratic institutions and political identity, but the ROC's original position was itself based on a competing claim to represent China.

The international system eventually resolved the question of China's representation in favor of Beijing. But resolving representation is not necessarily the same thing as resolving every historical, political or legal question that has grown out of the Chinese civil war.

That distinction is particularly relevant when the United Nations is invoked as the definitive foundation of the contemporary One-China narrative.

Is the issue really about the United Nations?

United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758 of 1971 is central to the history of the issue. The resolution restored the PRC's rights in the United Nations, recognized the representatives of the PRC government as the lawful representatives of China in the organization, and removed the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek. In institutional terms, it was decisive: Beijing obtained China's seat at the United Nations, while Taipei lost the ROC's representation there.

But the resolution raises a question that is often overlooked in public discussion: "is the Taiwan question fundamentally a question about the United Nations?" It is not. The UN is an important part of the history, but it is not the entirety of the history. Resolution 2758 settled who would represent China within the United Nations system. It did not, merely by determining the occupants of China's UN seat, erase the political history that produced the competing governments in the first place.

Nor should a resolution concerning representation automatically be treated as though it were a comprehensive international adjudication of every question concerning Taiwan's sovereignty, political status or future.

This is where the use of the United Nations as a kind of diplomatic alibi can become problematic. It allows a complicated historical contest over legitimacy to be reduced to an institutional outcome: the UN recognizes Beijing, therefore the broader One-China question is considered settled on Beijing's terms.

That conclusion goes beyond what the institutional question itself necessarily establishes. Beijing certainly has a broader interpretation. Chinese authorities regard Resolution 2758 as affirming the One-China principle and supporting the position that Taiwan is part of China. Taiwan and other governments and analysts have disputed that interpretation, particularly the proposition that the resolution itself constitutes a determination of Taiwan's sovereignty.

The existence of this dispute does not make Resolution 2758 irrelevant. Quite the opposite. It demonstrates why the resolution must be understood in its proper context.

The UN resolved the question of "who represents China in the organization". It did not transform a decades-long contest over Chinese legitimacy into a simple matter of historical nonexistence. The distinction may appear technical, but international relations frequently turn on precisely these technical distinctions. Representation, recognition, sovereignty and territorial claims are related concepts, but they are not interchangeable.

The historical problem of “One China”

The contemporary phrase can also obscure the fact that “One China” historically had competing meanings. For the PRC, the principle meant that there is one China, that the PRC is the sole legal government of China, and that Taiwan is part of Chinese territory. For the ROC, particularly during the earlier decades after 1949, the proposition was framed differently. The ROC did not initially regard itself as merely the government of Taiwan. It claimed to be the legitimate government of China.

Thus, the historical dispute was not simply “Beijing versus Taiwanese independence.” For a substantial period, it was a contest between two governments making competing claims to represent the same China.

That distinction matters because it shows why the phrase “One China” cannot simply be detached from the question of political legitimacy. The PRC ultimately prevailed in the international contest for diplomatic recognition. Most states shifted recognition from Taipei to Beijing, and the PRC assumed China's UN seat. Taiwan, meanwhile, continued to be governed separately under the ROC government and gradually developed a political system and identity distinct from the mainland.

The international community consequently arrived at a diplomatic arrangement that is inherently more complicated than the slogan suggests. Most states recognize Beijing as the government of China while maintaining various forms of unofficial relations with Taiwan.

The Philippines is part of this diplomatic system. But being part of that system does not necessarily require Manila to adopt every proposition contained in Beijing's broader political narrative.

What did the Philippines actually agree to?

The Philippine position has a clear historical foundation. When Manila established diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1975, the two countries issued a Joint Communiqué. The Philippines recognized the PRC as the sole legal government of China and stated that it understood and respected the Chinese position that Taiwan is part of Chinese territory.

This is an important commitment and should not be minimized. It forms part of the foundation of Philippine-China diplomatic relations and explains why official Philippine policy does not recognize Taiwan as a separate sovereign state.

But a diplomatic commitment should be read according to what it actually says and the context in which it was made. There is a meaningful difference between recognizing the PRC as the government representing China and accepting that every subsequent interpretation Beijing places upon the One-China principle automatically becomes a Philippine position.

The distinction is not unique to China. In international diplomacy, recognition of another government does not ordinarily mean that the recognizing state adopts every historical claim, territorial interpretation, strategic objective or political doctrine advanced by that government. Diplomatic recognition establishes a relationship between states and governments. It does not eliminate the independent foreign policy of the recognizing state.

This is where the Philippine discussion could benefit from greater precision. The relevant question is not whether Manila has a One-China Policy. It clearly does. The more useful question is "what the Philippine One-China Policy actually requires Manila to recognize, and what it does not require Manila to surrender." That is particularly important because the Philippines has interests of its own.

A policy cannot be separated from national interest

Philippine policy toward China cannot be considered exclusively through the prism of diplomatic recognition. China is one of the Philippines' most important economic and trading partners, while the Philippines is simultaneously a maritime state with its own territorial claims, security interests and obligations.

Taiwan is also not an abstract issue for Manila. Its geographic proximity means that instability in the Taiwan Strait could have direct consequences for Philippine commerce, shipping, supply chains, investment and energy security. The Philippines also has substantial people-to-people and economic ties with Taiwan, including a large Filipino workforce there.

From a business perspective alone, this makes excessive simplification undesirable. Companies do not operate according to diplomatic slogans. They deal with shipping routes, insurance premiums, supply-chain exposure, investment decisions, labor mobility, market access and political risk. A significant disruption in the Taiwan Strait would not remain a theoretical geopolitical problem; it could become an economic problem for the Philippines.

This does not mean that Manila should abandon its One-China Policy. It means that the policy has to coexist with the Philippines' responsibility to protect its own interests.

There is no inherent contradiction in maintaining official diplomatic relations with Beijing while sustaining substantial unofficial economic, commercial, cultural and people-to-people relations with Taiwan. Indeed, this is broadly how many governments manage the practical consequences of the cross-Strait divide. The question is therefore one of diplomatic scope.

Recognition is not the same as deference

There is a tendency in some discussions to treat the One-China Policy as though it were a comprehensive commitment to Beijing's worldview. That is where a diplomatic policy can quietly become something much larger than its original purpose.

Recognizing Beijing does not necessarily mean that Manila must accept Beijing's interpretation of every development involving Taiwan. Nor does it mean that the Philippines must treat every Chinese statement concerning the Taiwan Strait as though it were an authoritative interpretation of Philippine obligations.

There is an important distinction between "acknowledging another state's position" and "adopting that position as one's own".

The Philippine formulation in its 1975 diplomatic agreement is instructive precisely because it used language concerning the Philippine government's understanding and respect for the Chinese position. That language belongs to the diplomatic history of the relationship and should be taken seriously. But it should also be distinguished from the broader and more categorical formulation Beijing uses when describing its own One-China principle.

This distinction becomes particularly important when the issue intersects with Philippine sovereignty. A sovereign state cannot reasonably be expected to regard its own foreign policy as infinitely elastic simply because another state attaches a broader meaning to a diplomatic commitment.

The Philippines can recognize China's government while retaining an independent assessment of what its own national interests require. It can avoid taking a position on Taiwan's ultimate political status while still preparing for the economic and security consequences of developments across the Taiwan Strait. It can maintain its diplomatic relationship with Beijing while continuing practical relations with Taiwan. That is not necessarily a contradiction. It is the normal complexity of statecraft.

The problem with making Beijing the default definition

The deeper issue, then, is the tendency to treat Beijing's interpretation of “One China” as though it were the definition of the term itself.

This is understandable from Beijing's perspective. The PRC is the internationally recognized government of China and holds China's seat at the United Nations. It is therefore unsurprising that Beijing would present its interpretation as the authoritative one.

But other countries do not have to surrender the distinction between "China's position" and "their own policy". This is particularly important for the Philippines because diplomatic language has practical consequences.

If Manila says that it recognizes the PRC as the government of China, that establishes one thing. If Beijing then says that this recognition necessarily requires Manila to accept every element of the PRC's interpretation concerning Taiwan, regional security, military activities or Philippine policy, that is a second proposition. The second proposition requires its own justification.

It should not be smuggled into Philippine policy simply by repeating the phrase “One China.” This is why the debate over terminology is not merely semantic. The language used in diplomatic statements establishes the boundaries within which governments later interpret their obligations.

A broad interpretation may produce a very different foreign policy from a narrower one.

What about Taiwan?

None of this requires the Philippines to recognize Taiwan as an independent sovereign state. That would be a separate policy question. Nor does it require Manila to reject the PRC's position.

The more modest argument is that Taiwan's practical existence cannot be wished away simply because most countries do not recognize it diplomatically as a sovereign state. Taiwan has its own government, legal and economic institutions, political system, armed forces and international economic relationships. Its political status is contested, and its international participation remains constrained by the diplomatic consequences of the PRC's position and by the policies of other states. These facts coexist. The Philippines can acknowledge these practical realities without altering its formal diplomatic recognition of Beijing.

Indeed, this distinction is essential for business and economic policy. Philippine companies dealing with Taiwan do not cease to exist because Manila maintains a One-China Policy. Trade does not become illegitimate. Educational exchanges do not become illegitimate. Investment does not cease to have economic value.

