China on display V

These series of reflections this week on China begs the child’s simple query: So what? What has the cost of rice in China anything to do with the making of a living and the living of a life in the CNMI? Is there anything wise and relevant from China’s debut into the world stage this August that is worth our bother? And if there is, who cares?

Though our stream of consciousness narrative has not been bereft of relevant insights, let me reframe the questions in the context of this week’s dialogue between the local administration and business concerns with federal government officials writing the regulations pursuant to the recent federalization bill enacted by the U.S. Congress.

The following quote is from the online edition of one of our local dailies. We focus on the substance rather than the attribution of source, which I evidently failed to note: “Business leaders have long said federalization could harm the local economy, which is largely dependent on alien labor, by limiting the number of foreign workers that can be brought into the Commonwealth and stifle foreign investment by imposing strict rules on investor visas.”

Standardization of weights and measures was an early feature of the Han Dynasty. Common characters unified the varied dialects. Large-scale economy in the Far East extending into the Silk Trade Road toward Rome was made possible in the same way as the coins out of Lydia (Asia Minor) and the alphabet of the Phoenicians (precursors to the Greeks and the Romans) were civilizing tools in the Mediterranean and Levant.

Federalization of CNMI immigration and labor in the U.S. context is economic standardization. The weakness of the original 13 colonies was not political wimpy-ness but the absence of a national economic design and SOPs. Federalization had not hampered the rugged individualism of the Northeast, nor did it water down the cultural parochialism of the Deep South; it did not inhibit commerce and industry in the Rust Belt, nor did it derail the march west of the Plains’ methodical common sense; it did not alienate MexTex’ aspirations, nor drenched the heart and soul of Pacific Ecotopians.

The absence of commonality to federal standards on immigration and labor in the Commonwealth, however, has made us depend on being the exception, requiring special favors, demanding entitlement and preferential treatment. We are at once pariahs and prima donnas in Uncle Sam’s budget.

In any economic system, three processes are at play. Foundational is the utilization of resources—natural, human and technological. The other two are production of goods and services and the distribution of the same. A glance at the lagoon on Saipan shows how we abused natural capital in the last four decades. Local human resource deteriorated into protection of privileges. Abusing alien labor was taken for granted.

Dependence on alien labor, for as long as it stays alien, is not a plus in our local economy, though exploiting it was profitable. In fact, the practice is a modern form of servitude. When I first came to the CNMI in 1989 to help recruit personnel, I was stunned at the living conditions of contract workers. DC Rep. Juan Babauta paid dearly for airing out this dirty laundry. Ten years later, as director of the United Methodist Church’s Marianas Resource Center in Oleai, I became familiar with the case of a nanny and her government functionary employer.

The nanny came as an unregulated contracted labor, a privilege shared with farmers. Her husband came in as a construction worker, and remained a farm hand. Both were totally at the mercy of their employer. In this particular case, the over 40-year-old nanny, already mother to nine children back in Pea Eye, was asleep in her servant’s quarters when the inebriated boss staggered in one early morning and tried to insert a part of his private anatomy into the sleeping nanny’s mouth.

She resisted the intrusion and made a ruckus of it. The following day, the wife told her that she was no longer to do her toilet in the house’s restrooms but to go to the wooded area behind the house to perform her needed functions. More than the blatant breach of employment contract, she bears the deep scar of violated human dignity. Doubly tragic is the fact that this was not an isolated case. The nature of violations against imported contract labor was not uncommon, is well documented, and alas, continues to this day.

We will not bother to go into the pampered native personnel in the public sector, a hotbed of nepotism and corruption, well publicized by others. China’s economic development zones insisted on joint ventures and partnerships, a provision though hardly adhered to that is required in capital investments in the CNMI. A former Red Guard and significant other to a Red Army General moved to the CNMI early on because the General was caught misusing SEZ funds and remains incarcerated in penal confinement. A local pundit quips that local crooks are never prosecuted, they just keep getting re-elected.

Nor do we want to mention our neglect of technology. Vocational training and trade skills are not a high PSS priority, Tony Pellegrino’s bewailing notwithstanding. I do thank the Chinese farmers for propagating kailan (Chinese broccoli), and Walt FJ Goodridge for recognizing malunggay and other iron-rich veggies in the Pinoy repertoire of backyard greens. Lino Olopai’s shifting of his navigational skills to land-based food productivity might just radically reduce our food chain dependence on Oakland and Baltimore seaports.

A Chinese sociological study reveals that 20 percent participation of the local population in a designated special economic zone is the best that can be expected, which even in their eyes is not good enough since the remaining 80 percent are left in the cold. We do not fare better. The moral contradiction in our time is the economic cleavage between the 15 percent who control assets and resources against the 85 percent who rely on the crumbs from under the well-off tables!

The cultural ethos of significant individual engagement resulting in the common good is missing in the Chinese equation but the social net in place to ensure the broadest protection of individual welfare is there. Social contract, a covenant of mutual responsibility and interdependence, ironically prevails in secular socialist states more than its occurrence in supposedly charitable Christian nations.

Confucian paternalism worked for China and Uncle Sam’s martial hierarchy guided post-WWII organizational systems. The modern world is requiring a One World, One Dream orientation in economics, politics and culture. China is lifting itself up for display on the global stage—shaken Sichuan and tremulous Tibet notwithstanding. This may just be a good permission-giving stance for others, like the CNMI, to quit posturing and whimpering, and start getting a life.