World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [19]
Although the hacienderos also have extensive businesses, it was the country’s tiny Chinese minority whose economic power exploded with the pro-market reforms of the late-1980s and 1990s. Today, Filipino Chinese, just 1 to 2 percent of the population, control all of the Philippines’ largest and most lucrative department store chains, major supermarkets, and fast-food restaurants, including the McDonald’s franchise and the Jollibee chain, which makes “Filipino-style” burgers with soy sauce. With one exception, all of the Philippines’ principal banks are now Chinese-controlled, including George Ty’s Metrobank Group, the country’s largest and most aggressive financial conglomerate.
The Manila Stock Exchange, located near Chinatown, is dominated by Filipino Chinese stockbrokerage firms. Ethnic Chinese also dominate the shipping, textiles, construction, real estate, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, and personal computer industries as well as the country’s wholesale distribution networks. Outside of commerce and finance, Chinese Filipinos control six out of the ten English-language newspapers in Manila, including the one with the largest daily circulation. Apart from the aristocratic Zobel de Ayala family and possibly the Marcos family (Ferdinand and Imelda’s son Bong Bong and daughter Imee are currently both elected officials in the Philippines), all of “the top billionaires in the Philippines” are Filipino Chinese or Chinese-descended, at least according to a recent report in the (Chinese-owned) Philippine Star.
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Even the relatively unmarketized economies of Cambodia and Laos are showing signs of Chinese market dominance. Cambodia’s capital city Phnom Penh is now teeming with thousands of prospering Chinese businesses. In Laos, which has almost no indigenous commercial culture, the 1 percent Chinese minority more or less constitute the country’s entire business community, profiting eagerly from every grudging inch of globalization-induced market opening.
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Globalization has unquestionably had some positive effects even for Southeast Asia’s poor indigenous majorities. According to a recent World Bank report, global integration and market policies since 1980 have reduced absolute poverty in a number of Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, raising average incomes in these countries at all levels.
30 Unfortunately, this kind of statistic hides a number of troubling facts.
First, even with these income improvements, the indigenous majorities in these countries remain unmistakably, often shockingly poor. Impoverished Filipinos do not rejoice in World Bank empirical studies showing that their per capita income has increased by a few cents per day. Second, more fundamentally, globalization and free markets since 1980 have aggravated, in appearance and almost certainly in reality, the grotesque ethnic wealth disparities in the region. In the eyes of Southeast Asia’s indigenous majorities, global markets have produced multimillionaires, billionaires, and multibillionaires—but only among members of another ethnic group. As a result, despite marginal increases in their income, indigenous Southeast Asians often feel that free markets benefit only “outsiders”—ethnic Chinese and foreign investors—along with a handful of corrupt indigenous politicians in their pockets.
In all the countries of Southeast Asia, free markets have produced countless rags-to-riches success stories among the ethnic Chinese, but remarkably few among the region’s indigenous majorities. As an informal illustration of globalization’s disproportionate