The challenge for government is to maintain these practical relationships without creating unnecessary conflict with its formal diplomatic commitments. That requires careful policy, not slogans.

The danger of confusing international recognition with historical finality

There is also a broader lesson in the way the One-China issue is discussed. International recognition can settle the practical question of which government other states will deal with. It does not necessarily settle every historical argument surrounding legitimacy.

The PRC won the international contest for recognition as the government representing China. That is an established feature of the present international system. But the historical fact that another government once made the same claim does not disappear because the international balance changed.

Nor does the separate political development of Taiwan disappear. This is why describing the history simply as “China and Taiwan” can itself be misleading. It projects today's political geography backward onto a period in which the central dispute was explicitly about which government represented China.

Understanding that history does not require endorsing the ROC's former claim, nor does it require rejecting the PRC's current position. It simply makes the analysis more accurate.

What should matter to Manila?

For the Philippines, the practical issue is ultimately one of policy autonomy. Manila does not need to choose between Beijing's entire political narrative and Taipei's historical narrative. It needs to determine what its own diplomatic commitments mean and how those commitments interact with Philippine national interests. That means maintaining the One-China Policy where it forms part of the country's established diplomatic position, while being precise about its scope.

It means recognizing the PRC as the government with which Manila maintains official diplomatic relations without assuming that recognition transfers to Beijing the authority to define Philippine policy on every issue. It means understanding Resolution 2758 as an important part of the history of China's representation at the United Nations without using it as a substitute for analysis of the broader Taiwan question.

And it means recognizing that Philippine sovereignty and national interest remain distinct from the diplomatic question of which government represents China. This last point is particularly important as economic and security questions increasingly overlap.

The Philippines is not an abstract observer of the Taiwan Strait. It sits near one of the world's most important commercial and strategic waterways. Its economy is integrated into regional supply chains. Its workers, companies and consumers are exposed to developments in both mainland China and Taiwan.

Foreign policy therefore has an economic dimension that cannot be ignored. A policy that is diplomatically neat but analytically imprecise can create problems when geopolitical tensions reach the level of trade, investment, logistics and national security.

A more precise way of looking at One China

The One-China Policy need not be discarded. But neither should it be treated as though its meaning were self-evident. A more precise reading begins by distinguishing several questions that are frequently collapsed into one.

• First, "which government does the Philippines recognize as the government of China?" The answer is the PRC.
  
  
• Second, "what position does Beijing take regarding Taiwan?" Beijing maintains that Taiwan is part of China and that the PRC is the sole legal government representing China.
  
  
• Third, "what does UN Resolution 2758 establish?" It establishes the PRC's representation of China in the United Nations and removed the ROC representatives from China's UN seat. The broader implications of the resolution for Taiwan remain a matter of competing interpretation.
  
  
• Fourth, "what did the Philippines itself agree to when it established diplomatic relations with Beijing?" That question should be answered from Philippine diplomatic documents, not simply from Beijing's subsequent characterization of the agreement.
  
  
• And finally, "what remains within the Philippines' own sovereign policy discretion?" That last question is often the least discussed and perhaps the most important.

A country's foreign policy cannot consist solely of accepting the interpretations of larger powers. Diplomatic relationships necessarily involve accommodation, but accommodation is not identical to surrendering policy autonomy.

Beyond the slogan

The One-China question is therefore more complicated than the standard formulation suggests. Historically, it emerged from a contest in which two governments claimed to represent China. The PRC ultimately secured international recognition as the government representing China and took China's seat at the United Nations. Taiwan, under the ROC government, subsequently developed along a separate political and economic trajectory.

That history matters because it explains why “One China” is not simply a geographical statement. It is also a question of representation, legitimacy and diplomatic recognition. The United Nations is an important part of that story, but it should not become a substitute for the story itself. Resolution 2758 answered the institutional question of who represents China at the UN. It did not eliminate the historical circumstances that produced the dispute or automatically determine the meaning that every country must attach to its own One-China Policy.

For the Philippines, the prudent approach is therefore neither to discard the policy casually nor to treat it as an unlimited commitment to Beijing's interpretation.

The better approach is to recover the distinction between recognition and endorsement, representation and sovereignty, diplomatic commitment and national interest. That distinction allows Manila to maintain its established diplomatic relationship with Beijing while preserving the policy space necessary to protect Philippine economic and security interests.

It also avoids a false choice. The Philippines does not have to decide whether Beijing or Taipei is the country's preferred historical narrator of China. It has to decide what the Philippine government recognizes, what it has agreed to, what it remains free to determine for itself, and how those choices serve Philippine interests.

For a country whose economy is deeply connected to the wider East Asian system, that is not a philosophical distinction. It is a practical one. And perhaps that is where the One-China debate should begin: not with the assumption that Beijing's interpretation is the only possible meaning of the phrase, but with the more basic question of what the Philippines itself means when it says it has a One-China Policy—and whether that meaning is being defined in Manila or elsewhere.  

September 21 and the Continuing Past

September 21 and the Continuing Past

There was something appropriate about the route taken through Manila on September 21.

Activists and multi-sectoral groups gathered at Liwasang Bonifacio before marching toward Mendiola for the 54th commemoration of the declaration of martial law. Their grievances did not stop at 1972. Corruption, human rights violations, the flood-control controversy and the proposed Pax Silica development all appeared in a protest that sought to connect an unhappy past with an equally unsettled present.

The contingent was initially blocked by authorities along Recto near Mendiola before proceeding with its final program. Elsewhere around the capital, police and barricades had already become part of the scenery as thousands were expected to join various September 21 demonstrations. Accountability over corruption, political dynasties and civil liberties figured prominently in the day's mobilizations.

It would be tempting to treat all this as another annual ritual: speeches, placards, the familiar chants of “Never Again,” followed by the inevitable arguments over what martial law accomplished and what it destroyed.

Yet September 21 persists precisely because the argument has never really been confined to martial law. It is also an argument over how power presents itself, how development is sold, how corruption survives political transitions and how easily the language of national salvation can become the language through which entrenched interests protect themselves.

That is why the starting point must still be 1972. Martial law was imposed with promises of order, discipline, reform and national reconstruction. What followed included widespread arrests and detention, torture, enforced disappearances and killings of people considered opponents or critics of the government. Amnesty International documented such patterns during the period; Philippine law itself later formally recognized victims of summary execution, torture, enforced disappearance and other gross human-rights violations committed under the Marcos regime.

These facts need not be embellished. Their weight is sufficient. But the more interesting question today is how such a system explained itself.

Martial law did not advertise repression as its objective. It offered instead a grander proposition: the republic had to be saved and society remade. The old political order was supposedly exhausted. Oligarchs had corrupted democracy. Disorder had become intolerable. Only a more disciplined state could sweep aside the failures of the past and construct something new.

The phrases associated with the period — the “New Society,” the need to “save the republic,” even the notion of a “revolution from the center” — reveal something important about political power. Measures that concentrate authority seldom arrive carrying labels that say concentration of authority. They arrive as solutions to disorder. And the vocabulary was clever because it borrowed the grievances of ordinary people.

The old society really was unequal. Oligarchic power really was a problem. Poverty, landlordism, political patronage and dependence on outside interests were not inventions of martial-law propaganda. The failure lay in claiming that concentrating political authority would solve these problems.

Instead, the attack on the old oligarchy became associated with the rise of cronies and favored interests surrounding the new regime. One arrangement of privilege gave way, in significant respects, to another.

That distinction is worth remembering because it prevents September 21 from becoming merely an argument over whether roads, hospitals or cultural buildings were constructed during the dictatorship. Of course things were built, as Governments build things. But the more serious questions concern lies in how they were financed, who benefited, what institutions were weakened in the process and whether visible construction compensated for costs carried elsewhere by the population. Concrete is an inadequate unit with which to measure political legitimacy.

The same caution applies in the present. The Philippines of 2026 is not the Philippines of 1972. There is no useful analysis in pretending that every controversy involving government is simply martial law reborn. Institutions differ, political competition exists, circumstances change and contemporary abuses require examination on their own terms. But the persistence of certain questions is difficult to ignore. Extrajudicial killings, red-tagging, alleged trumped-up charges, anti-terror laws and the treatment of political dissent have replaced some of the terminology associated with the dictatorship. They are not interchangeable phenomena, and they should not be lazily collapsed into one historical category. Yet they keep alive the older dispute over where legitimate state power ends and political coercion begins.

So does corruption. Every generation seems to discover corruption as though previous generations had somehow neglected the subject. Scandal is exposed, hearings are held, officials denounce wrongdoing, prosecutions begin and reforms are promised. A few years later the country discovers that public money has once again acquired a remarkable talent for finding its way toward private interests.

That recurring spectacle explains why corruption occupied such a prominent place in the September 21 demonstrations. The commemoration became not merely a retrospective condemnation of what happened half a century ago but a convenient occasion for asking why the political structures that permit patronage, concentrated wealth and weak accountability remain so difficult to dislodge.

Pax Silica entered the march from this direction. Opposition to it should not be mistaken for the whole protest, nor should criticism of Pax Silica be reduced to hostility toward technology or foreign investment.

