Philippine perspectives on China's experience

LAST week's column ended with a suggestion that democracy and its attendant principles may not be the right fit for us, considering the decades of experimentation in the Philippines, comparative to some successful Asian countries run under the opposite type of governance, if our gauge of success is to see the citizenry improve their lives immensely and provide for the present generation and the future ones. It is a valid assumption that a government must exist to provide the wherewithal for the well-lived lives of its citizenry. In its simplest terms, under the precepts of democracy, its success is measured when the great majority of its people are not hungry and are educated and safe and, in essence, poverty is alleviated. And the menu of ingredients for success is myriad when related to the dignity of each Filipino — the core values of centrist democracy, health care, decent dwelling, job creation, a living wage and social security, among others. I submit that in many of these features, our government under democracy has failed.

The American precepts we adopted gave precedence to values that may not be congruent with Filipino culture. Individual freedoms, which are products of America's historicity and political evolution — freedom of speech and the press, religious beliefs, freedom to bear arms, a bill of rights, etc. — are basically alien to our own. Adherents of democracy as practiced in the Western world argue that democracy has many defects, but its opposite, authoritarianism, is no better an alternative. But empirical evidence shows otherwise.