Analysis and Opinion

By Dean de la Paz

Hegemony takes many forms.From conquests, and colonization, the menu now includes terraforming watery shoals, foreign debt-compromised infrastructure with sovereign guarantees that hock patrimonial assets, the invasion of online gambling armies and battle-ready battalions of foreign construction and factory workers. The most farfetched form of domination is inflicting virtual eugenic population control using deadly viral and mutating microbes.

Note hegemony's more novel forms. Off Palawan there is the exploitation of natural resources by an entity owning 90% of the exploration company, but with layered equity leveraged to foreign creditors. Across the archipelago a telecommunications company owned 40% by a hostile foreign state has the Filipino 60% likewise indebted to foreign creditors.

In Dumaguete there is foreign intrusion in an environmentally destructive reclamation project. In Central Luzon, and even in Manila, foreign factory, construction workers and casino operators have displaced Filipinos whose total unemployment rate worsened severalfold. Across the country the electricity transmission grid is technically in the grip of a hostile superpower.

There are many ways to subdue and dominate. On the COVID 19 pandemic, more than half of those vaccinated were, by deliberate design, inoculated with a Chinese vaccine that, among all others, exhibited the least efficacy.

We should have been forewarned early in 2020 when Iran was COVID 19's first epicenter.

Why Iran? Given the number of Chinese nationals from China's innermost provinces, spread like a virus to all who welcomed the tax revenues from online gaming operations, one would think the Philippines would be more impacted since we host legions of legal and illegal Philippine Online Gaming Operators. In contrast, Iran, an Islamic nation, strictly adheres to the Holy Koran that declares gambling illegal.

It is not just religion. Shielding Iran from China are Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India in between. The distance from COVID 19's petri dish birthplace to Tehran is 5,780 kilometers as the crow flies. From Wuhan to Manila is a mere 3 hours. Closer if you count Chinese islands squatting inside our exclusive economic zone.

When the United States imposed economic sanctions on Iran in 2018, they virtually shoved Iran into the waiting talons of China. In our case, we recklessly pivoted, lured by China's ''Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI).

Within a year, Iran's inflation worsened to 40%; it was forced into rationing; its currency lost 70% of its value; and unemployment rose to 50% among the young.

Iran owns 10% of known oil reserves. With China as an insatiable consumer, a diabolical parasitical relationship ensued. China's oil purchases keep Iran afloat. In return China provides weapons and nuclear technologies, thus deepening their infernal bond. With that, debt between the two grew. Chinese investments then went into a frenzy as China opened billions in credit lines. 

Within Iran a web widened with the China National Machinery Import and Export Corporation guaranteeing a market for imported Chinese goods and the employment of exported Chinese workers under the BRI quid pro quo.

Chinese names are now familiar in Iran's innermost regions - China Railway Construction Corp., China National Machinery Industry Corp. and China Railway Engineering Corp. with the latter building a $2.7 billion rail line in Qom, a city that hosts Iran's largest Chinese labor force.

Incidentally, Qom is where COVID 19 had spread like wildfire. So why Iran? Connect the dots. But check the neighborhood as well. Ours and theirs.

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Dean de la Paz is a former investment banker. He is the Chairman of the Board of a renewable energy company and is a retired Business Policy, Finance and Mathematics professor.

Photograph is from CHOICE, China Observers in Central and Eastern Europe: https://chinaobservers.eu/are-china-and-iran-forging-a-new-geopolitical-axis-in-eurasia/