The proposed initiative is tied to semiconductor manufacturing, artificial intelligence infrastructure, critical minerals and other strategic supply chains, with a major hub planned in New Clark City. Supporters see an opportunity to place the Philippines inside higher-value technological industries. Critics, including labor, environmental, church and other civil-society groups, have raised questions about control, land and water use, environmental costs and the extent to which the project aligns Philippine development with the strategic objectives of the United States.

There is a serious economic argument buried beneath the slogans. A semiconductor plant on Philippine soil is not automatically Philippine industrialization. Neither is an artificial-intelligence complex necessarily technological sovereignty. A mine producing strategic minerals may generate exports without developing downstream industry. A data center may attract capital without producing Filipino ownership of the technologies running inside it.

None of this makes such investments undesirable by definition. Foreign capital can create employment. Integration into sophisticated supply chains can expose local firms and workers to new technologies. Industrial parks, transport corridors and energy projects can become foundations for something larger.

But the outcome depends on the terms. That is the part of development policy that ribbon-cuttings tend to obscure. If land, labor, minerals, electricity and public infrastructure are supplied locally while technology, intellectual property, financing and commanding corporate decisions remain elsewhere, then the country may host advanced industry without acquiring much industrial power of its own.

The factory may be modern while the economic relationship remains old. That concern explains why Pax Silica has become useful to a broader critique of Philippine development. Protesters opposing the initiative have explicitly argued that development should occur on Philippine terms rather than those set by foreign powers and large corporations.

Whether that criticism ultimately proves justified will depend on the actual agreements, technology transfers, ownership structures, environmental obligations and industrial policies attached to the project. But the question itself is legitimate.

It is also much older than Pax Silica. Philippine governments have spent decades navigating between domestic oligarchic interests and competing foreign centers of economic and strategic power. Washington retains deep security and commercial links with Manila. Beijing has become a major economic actor and geopolitical rival. Japanese, Korean and European capital occupies important sectors. Global finance exerts its own disciplines through investment, debt and access to markets.

The danger lies in confusing movement between these interests with independence from them. For critics marching on September 21, the issue is not simply American influence, nor should it be. Replacing Washington with Beijing would hardly constitute economic sovereignty. Nor would replacing one set of foreign investors with another while leaving the basic domestic structure untouched.

The problem is less geographical than structural. Wall Street or Shanghai, Washington or Beijing: the relevant economic question is what the Philippines gains beyond the immediate transaction.

Does foreign investment create domestic suppliers? Does it transfer technology? Does it produce engineers and researchers capable of building the next generation of industry? Does it deepen Filipino capital formation? Does it strengthen local control over strategic sectors? Does dependence diminish as development proceeds? Or does the country remain primarily a supplier of labor, land and resources while celebrating each new investment announcement as evidence that industrialization has finally arrived?

Those questions become harder to avoid when set against the conditions experienced by ordinary Filipinos.

The country has changed enormously since 1972. Cities have expanded. Industries have developed. Millions now work in sectors that hardly existed half a century ago. Infrastructure has improved, technology has transformed daily life and the Philippine economy is far larger and more complex.

Yet familiar problems remain stubbornly recognizable: insecure employment, inadequate wages, landlessness, housing shortages, unequal public services, political dynasties and recurring corruption.

This persistence gives every new language of transformation a burden of proof. There was once the New Society. Later governments had their own formulas for national recovery, modernization and reform. "Philippines 2000", "Angat Pinoy 2004", "Daang Matuwid", and more recently came "Build, Build, Build" and now "Bagong Pilipinas". Every administration naturally requires a vocabulary with which to explain itself.

The trouble begins when vocabulary substitutes for examination. Order is not necessarily justice. Discipline is not necessarily consent. Investment is not necessarily industrialization. Infrastructure is not necessarily development. Stability is not necessarily legitimacy.

Nor does questioning these terms require rejecting what they can genuinely accomplish.A useful road remains useful. A functioning railway improves lives. A productive factory creates employment. Foreign partnerships can serve Philippine interests. Public authority is necessary for any functioning society.

The point is precisely to distinguish the thing itself from the political mythology built around it. A road can be necessary and overpriced. A factory can create jobs while transferring little technology. A foreign partnership can be mutually beneficial or profoundly unequal. An administration can construct useful public works and still deserve scrutiny for abuses committed elsewhere.

One does not cancel the other. That is also why arguments defending martial law by listing infrastructure have always been inadequate. They treat repression and development as entries in the same ledger, as though enough bridges might eventually balance an enforced disappearance.

For the families of those arrested, tortured, killed or never seen again, September 21 necessarily means something more intimate than a historical debate over economic statistics. The Philippine state has already recognized that such violations occurred.

For the rest of the country, however, the date poses a different challenge. It asks how a political order promising to destroy oligarchy could produce new concentrations of privilege; how repression could be marketed as discipline; and how policies presented as national development could coexist with enormous private accumulation and continuing poverty.

Those are historical questions, but they are not antiquarian ones. The Marcos dictatorship did not invent inequality, oligarchy or foreign dependence. Its overthrow did not eliminate them. EDSA restored democratic institutions without magically resolving the political economy beneath them. Subsequent administrations operated within many of the same unresolved structures, even as each modified them in important ways.

That is the more sober meaning of a “continuing past.” History does not simply repeat 1972. It does something more complicated. Old problems survive while acquiring new institutions, new personalities and new slogans.

The result is not another New Society but the recurring temptation to believe that political concentration can cure political failure, that foreign alignment can substitute for national strategy, or that impressive construction can settle the argument over who actually benefits from development.

Seen this way, the September 21 march from Liwasang Bonifacio toward Mendiola was less a reenactment of an old struggle than an argument about unfinished business. Pax Silica was part of it, but only part. So were corruption, inequality, state violence, foreign influence and the continuing ability of entrenched interests — domestic or foreign — to adapt themselves to whichever language happens to dominate the moment.

This does not mean that nothing has changed since martial law. Much has. It means instead that democratic memory is most useful when it does more than remember villains and victims. It should also examine the arrangements that made abuse politically possible and economic dependence durable.

“Never Again” remains an important warning. But perhaps the harder lesson of September 21 is that the past rarely announces its return under its old name.

It usually arrives rephrased for the present.  

The Price of Order: Remembering September 21 and the Political Economy of Authoritarian Rule

The Price of Order: Remembering September 21

and the Political Economy of Authoritarian Rule

There are dates in the history of a country that resist conversion into ordinary anniversaries. September 21 belongs to that category in the Philippines, not simply because Proclamation No. 1081 bears that date, but because it has come to represent a political rupture whose consequences extended far beyond the formal declaration of martial law. The arrests, the closing of newspapers and broadcast stations, the detention of political opponents, the enlargement of executive authority, and the subsequent institutionalization of authoritarian rule transformed what had been presented as an emergency measure into a new arrangement of political life. General orders issued immediately afterward directed the arrest and continued detention of persons whom the government considered connected with rebellion, subversion and threats to national security, while other orders placed important categories of offenses within the jurisdiction of military tribunals.

The commemoration of September 21 therefore cannot be separated from the experience of those who were arrested, detained, tortured, killed or disappeared during the years of dictatorship. This is no longer merely a matter of competing recollections between admirers and opponents of the Marcos government. The Philippine State itself, through Republic Act No. 10368, subsequently recognized victims of summary execution, torture, enforced or involuntary disappearance, arbitrary detention and other gross violations of human rights committed during the Marcos regime, and acknowledged a moral and legal obligation to restore their honor and dignity and provide recognition or reparation. The significance of that law lies not merely in the compensation it authorized but in the institutional acknowledgment that the injuries of the period were not simply unfortunate episodes attached to an otherwise conventional administration. They formed part of the historical record of the State and consequently of the obligations inherited by the democratic republic that followed it.

Such remembrance necessarily carries grief and anger, particularly among those whose families experienced detention, disappearance or death. Yet its importance extends beyond the emotional claims of memory. September 21 remains intellectually and politically relevant because the authoritarian experiment of 1972 was justified not merely through the language of emergency but through an ambitious theory of national reconstruction. Martial law was presented as a means of saving the Republic from disorder while simultaneously creating what the government called a New Society. The rhetoric appealed to discipline, social reform, economic development and national regeneration. General Order No. 15, for example, explicitly described one objective of the martial-law proclamation as the achievement of social, economic and political reforms and the transformation of the country into a new society supposedly infused with discipline and social conscience.

The argument had considerable political force because many of the conditions against which it was directed were real. The pre-1972 Republic was hardly an egalitarian democracy. Political parties were frequently personalistic machines, elections were expensive and violent, landed interests retained considerable influence, poverty remained widespread, and access to public authority was substantially conditioned by family, wealth and patronage. Rural insurgency and separatist conflict were real security problems rather than later inventions of official propaganda. The social discontent of the period was likewise genuine. To acknowledge these conditions is not to accept the authoritarian solution that followed; it is instead necessary to understand why the rhetoric of national reconstruction could acquire plausibility among sections of the population dissatisfied with the old order.

