Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

288 MICHAEL PINCHES
Philippines, as well as a magazine (Say), both of which featured hundreds of
biographical profiles of wealthy business families, executives, entrepreneurs and
professionals, many of them hierarchically categorised by income, but not by
ethnic identity. The names include members of the old mestizo and Spanish elite,
as well as new rich Chinese and Malay Filipinos. Although these publications
included some people in apparently anomalous categories like ‘bartenders’ and
‘fashion models’, they were for the most part explicitly concerned with identifying,
ranking and honouring the country’s wealthy capitalists and new middle class,
regardless of ethnicity.
While these changes herald the positive incorporation of Filipino-Chinese
identity into Philippine bourgeois and national identities, tensions nonetheless
continue. Although many business people and politicians see the FilipinoChinese
as national role models, in some other quarters old racist antipathies remain, even
if they are waning. It is still often claimed that the Filipino-Chinese have little loyalty
to the Philippines and there has been some resentment along these lines as some
of the Taipans have been investing in China, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
During the 1990s, many wealthy Chinese families have been singled out by
kidnapping syndicates who see them as easier targets than other wealthy people.
For this reason Mahal Kong Pilipinas stopped publishing its business profiles, and
many wealthy Chinese have reasserted the secrecy for which they are well
known. 26
Although Chinese ethnicity is commonly used to identify the new rich, many of
the stories of upwardly mobile entrepreneurs that appear in the media, and that
are told verbally, feature women and men who are represented as indigenous
Malay Filipinos rather than Filipino-Chinese. One informant also pointed to the
new family names, normally associated with the working class or peasantry, that
were now appearing in elite business circles. As with Chinese ethnicity, recent
attempts have been made to conceptualise a distinctive form of Filipino
entrepreneurship rooted in traditional indigenous values. 27 Much of the impetus for
this came with a movement for cultural revitalisation in the wake of the overthrow
of the Marcos regime. A popular view circulating in political and intellectual circles
was that the Philippines had a heritage of emphasising negative values, which
helped account for the country’s dictatorship as well as for its economic
backwardness, and that it was necessary to overturn these in favour of positive
indigenous values which had remained largely dormant and untapped. 28
Out of this came the Aquino and Ramos governments’ Moral Recovery
Programme (Schwenk 1989) which, in turn, fostered a number of attempts to
promote and explain indigenous Filipino entrepreneurship. On the one hand, the
Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation launched what it called the ‘dragon
campaign’ which, in part, sought to ‘reorient Filipino values’ by identifying cultural
traits that it saw as contrary to the cause of national development (Villegas 1995).
On the other, the Development Bank of the Philippines ran advertisements in local
business journals presenting a series of Tagalog language concepts which were
seen to embody the qualities of the successful entrepreneur: pagsasarili (self-