MEDIUM RARE

Two days in a row, PBBM shook hands and rubbed elbows with two of the most prominent, clubby Chinese-Filipino organizations, and twice he thanked them for their “astuteness and wisdom” in helping grow the economy as a partner of government.
One day after President Marcos Jr. inducted officers of the Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry Inc., he joined Chinese Ambassador Huang Xilian at an awarding ceremony of the Association for Philippines-China Understanding.
It would be instructive for the grandchildren of the two groups’ members to learn (or be reminded, occasionally) that it was the first President Marcos who signed two presidential decrees (plus one LOI, or Letter of Instructions) that allowed local Chinese and other non-Filipino residents to engage in retail trade through the simple expedient of granting them citizenship. Imagine a landscape where “Filipino First,” not a law but an aspiration, kept out a tribe of intrepid entrepreneurs, their genes and genius, from engaging in trade. Imagine an economy without LT Group, SM, Universal Robina, Megaworld, Double Dragon, etc. without their armies of suppliers, contractors, employees, and consumers, without their taxes and philanthropies!
Presidential decree No. 836 was signed in December 1975 granting citizenship to aliens who qualified for citizenship with none of the disqualifications, decree No. 1379 was signed in May 1978 creating a special committee on naturalization “to receive and process applications” through a “less expensive and more expeditious procedure.” Less expensive is right, for it was an inalienable fact then that applications for citizenship cost an arm and a leg, the negotiations carried in a dark corner across some agent’s desk and under the table. Three years after FM the First signed his decrees, 50,000 applications had been granted and processed. In 2019, his eldest child, Sen. Imee Marcos, noted that PD 1379 had forever “changed the color of our economy” and “contributed to the rise of a truly dynamic entrepreneurship.”
Those retailers that would have been barred and banned from trading are today not only proud and successful citizens of the Republic, they are also global citizens whose investments in world trade are not to be sneezed at. Carlos Chan’s Oishi, for example, has shown to the Chinese in China how far that made-in-PH flair can go.