The New Society presented itself as a repudiation of precisely these defects. Its official argument held that an exhausted political order dominated by oligarchic interests could no longer reform itself through the conventional mechanisms of liberal democracy. What Ferdinand Marcos would describe as a “revolution from the center” proposed that the State itself would become the principal agent of transformation, disciplining both the political class and society from above while directing the resources necessary for modernization. The old oligarchy was to be restrained, administrative authority centralized, economic development accelerated and the population incorporated into a disciplined national project.

It was an ambitious proposition, but it contained a contradiction that became more apparent as authoritarian rule matured. The concentration of authority that was supposed to free the State from entrenched private interests also made access to the State itself more valuable. Once the executive possessed extraordinary discretion over credit, licenses, contracts, foreign exchange, monopolies, franchises, government guarantees and appointments, the problem of oligarchic influence did not disappear. It changed its institutional location. Competition among established interests was increasingly replaced by a system in which economic advantage depended upon access to an unusually centralized presidency and the networks surrounding it.

The resulting arrangement has frequently been described as crony capitalism, although the phrase itself can conceal as much as it reveals if used merely as an insult. Its more useful meaning concerns the transformation of the boundary between public authority and private advantage. World Bank retrospectives on the Philippine private sector later observed that the distinction between public and private activity had become blurred during the Marcos administration, with selected firms receiving directed credit, foreign-exchange access, tax privileges and other forms of state support. Some investments were productive, while others were inefficient and became liabilities ultimately absorbed by public financial institutions. The broader problem was therefore not state intervention as such, since successful developmental states elsewhere in East Asia also intervened extensively, but the absence of sufficiently impersonal institutions capable of disciplining beneficiaries of state assistance and withdrawing privileges when they failed to serve wider developmental purposes.

This distinction is important because criticism of the Marcos economic order need not proceed from the assumption that government intervention in economic life is inherently undesirable. Such an assumption would itself distort the development experience of much of Asia. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore all employed different combinations of state direction, industrial policy, public investment, controlled finance and collaboration between government and business. The decisive distinction was not between an interventionist State and a laissez-faire one, but between intervention governed by developmental discipline and intervention subordinated to privileged political access. A State that directs credit toward an industry while requiring exports, technological upgrading or measurable increases in productivity performs a different economic function from a State that socializes the liabilities of enterprises because their proprietors possess political connections.

The Philippine case under martial law increasingly revealed the latter danger. State power could be used to reorganize industries, grant monopolistic privileges and extend financial support, yet the State itself lacked effective independent mechanisms through which these decisions could be publicly contested. Congress had ceased to function in its old form; media institutions operated under severe restrictions; opposition figures were imprisoned, marginalized or forced abroad; and the political environment discouraged the kind of scrutiny that might otherwise have exposed the costs of favored economic arrangements at an earlier stage. The suppression of political accountability therefore had economic consequences. Authoritarianism was not simply a question of what government could say or whom it could imprison; it affected the distribution of resources and the ability of society to examine how those resources were being used.

This is why the enduring argument over martial law cannot adequately be resolved by inventories of infrastructure. Roads, bridges, irrigation systems, hospitals, schools, cultural buildings, power plants and other public works were built during the period, and any serious historical assessment has to acknowledge their existence and, where appropriate, their continuing usefulness. Yet physical accomplishment by itself is an insufficient measure of development. Every public structure embodies a financing decision, an allocation of scarce resources and an opportunity cost. A project paid for through foreign borrowing continues to impose obligations long after the inauguration ceremonies have ended. A government guarantee extended to an unsuccessful private enterprise may later become public debt. An industrial undertaking protected from competition may produce employment while simultaneously imposing higher costs elsewhere in the economy. A large infrastructure program may increase productive capacity, but it may also become economically burdensome if projects are poorly selected, contracts are inflated or foreign liabilities accumulate faster than the country's capacity to service them.

The relevant question is therefore not whether public works existed, because they plainly did. The question concerns the economic and institutional terms under which they were undertaken and the distribution of their benefits and costs. The developmental State cannot be evaluated through concrete alone. It has to be examined through employment, productivity, industrial capability, technological acquisition, agricultural transformation, real wages, public health, educational access and the long-term capacity of the economy to reproduce growth without repeatedly depending upon unsustainable external financing.

The external debt accumulated during the 1970s and early 1980s consequently belongs within the discussion. Borrowing is not inherently evidence of economic failure; developing economies commonly borrow to finance investments whose returns are expected to exceed the eventual cost of repayment. The difficulty arises when the quality of investment deteriorates, when borrowed funds sustain politically protected enterprises without corresponding increases in productive capacity, or when the structure of debt leaves the economy dangerously exposed to changes in international interest rates, export conditions and investor confidence. World Bank reviews of the Philippine economy have noted that a number of large investments during the period contributed to the external debt burden without producing commensurate increases in output.

The eventual economic crisis cannot be attributed to a single cause. The oil shocks, the changing international credit environment, higher global interest rates, deteriorating terms of trade, weaknesses in domestic industry, policy errors, capital flight and political instability all formed part of the deterioration. The assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr. in 1983 then intensified an already serious crisis of confidence. Any useful economic history must resist the temptation to explain the collapse entirely through either foreign circumstances or domestic corruption. Both external vulnerability and internal institutional weakness mattered, and they interacted with one another. A heavily indebted economy could have endured international shocks more successfully had investment returns been stronger and public confidence greater, while even competent domestic policy would have confronted severe pressures from the global environment of the period.

What remains particularly relevant is that the promise of authoritarian efficiency did not insulate the Philippines from either economic crisis or political decay. The restriction of political competition removed certain obstacles to rapid decision-making, but it also weakened the mechanisms through which bad decisions might be corrected. Administrative speed and administrative quality are not identical. A government may acquire the capacity to decide quickly while simultaneously losing the institutional capacity to determine whether the decision is correct, because officials become reluctant to transmit unwelcome information upward, private interests cultivate access to concentrated authority, and public institutions become increasingly identified with the political survival of the regime.

The language of the “revolution from the center” deserves particular scrutiny in this regard. It attempted to appropriate grievances traditionally associated with movements seeking structural transformation while insisting that such transformation could be accomplished without transferring political initiative to the population itself. The State would attack oligarchy, direct development and reorganize society, but the citizen would participate largely within structures defined by that same State. The contradiction was obvious: the New Society claimed to act in the name of ordinary Filipinos while narrowing the independent political spaces through which ordinary Filipinos might contest the policies being implemented on their behalf.

This contradiction was most visible when the language of social reform encountered the continuing realities of inequality. The regime promised agrarian transformation, national discipline and economic modernization, yet the structure of landed and commercial power proved more resilient than its rhetoric suggested. Existing oligarchs were weakened in some sectors, but politically favored economic groups emerged or expanded in others. The result was not the abolition of elite economic power but its partial recomposition. A more centralized State altered the manner in which wealth and influence interacted with government without necessarily democratizing ownership or substantially redistributing control over the productive resources of the country.

The experience also demonstrates why the political and economic dimensions of democracy cannot easily be separated. Freedom of the press, judicial independence, freedom of association and political opposition are sometimes treated as liberal luxuries distinct from the material problems of employment, wages and development. In practice, they are among the institutional instruments by which economic power is made answerable to society. Independent journalists investigate questionable contracts and monopolies. Legislatures examine public expenditure. Labor organizations contest wage policies and conditions of work. Farmers' groups challenge land arrangements. Universities subject official development theories to criticism. Courts establish limits upon executive action. When these institutions are weakened, those already possessing administrative or economic power encounter fewer obstacles to converting public authority into private advantage.

The human-rights question thus belongs within the political economy of martial law rather than in a separate moral appendix. Arbitrary detention, torture, disappearance and political intimidation affected not only individual liberties but the capacity of society to organize around competing economic interests. A worker who fears association, a peasant organizer exposed to military suspicion, a student movement constrained by surveillance, or a journalist unable to investigate politically connected firms operates within an economic system in which bargaining power has already been altered by coercive political arrangements.

This is also why the commemoration should avoid a simplistic nostalgia for the constitutional order preceding 1972. The failures of that order were among the conditions that permitted authoritarianism to present itself as an attractive alternative. Restoring elections by itself could not eliminate oligarchy, just as removing martial law could not automatically resolve landlessness, low wages, unemployment, inadequate housing or regional inequality. The deeper historical question concerns whether Philippine democracy has developed institutions capable of addressing these structural problems without repeatedly inviting the argument that political liberty must be suspended because democratic government is supposedly too disorderly to undertake serious reform.

More than half a century after the proclamation, many of the issues that gave force to the language of the New Society remain recognizable, even though the country itself has undergone profound political, demographic and economic change. Questions concerning unequal development, precarious employment, insecure housing, agrarian conflict, the concentration of wealth and dependence upon external sources of capital continue to influence political life. It would be inaccurate to suggest that nothing has improved since the 1970s, just as it would be misleading to treat every contemporary social conflict as a repetition of martial law. The more useful conclusion is that the endurance of these problems continues to create political opportunities for those who promise order as a substitute for difficult institutional reform.

The persistence of practices such as red-tagging demonstrates the relevance of this institutional caution. The Supreme Court has recognized that red-tagging, vilification, labeling and guilt by association may constitute threats to life, liberty or security, while civil-society monitors continue to report cases in which activists, journalists, environmental defenders and organizations are publicly associated with communist or terrorist movements. These contemporary practices do not make the present constitutional order identical to the dictatorship, and historical differences should not be erased for rhetorical convenience. They do, however, show how the vocabulary of national security can extend beyond armed groups and affect individuals engaged in lawful political, labor, environmental or community activity.

The lesson of 1972 therefore lies less in searching for exact repetitions than in recognizing recurring institutional temptations. Governments facing disorder will naturally invoke security, and the State possesses a legitimate responsibility to confront rebellion, terrorism and criminal violence. The democratic question concerns how that authority is exercised, whether accusations are supported by evidence, whether defendants receive due process, whether legitimate dissent remains distinguishable from armed activity, and whether the language of security becomes a convenient instrument against criticism that may be uncomfortable but lawful.

The same caution applies to the rhetoric of discipline. Discipline has frequently possessed an almost mystical place in Philippine discussions of development, as though national poverty were principally a consequence of insufficient obedience among the population. Yet development is not merely the accumulation of personal virtues. It depends upon institutional capability, productive investment, land use, industrial organization, technology, infrastructure, education, public health and the distribution of bargaining power. A poorly paid worker cannot be disciplined into a high-wage industrial economy; a tenant cannot practice his way into land ownership; a country cannot moralize itself into technological independence without institutions capable of financing, coordinating and protecting long-term productive investment.

Authoritarian political language nevertheless finds discipline attractive because it relocates responsibility downward. Structural failures can be attributed to the supposed indiscipline of citizens rather than to deficiencies in government policy or economic organization. Poverty becomes a problem of individual conduct; protest becomes evidence of disorder; demands for redistribution become obstacles to stability. This moralization of economic failure can coexist comfortably with policies that protect powerful interests, since the burden of adjustment is placed primarily upon those with the least influence over the design of policy.

The memory of martial law consequently becomes relevant to the continuing debate over what development means. If development is measured chiefly through highly visible projects, the State can present itself as benefactor while leaving largely unexamined the manner in which those projects are financed and administered. If development is understood more broadly as the enlargement of productive and human capacities, however, then the condition of the worker, farmer, small entrepreneur and household becomes central. The issue is no longer simply how many projects were completed but whether the economic structure enabled ordinary citizens to obtain secure employment, adequate wages, housing, education and meaningful opportunities for advancement.

The infrastructure defense of authoritarian government becomes especially problematic when it implicitly asks that political repression be weighed against economic accomplishment, as though a sufficient quantity of public works could compensate for abuses of state power. This is conceptually mistaken. Public infrastructure is one responsibility of government, while the protection of basic rights is another. The construction of a dam or highway cannot retroactively provide due process to a detainee or restore a person who disappeared in custody. Nor does the existence of human-rights violations establish that every economic undertaking of the same government was without value. Historical judgment need not choose between these two simplifications. It can acknowledge useful public investments while still recognizing that such investments did not confer upon the government a license to violate rights or eliminate political accountability.

For the victims and their descendants, the distinction is especially important because developmental nostalgia can transform their suffering into an incidental cost of modernization. Such reasoning effectively requires those who suffered to justify their claims against an accounting of buildings, roads and statistical growth. Republic Act No. 10368 rejected that logic by recognizing that human dignity created obligations independent of whatever material accomplishments the regime might claim.

At the same time, remembrance gains analytical strength when it refuses to treat every person who initially supported martial law as either malicious or foolish. Some Filipinos welcomed the declaration because they feared crime, insurgency and political disorder; others believed that strong government could finally break the control of entrenched families; sections of the business community initially valued administrative predictability; and some technocrats saw centralization as an opportunity to implement reforms previously obstructed by congressional patronage and electoral politics. These expectations form part of the historical record and should be understood rather than caricatured. Their eventual disappointment also reveals how authoritarian systems acquire legitimacy: not simply through force, but by attaching themselves to genuine social frustrations and promising solutions that existing institutions have failed to provide.

It was precisely this combination of legitimate grievance and concentrated authority that made the New Society politically significant. The regime did not invent the poverty of the countryside, the weaknesses of Philippine industry, the corruption of electoral institutions or the dominance of established families. Its historical responsibility lay in claiming that these problems required the concentration of political power while subsequently reproducing important elements of privilege under a more centralized arrangement.

The lesson is broader than the fate of any single administration. Political systems frequently survive by appropriating the language of those who criticize them. Demands for social justice can be converted into programs administered from above; nationalism can be invoked while external dependence continues; anti-oligarchic rhetoric can accompany the emergence of new privileged networks; and appeals to popular welfare can be used to legitimize institutions in which the population possesses limited influence over decisions supposedly undertaken in its interest. The contradiction between rhetoric and structure is therefore one of the most important subjects of any serious commemoration of September 21.

This also explains why remembrance cannot consist solely of remembering repression. The economic promises of the regime must be remembered alongside the repression because the two were components of the same political project. The New Society justified extraordinary authority partly through the assertion that ordinary democratic procedures had become obstacles to transformation. Evaluating that claim requires attention to the economy produced under extraordinary rule, including the development projects that succeeded, the enterprises that failed, the debt that accumulated, the industries that received protection, and the social groups that gained or lost bargaining power.

Such an evaluation also guards against the opposite historical error: the notion that the restoration of formal democracy in 1986 resolved the social conditions that had preceded authoritarianism. Many of the economic structures inherited from both the pre-martial-law republic and the dictatorship remained intact or were reorganized rather than abolished. Oligarchic politics did not disappear with the return of elections. Foreign dependence did not disappear with the restoration of Congress. Rural poverty and unequal landholding did not vanish with the new Constitution. The democratic restoration was indispensable because it reopened political space and restored institutional restraints upon executive authority, but it did not by itself complete the social transformation that generations of Filipinos had demanded.

The continuing task is therefore more difficult than either defending or condemning a single historical period. It requires a conception of democracy that extends beyond periodic elections without diminishing the importance of elections, and a conception of development that extends beyond economic growth without dismissing the necessity of growth. Political liberty and material security have to be treated as mutually reinforcing components of a democratic society rather than competing objectives between which the country must permanently choose.

Under such a conception, the dignity of the person acquires both political and economic content. It involves freedom from arbitrary arrest and coercion, but also access to the material conditions necessary for meaningful citizenship. It includes freedom of expression and association, but also the practical capacity of workers, farmers, communities and professional groups to organize around their interests. It requires due process against the power of the State while also requiring institutions capable of preventing private wealth from exercising disproportionate power over public decisions.

September 21 therefore remains a difficult but necessary date precisely because it forces Philippine society to examine the relationship among order, development and freedom. The dictatorship claimed that extraordinary authority could save the Republic and reconstruct society. Its history demonstrated instead the danger of attempting social transformation while weakening the institutions through which society itself can scrutinize those entrusted with transformation.

The commemoration need not become an annual exercise in partisan accusation, nor should it be reduced to a contest between nostalgic inventories of infrastructure and equally mechanical lists of abuses. The record is sufficiently important to demand more serious treatment. The period should be examined as an experiment in authoritarian development whose achievements, failures, contradictions and human costs remain relevant to any discussion of Philippine state-building. Its victims deserve remembrance not because memory requires the country to remain imprisoned by the past, but because a political community incapable of recognizing the injuries committed through its own institutions becomes more vulnerable to repeating them under new circumstances and new language.

The enduring significance of September 21 consequently lies in the unfinished character of the Republic. The conditions invoked in 1972—inequality, insecurity, political corruption, concentrated economic power and social conflict—were not abolished by martial law, just as they were not abolished by the restoration of democratic government. Their persistence should not be used to romanticize authoritarianism or to dismiss democratic politics as futile. It should instead encourage a more demanding understanding of democracy, one capable of confronting economic concentration and social deprivation while preserving the rights through which citizens participate in that confrontation.

Such a democratic order would have little need to describe repression as discipline, exclusion as stability or privilege as development. Its legitimacy would rest upon institutions sufficiently strong to permit disagreement, sufficiently impartial to restrain both public and private power, and sufficiently developmental to demonstrate that political liberty need not condemn the country to economic stagnation. The remembrance of September 21 would then cease to be merely an argument over whether the past was good or bad and become what historical commemoration ought to be: an examination of the choices that produced that past and of the institutional safeguards necessary to prevent its most destructive features from acquiring new forms.

In that sense, the struggle associated with the memory of martial law is not adequately understood as a struggle against one family, one party or one generation. Its more enduring content concerns the effort to construct a political order in which the State can be strong without becoming arbitrary, development can be directed without becoming patronage, security can be maintained without converting dissent into criminality, and economic growth can be pursued without treating the common citizen merely as the taxpayer, debtor, laborer or passive beneficiary of decisions made elsewhere.

The victims of authoritarian rule occupy an indispensable place in that continuing national argument because their experiences reveal what happens when the authority to define the national interest becomes excessively concentrated. The economic record occupies an equally necessary place because it demonstrates that the legitimacy of government cannot be established through physical accomplishment alone. A Republic worthy of preservation requires both the material capacity to improve the conditions of its people and the political restraint to recognize that those people are citizens rather than instruments of policy.

The commemoration of September 21 thus remains neither an antiquarian exercise nor a demand that succeeding generations inherit every bitterness of those who came before them. Its value lies in historical vigilance: in understanding how legitimate demands for order, reform and development can be absorbed into political arrangements that gradually narrow the space available for public judgment, and how the vocabulary of ordinary people can itself be appropriated to justify concentrations of power from which ordinary people remain distant.

More than five decades after 1972, that is perhaps the most important reason the date continues to matter. The historical problem was never simply that a government promised to save the Republic and build a new society. The deeper problem concerned the terms under which that Republic was to be saved, the distribution of authority within that proposed new society, and whether citizens themselves retained sufficient freedom and institutional power to determine whether the transformation being undertaken in their name was genuinely their own.

Any durable democratic settlement must answer those questions differently. It must make social justice compatible with political freedom, public investment compatible with accountability, national development compatible with human dignity, and effective government compatible with the participation of those whose lives are most affected by its decisions. The continuing relevance of September 21 lies in the fact that these questions remain unfinished business, and that the lessons of authoritarian rule become useful only when remembrance is joined to the construction of institutions capable of addressing them.

The State, the Dead, and the Record: How the Philippines is Still Arguing With Duterte's War on Drugs

 The State, the Dead, and the Record: 

How the Philippines is Still Arguing With Duterte's War on Drugs

By Kat Ulrike

Photo from ICC

The difficulty with political violence is that it rarely ends when the violence itself subsides. Governments change, policemen are reassigned, slogans disappear from official speeches and the emergency vocabulary of one administration gives way to the managerial vocabulary of the next. Yet the arguments that justified the violence, the grievances of those who suffered from it and the loyalties formed around those who ordered or defended it tend to survive. What had once been a contest over policy becomes, in time, a contest over memory.

The Philippines has entered precisely such a period over Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. The raids and nightly casualty reports that defined much of his presidency no longer occupy the center of national political life, but the country has not arrived at an agreed understanding of what happened. Thousands of deaths remain embedded in police records, court complaints, family recollections and human-rights investigations. At the same time, a substantial political constituency continues to remember the campaign not principally as an episode of abuse but as a period in which the state recovered an authority that previous governments had seemed unwilling or unable to exercise. The disagreement is therefore not simply over Duterte. It concerns the older Philippine question of how much coercion a weak or frustrated state may employ in the name of restoring order.

The appearance of Duterte before the International Criminal Court has given this argument a new institutional setting without resolving it. The Hague can determine criminal responsibility within the limits of the charges and evidence before it. An independent Truth Commission in the Philippines has begun the broader work of documenting cases that may never reach an international courtroom. Between them remains the political nation itself, still divided over whether the drug war should be remembered primarily as a campaign against criminal disorder or as a period in which the state permitted violence to outrun law. That division was visible even before a single witness at Duterte’s trial had been called.

Two Audiences

There were at least two Philippine audiences watching Rodrigo Duterte when he appeared in person before the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and the distance between them was considerably greater than the miles separating Manila from the Netherlands. Duterte, now 81, sat in a dark suit and white shirt behind his lawyers while the judges discussed witnesses, evidence, scheduling and the practical arrangements for a trial expected to begin on Nov. 30. It was his first physical appearance before the tribunal since he was taken into ICC custody in March 2025. He did not address the court. For much of the hearing, the drama lay less in what Duterte said than in the fact that he was physically there at all.

For his allies, the images revived a familiar political language. Robin Padilla posted photographs of Duterte accompanied by the word Tatay—“Father”—while Christopher “Bong” Go, his aide for more than two decades, used the affectionate “Father Digong.” The vocabulary was revealing. Duterte was not presented merely as a former chief executive awaiting trial but as the paternal figure around whom a political family and constituency had long organized their loyalties. His own public response was more explicitly political: “Everything I did, I did it for my country.” The sentence compressed into eleven words the defense that had surrounded much of his presidency—that whatever harshness attended the anti-drug campaign had to be understood through the purpose his supporters attributed to it: the restoration of order and the protection of the public.

Another audience had gathered in Quezon City. Families of people killed during the anti-drug campaign watched the proceedings with lawyers, church representatives and human-rights advocates. Their attention was directed toward the same face and movements, but they drew from them almost the opposite reassurance. Llore Pasco, whose sons Crisanto and Juan Carlos Lozano were killed in a police operation in 2017, said she had been surprised but pleased to see Duterte appear. Translated into English, her reaction was practical rather than triumphant: “We were surprised, but of course we were happy that he finally appeared, and we saw that he looked well. He even gained weight. So we expect that he really is capable of facing trial.”

Dahlia Cuartero, whose son Jesus Cuartero III was also killed during the drug war, expressed a similar hope in the language of prayer. “Our prayer was answered—that he would remain strong so that all his victims could be given justice,” she said. “We were happy to see that he was strong.” The peculiar moral geometry of the moment was difficult to miss. These relatives were not hoping to see an accused adversary diminished by illness. They wanted him healthy enough to remain before the judges, understand the proceedings and stay alive long enough for the judicial process to run its course.

Neri Colmenares, who represents some alleged victims, converted those impressions into a legal argument. In his view, Duterte’s behavior in court suggested that he understood what was happening and recognized supporters in the gallery. Translated into English, Colmenares said: “It showed that President Duterte can do this, that he is fit for trial because he understands what is happening. He still knows how to wave to his supporters. He knows where in the gallery his supporters are.” He added that forgetfulness alone should not automatically be treated as proof that a defendant cannot stand trial. That is an advocate’s interpretation rather than a clinical finding, but it demonstrates how an ordinary human gesture could immediately acquire evidentiary and political meaning.

The defense has presented a sharply different picture. Duterte’s lawyers say significant memory impairment prevents him from reliably retaining recent information and from giving meaningful instructions about a complicated criminal case. Prosecutors, relying on a three-member medical panel, have argued that he remains capable of exercising his procedural and fair-trial rights. The question belongs properly to medicine and law rather than to photographic interpretation. An accused person’s fitness cannot depend upon whether relatives of the dead want a trial to continue or whether his admirers see an elderly statesman enduring detention with dignity. Yet outside the chamber politics had already done what politics normally does: it had given the same image several meanings.

Even politicians who did not speak as either prosecutors or unconditional defenders found themselves responding to the human image. JV Ejercito said he felt sadness at seeing Duterte after a long absence, describing him as extremely thin and frail. Translated, Ejercito said: “I felt sad when I saw him for the first time in a long time because he was very thin and very frail, with his hair grown long.” But when asked about the families of those killed during the drug campaign, he stopped short of converting personal sympathy into a judgment on the proceedings. “Let justice take its course,” he said.

The multiplicity of these responses matters because there was no single Rodrigo Duterte visible on the screen. There was the accused before an international tribunal, the aging former president who elicited ordinary human sympathy, the paternal political figure remembered by loyalists, and the architect of an anti-drug campaign associated with thousands of deaths. One audience saw endurance. Another saw the possibility of accountability. Neither image, by itself, tells us what the court will decide. Together, however, they tell us why the drug war has remained politically unsettled long after Duterte ceased to exercise presidential power.

What Was the “War”?

The most important division is not over Duterte’s present condition but over the past that placed him in The Hague. Nearly a decade after the anti-drug campaign became the organizing drama of his presidency, Filipinos continue to disagree not only about individual killings but about what the campaign represented. To its critics, it became a period of unlawful violence, institutional impunity and the erosion of due process. To many of its defenders, it remains a necessary response to a narcotics and criminality problem that ordinary institutions had failed to contain.

Ronald dela Rosa, Duterte’s first national police chief, has stated the second position more candidly than most. In October 2024, asked whether he regretted implementing the campaign, he replied: “No regrets. If you are going to give me the chance to do it again, I will do it again. The same approach.” He went further, arguing that a campaign against drug personalities could not succeed through gentleness. “You have to be forceful enough,” he said, for the government’s message to reach criminals unmistakably.

Three months later, dela Rosa offered a more qualified but substantively similar defense. Loss of life was regrettable, he said, including the deaths of police officers during operations, but that did not mean the campaign itself should never have been undertaken. Without it, he claimed, the Philippines might have become a “narco-state,” with powerful drug lords exercising influence over provinces, cities and politicians. His conclusion was emphatic: “We have to do that. We had to do that.”

Such statements are significant because they show that severity was not merely an accidental embarrassment later disowned by the campaign’s principal implementers. Severity formed part of the governing argument. Dela Rosa’s defense begins from the premise that criminality had become emboldened because the state had ceased to command sufficient fear. The solution was therefore not simply better police administration or more efficient prosecution but a restoration of the psychological asymmetry between government and those it regarded as lawbreakers. The criminal was to understand, in unmistakable terms, that the state had recovered its capacity to punish.

Dela Rosa has also insisted that the campaign was not designed selectively to spare one class of offender while targeting another. “We didn’t discriminate as to who we are going to arrest,” he said in 2024, arguing that drug lords, pushers, traffickers and users were all targets of enforcement. He has acknowledged that human-rights violations occurred in some cases and argued that these should be investigated individually rather than used to classify the entire campaign as a crime against humanity. That distinction is central to the defense mounted by many Duterte supporters: abuses may have occurred, they say, but abuses committed within a policy do not necessarily define the legal or moral character of the policy itself.

This interpretation cannot be understood merely as the retrospective self-defense of officials facing international scrutiny. Duterte’s rhetoric possessed a genuine constituency because it answered frustrations that preceded his presidency. Many Filipinos experienced the criminal-justice system as slow, unequal and vulnerable to local influence. Police could appear corrupt or ineffective; prosecutors and courts moved at a pace far removed from the immediacy of neighborhood crime; wealthy or politically connected defendants could seem capable of manipulating procedure. Within such circumstances, a politician promising uncomplicated force could present himself not as the destroyer of government but as the man finally willing to make government work.

The political attraction of Duterte therefore lay partly in the collapse of distinctions that liberal institutions normally try to preserve. He spoke about narcotics, crime, corruption, weak policing and cumbersome legal process as aspects of a single disorder requiring executive will. What his critics heard as contempt for procedure, supporters frequently heard as impatience with institutional paralysis. What critics interpreted as menace could be heard by supporters as reassurance.

Dela Rosa later accused legislators of opportunism for having praised the anti-drug campaign while Duterte was politically dominant and condemning it after circumstances changed. In his recollection, lawmakers had once thanked the administration for restoring peace, tranquility and safer streets, only to reverse themselves later. The accusation is partisan, but it points toward a historical fact that should not be overlooked: the drug war did not initially exist outside respectable Philippine politics. It enjoyed substantial public and institutional support. Any serious reconstruction of the period must explain that support rather than treating it merely as an embarrassing national aberration.

This is what makes the language of “war” important. Calling anti-drug enforcement a war was not merely colorful rhetoric. War has enemies, casualties, sacrifices and emergency measures. Criminal law has suspects, warrants, evidence, defendants and trials. Once policing is imagined as warfare, the restraints associated with ordinary criminal procedure can begin to look like impediments placed upon those defending society.

Duterte’s supporters can reasonably object that the metaphor did not automatically suspend the law. Police still operated under statutes, arrests still occurred, courts continued to function, and officers retained a lawful right to defend themselves when confronted by armed suspects. Forcefulness and illegality are not synonymous. But critics begin from the opposite institutional concern: a suspected dealer remains a citizen, suspicion does not amount to conviction, and precisely because the state possesses overwhelming coercive power, restraints upon lethal force become more rather than less important.

The argument is therefore more substantial than the familiar opposition between “security” and “human rights.” Both sides claim an idea of order. The defenders of Duterte emphasize the capacity of government to protect ordinary people from criminal disorder. His critics emphasize the legal restraints necessary to protect ordinary people from arbitrary state power. One camp fears a state too weak to govern; the other fears a state powerful enough to escape accountability.

The Archive of the Dead

The families watching in Quezon City carry another archive of the drug-war years. It is composed not principally of crime statistics or political speeches but of bodies, wakes, disputed police reports, exhumations, witnesses and the long bureaucratic aftermath of violent death. Where a defender of the drug war may remember a neighborhood dealer disappearing from a street corner, a mother may remember a son who never returned home.

The phrase nanlaban became one of the essential words of the period. Literally, it meant that a suspect “fought back.” In police reports it could describe an officer responding to armed resistance during an operation. Among many families and human-rights advocates, however, it became shorthand for an official explanation they believed was repeatedly used to justify killings after the fact. The significance of the word lay precisely in this collision of narratives. A police report and a family testimony might describe the same death in incompatible ways, and the issue became not merely whether a person had died but whether the state’s own record could be trusted.

It is in this unresolved space that the independent Philippine Truth Commission has begun its work. Formally launched in May 2026 by Church leaders, lawyers, academics and human-rights advocates, the commission describes itself as independent, civilian-led, survivor-centered and trauma-informed. Raul Pangalangan, a former ICC judge, chairs it; its commissioners include forensic pathologist Raquel Fortun, trauma specialist Al Fuertes, theologian Daniel Franklin Pilario and human-rights advocate Carlos Conde. Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David serves as adviser. Its stated mission is to document and preserve evidence of violations associated with the anti-drug campaign while providing spaces in which victims and witnesses can place their experiences on the public record.

The commission says it has documented more than 7,500 incidents. That number must be understood with care. It describes the scope of the commission’s documentation; it is not a judicial determination that 7,500 crimes have been legally established. The distinction is essential because a truth process earns authority not by converting every testimony into a finding but by separating allegation, corroboration and conclusion.

The commission’s first public truth-telling session concerned Luzviminda Siapo and her 18-year-old son Raymart, who had a congenital clubfoot that affected his ability to walk and run. According to the commission’s account, Raymart was taken hours after a neighbor accused him of selling marijuana and was later shot. The hearing sought not merely to establish the circumstances of his death but to restore the biography that death had eclipsed: he was a son and brother, was preparing to work with an uncle and had discussed continuing his education. The session combined family testimony with documentary and forensic material in an attempt to create a record that would survive beyond the emotional force of recollection.

Its second session examined the death of 17-year-old Darwin Hamoy in Payatas during a 2016 police operation. His family disputed the police claim that Darwin and others had fought back during a buy-bust operation. Years later, according to the commission, examination of his exhumed remains documented injuries consistent with gunshot wounds and classified his manner of death as homicide. The inquiry extended beyond the instant of death into the family’s attempts to find the body, complaints against police officials and the psychological, social and economic consequences of the killing.

These are questions a criminal indictment may never need to answer. A court asks whether the prosecution can establish the elements of a crime and connect them to the accused. A broader historical inquiry may ask what happened to a family after the funeral, how children understood the disappearance of a father or brother, how barangay officials compiled lists of suspected drug personalities, what policemen believed their superiors expected of them and how repeated presidential rhetoric changed the range of violence that citizens were willing to tolerate.

Pangalangan’s argument for the truth-telling sessions rests largely upon this difference. Many victims and survivors, he has said, will never have cases before the ICC. Their stories therefore cannot depend upon whether an international prosecutor finds them necessary to proving a particular charge against Duterte. The court and the commission are not substitutes for one another because they are engaged in different kinds of inquiry.

Yet the commission’s historical burden extends beyond giving the dead back their names. If it is to explain the period rather than merely memorialize one side of it, it must also take seriously the experience of citizens who insist that the anti-drug campaign improved their lives. Their testimony cannot determine whether a particular killing was lawful, but neither should it be excluded from the social history of the policy. A resident who says the street became safer after a dealer disappeared is describing a political experience. That claim may be compared with crime data, surveys and local evidence, but it remains part of the reason Duterte’s program acquired democratic support.

The important distinction is between recording a claim and accepting it. A policeman who says a suspect fired first makes a claim that may be tested against ballistics, autopsy findings, witnesses and scene evidence. A family alleging execution makes another claim requiring corroboration. A politician who says crime fell because of the campaign makes an empirical assertion that can be tested against data. A supporter who says the campaign restored dignity or peace to a neighborhood makes a more subjective statement but one that nevertheless belongs in the historical record.

Listening broadly does not require concluding that every account is equally well supported. Indeed, a truth commission becomes useful precisely when it refuses the lazy convention by which journalism sometimes places two contradictory statements beside each other and calls the resulting symmetry balance. Evidence can strengthen one account, weaken another or leave matters genuinely unresolved.

What The Hague Can Decide

The ICC operates under a different discipline. It is not writing the final history of the Duterte presidency. It must determine whether specified charges against a particular accused have been proved according to the Rome Statute while preserving the accused’s procedural rights. Duterte faces crimes-against-humanity allegations connected with killings during periods in which the court says it possessed jurisdiction. He denies the charges. The upcoming trial will be governed by rules of evidence, legal responsibility and proof rather than by the larger political question of whether Filipinos approve or disapprove of the drug war.

The status conference itself illustrated the practical narrowness of the task. Presiding Judge Joanna Korner discussed the prosecution’s witnesses, evidence, disclosures and the sitting schedule. The chamber is also considering arrangements shaped partly by Duterte’s age and health. The problem facing the judges is not whether the entire Philippine drug war was morally acceptable; it is how to conduct a manageable and fair criminal trial concerning the charges before them.

The dispute over Duterte’s mental fitness reinforces the distinction. Families may reasonably interpret his courtroom behavior as indicating awareness. Supporters may reasonably interpret the same scene as the stoicism of an old man determined to acknowledge them. Neither observation settles the medical question. The judges must examine expert reports and decide whether Duterte possesses the capacity required to understand proceedings and meaningfully assist his defense.

This is also why the rights of the accused and the interests of victims should not be treated as competing moral luxuries. A proceeding in which an incapable defendant could not understand or answer the case would satisfy little beyond vengeance. Conversely, a system in which age, political stature or loyal public support shielded an otherwise capable accused from trial would hardly satisfy the principle of accountability. Fair process is not a concession granted to Duterte by his critics; it is part of what gives any eventual judgment legitimacy.

The same caution will be necessary once the trial ends. A conviction would establish criminal responsibility for charges proved to the court’s standard. It would not prove every allegation ever made about every police operation under Duterte. An acquittal would mean that the prosecution failed to establish the particular charges to the required standard; it would not retroactively declare every contested drug-war death lawful.

Courts necessarily exclude more history than they include. Prosecutors select representative incidents, documents and witnesses because no trial can become infinite. Some deaths will fall outside jurisdictional dates. Others may lack evidence. Still others may be unnecessary to a prosecution theory already supported by stronger cases. This is not indifference; it is the architecture of adjudication.

The danger lies in asking the judgment to carry a political meaning it cannot logically bear. Duterte’s supporters may be tempted to interpret an acquittal as vindication of the entire drug war. His opponents may be tempted to interpret a conviction as judicial confirmation of every accusation ever made against the administration. Neither conclusion follows automatically. The law is more precise, and therefore in some respects less emotionally satisfying, than political memory.

Truth Without Monopoly

The Truth Commission faces almost the reverse problem. The court must narrow; the commission must broaden without losing rigor. It is attempting to construct a record capable of containing personal testimony, police documentation, forensic examination, public rhetoric and institutional behavior without collapsing these different forms of evidence into a single moral narrative.

The presence of Fortun is especially important because forensic evidence imposes a discipline upon both state narrative and family memory. A bullet trajectory cannot explain why Duterte won an election or why citizens supported aggressive policing, but it may indicate whether a particular account of a shooting is physically possible. Exhumed remains cannot establish the moral legitimacy of the drug war, but they may recover information neglected or concealed in an original investigation. The physical record is limited, but it is often resistant to rhetoric.

The commission’s trauma-informed procedures address another problem. Participants are not merely sources of data. They may remain vulnerable to intimidation, political abuse and renewed psychological distress. Its media rules therefore restrict unsolicited interviews around truth-telling sessions and emphasize the privacy, security and well-being of participants. This may appear to be a peripheral procedural matter, but it reflects an important difficulty of public truth processes: suffering can be exploited even by those who believe themselves to be documenting it.

The commission must nevertheless avoid becoming an institution whose conclusions are determined by the political identities of those who created it. If it appears to Duterte supporters simply as the organized voice of people who had already decided that the former president was guilty, its findings will persuade mainly those who required no persuasion. Conversely, if calls for “balance” become a demand that documented evidence always be offset by an unsupported denial, then balance becomes another mechanism of obscuring fact.

The harder standard is openness without false equivalence. Dela Rosa’s assertion that the campaign was necessary belongs in the record because it reveals the governing logic of the policy. His claim that the Philippines risked becoming a narco-state can be examined historically. His acknowledgment that some human-rights violations occurred can be placed alongside his insistence that those cases should be investigated individually. Duterte’s statement that everything he did was for the country belongs in the record as an assertion of political intention. None of these statements proves the lawfulness of a particular killing, but excluding them would impoverish an account of why the campaign happened and why it retained adherents.

The same principle applies to Pasco, Cuartero and other relatives. Their testimony explains the human meaning of accountability to those who have waited years for formal proceedings, but testimony is not automatically a judicial finding. Their accounts become historically stronger when connected to independent witnesses, documents and physical evidence.

This is what distinguishes truth seeking from merely collecting narratives. A society may possess many memories, but evidence gives those memories different weights.

The Politics of Remembering

The Philippines has never suffered from a shortage of narratives. Governments manufacture them, oppositions construct counter-narratives and political families transmit selective memories from one electoral generation to the next. A fact invoked solemnly while one coalition holds power can become propaganda after a realignment, only to be rediscovered when political usefulness changes again. History often functions less as a public archive than as an arsenal from which present factions select convenient weapons.

The drug war is unusually vulnerable to this tendency because it remains recent and most of its protagonists are still politically active. Duterte’s children and allies remain in public life. Police officers who implemented the policy can still defend it. Families of the dead continue to campaign. Human-rights organizations remain engaged in litigation and documentation. The institutions being asked to interpret the period are institutions that themselves lived through it.

There has therefore been no clean historical distance between the event and the argument over the event. The same citizens who once voted during the drug-war years are being asked to interpret their own choices. Some former allies have become critics; some critics have entered alliances with former supporters. The facts consequently compete not only with ignorance but with changing political interest.

Dela Rosa has complained precisely about this instability. His recollection of politicians once thanking the administration for safer streets and later condemning the campaign is intended as an accusation of opportunism. It is also an inadvertent reminder that political memory is frequently retrospective. Policies that appear normal while power is consolidated can acquire very different meanings after power disperses.

A useful historical record must therefore preserve what political actors said at the time, not merely how they explain themselves later. Duterte’s speeches, police directives, legislative hearings, contemporaneous surveys, crime statistics, autopsy reports, court records and accounts from poor communities must all be treated as part of the record. The post-Duterte reinterpretation of the drug war is itself historically relevant, but it cannot substitute for contemporaneous evidence.

Here the continuing loyalty of Duterte supporters also matters. Padilla’s and Go’s use of “Father” is not evidence in the ICC case, but it is evidence of the paternal political relationship Duterte cultivated. Dela Rosa’s refusal to repent is not proof that the campaign was lawful, but it is evidence that the governing philosophy of the drug war survives its presidency. Those reactions prevent the historian from writing a convenient story in which the entire country awoke after 2022 and unanimously repudiated what had occurred.

Likewise, the testimonies of families prevent the story from becoming an uncomplicated tale of popular order restored. They demonstrate that the same policy experienced as security by one household could be experienced as terror by another. The question is not which emotion should be deleted from history but what happened in the specific cases from which those emotions arose.

This is why the best description of the conflict may not be between law and order, or even between rights and security. It is between different fears. The Duterte constituency feared the failure of the state: drugs, criminality, corrupt institutions and the apparent immunity of offenders. Many victims’ families came to fear the success of an unrestrained state: armed officers, lists, accusations, raids and official explanations they believed they had no power to challenge.

Neither fear should be romanticized. Fear of crime can become a justification for arbitrary authority; fear of authority can obscure the real violence criminality inflicts upon communities. A serious account must be capable of holding both propositions simultaneously without allowing either to predetermine the facts of individual cases.

The War After the War

The anti-drug campaign no longer occupies the Philippine presidency in the form it did between 2016 and 2022. Subsequent police leadership publicly shifted emphasis toward supply chains and high-value targets rather than street-level users, explicitly describing the recalibrated policy as less bloody and more attentive to human rights. The Marcos administration has itself contrasted its approach with lethal enforcement, emphasizing large drug seizures in operations in which no one was killed.

But the political conflict created by the Duterte years has not disappeared with the policy’s alteration. It has changed arenas. The first war was conducted through police operations, presidential speeches and the language of emergency. The second is being conducted through court filings, testimony, forensic reports, historical documentation and struggles over public memory.

For the ICC, the final question will be bounded: what has been proved against Rodrigo Duterte under the law governing the charges? For the Truth Commission, the question is broader: what happened to people and institutions during the anti-drug campaign, including those whose cases will never enter an international courtroom? For the Philippine public, the unresolved question is broader still: what relationship between authority, legality and social order did the country accept during those years, and how should that acceptance be remembered?

The responses to Duterte’s courtroom appearance reveal why no single institution can provide all three answers. Pasco and Cuartero saw a defendant apparently strong enough for proceedings to continue. Colmenares saw behavior he believed relevant to fitness. Ejercito saw the physical decline of a former president and felt sadness while still insisting that justice should proceed. Padilla and Go saw the political father they continued to recognize. Dela Rosa, in his repeated defenses of the campaign, has made clear that he regards its central methods as necessary and would not repudiate them merely because the political climate has changed.

These statements belong in the same history, but they do not perform the same evidentiary function. A mother’s account of losing a son is testimony about a death and its consequences. A former police chief’s declaration that the campaign was necessary is evidence of governing philosophy. A senator’s sadness is a political and human reaction. A former president’s claim that he acted for his country is an assertion of intention. None can replace forensic evidence, documentary proof or a judicial finding, but each helps explain the political world in which those forms of evidence must now be interpreted.

That distinction may be the most important protection against turning the aftermath of the drug war into another partisan mythology. The task is not to find a sentence capacious enough to make one side disappear. It is to construct a record sturdy enough that neither loyalty nor hatred can easily rewrite it.

The same photograph from The Hague may continue to mean different things. One viewer can see an old leader enduring confinement; another can see an accused finally present before judges. Those are interpretations. What happened during particular operations, who gave particular orders, what police reports omitted or accurately recorded, what the forensic evidence shows and what responsibility the law ultimately assigns are questions susceptible, at least in part, to proof.

The first drug war was justified by its architects as a struggle to restore order. The struggle that follows concerns the order of memory itself: which facts survive, which testimonies are tested, which claims are corroborated and whether the historical record can resist the recurrent Philippine habit of changing with the government presently in power.

The ICC trial may eventually produce a judgment. The Truth Commission may eventually produce an archive and a set of findings. Neither will abolish political disagreement, nor should either be expected to do so. Their more modest but more durable contribution would be to make future disagreement answerable to evidence.

That may be the real war after the war. It is less dramatic than midnight raids, presidential threats or courtroom photographs, but it is likely to last much longer. It will determine not whether Filipinos are permitted to admire or condemn Rodrigo Duterte, but whether the period over which they continue to argue can eventually be remembered as history rather than indefinitely recycled as political ammunition.