Introduction
On 28 January 1954, The Bullseye tabloid in Manila printed a letter to the new president of the country, Ramon Magsaysay, from a ‘group of non-political but patriotic local Chinese merchants’ who had resided in the islands for over 20 years and come to regard the Philippines as their ‘second mother country’. Its author, Lim Tian Seng, said that the purpose of the letter was to point out ‘bad elements among the local Chinese who have utilized convenient facilities accommodated to them by some corrupt government officials to enrich themselves’. He singled out two individuals for special blame. The first he did not name, but described simply as a ‘naturalized alien whose citizenship is even now under question and whose notoriety is so well-known to the Filipinos as well as the Chinese that no further introduction is necessary’. Lim identified the second person as Shih I-Sheng (spelled ‘Sy Yek Sheng’ in the letter),Footnote 1 the former secretary general of the Kuomintang (KMT) in the Philippines, and proceeded to describe how Shih extorted money from wealthy Chinese. According to Lim, Shih simply picked up the telephone and called someone whom he knew to be well-off. Exploiting his KMT credentials, Shih claimed to have connections with the Philippine military and told his victim that someone had reported to the authorities that he was a communist or communist sympathizer. Shih then offered to clear this person's name, but only after he paid Shih 10,000, 30,000, or 50,000 pesos, depending on how wealthy he was. Shih had made, by a ‘very conservative estimation’, no less than half a million pesos from this scheme and, though no longer KMT secretary general, remained in the country as the ‘head of the Chinese Volunteers of the Philippines Fraternity’—a KMT-led Chinese guerrilla organization during the Second World War.
Lim also claimed that, during the previous week, ‘thousands of local Chinese commercial establishments received by mail supposed communist propaganda literature in Chinese, sealed in envelopes allegedly issued by the “Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party in the Philippines”’. Reasoning that such a large volume of propaganda could not possibly have been mailed by actual Chinese communists because of the Magsaysay Administration's ‘relentless’ anticommunist policies and the Chinese Reds’ lack of organization in the country, he concluded that the materials must have been forged. The real culprits, he conjectured, were ‘well-organized racketeers’ who hoped to deceive the government into believing that Chinese communists were active again and profit from any arrests that it might make. ‘We have reasons to believe’, he said, that there were many ‘Chinese operatives’ in the Department of National Defense (DND) who were in cahoots with the racketeers and had been feeding their Filipino superiors ‘biased and inaccurate or even false and malicious’ reports on the activities and ideological leanings of local Chinese. The letter then mentioned the Philippine military's mass arrest of some 300 Chinese on 27 December 1952 on charges of communism. At least 170 detainees had been released, revealing the extent to which the authorities relied on bad intelligence. In concluding, Lim modestly hoped that no further arrests would be made unless they were well supported by substantial evidence.Footnote 2
Lim had more in common with Shih and the Chinese operatives who had infiltrated the DND than his letter to the newly elected president condemning them suggests. Blackmail, forgery, rumour-mongering, and similar criminal or ethically questionable behaviour aimed at tearing down the reputation of men like Lim by identifying them as communists. In a twisted way, Shih and these operatives were practising anticommunism in the name of Filipino national values. Until exposed, they were perceived as anticommunists or as helping anticommunism. Similarly, Lim's carefully worded letter was a performance of his ideological affinities. By informing on his fellow Chinese to the public, which was a rare occurrence at the time, Lim was playing on Filipino prejudices toward Chinese and proving that he was a ‘patriotic’ Chinese merchant who regarded the Philippines as his ‘second mother country’. Lim understood his ‘patriotism’ here as a civic disposition unrelated to one's place of birth or nationality, neither of which we know. He might not have spoken Tagalog or been able to pass off as racially Filipino. But, in exposing the criminal methods of Shih and the operatives, he was strengthening the Philippine state's capacity to distinguish between genuine and fake Reds.
The practices described above were both a response to and a component of the anticommunist, Sinophobic political and social environment in the early post-colonial Philippines. Ethnic Chinese there did not experience the ‘global Cold War’ as a conflict between the great powers, but as what Heonik Kwon calls a ‘locally specific historical reality’, in which geopolitics was woven into the particulars of everyday life, from material and symbolic forms such as fallout shelters to less materially tangible and more socially diffused forms such as kinship relations.Footnote 3 This article builds on work by social and cultural historians of the Cold War such as Kwon and, most recently, Masuda Hajimu by showing how non-state Chinese actors helped create the locally specific reality of Chinese anticommunism in the Philippines.Footnote 4 It argues that, in a climate thick with Sinophobia and fears of communism, but largely devoid of actual Chinese Reds, anticommunism for Chinese was only secondarily about rooting out subversives, ideological authenticity, and supporting Chiang Kai-shek's plan to counterattack the mainland. As a social phenomenon, it was primarily a diverse and flexible repertoire of practices, from civic associationism to crime, that Chinese elites such as Lim and their challengers such as Shih and the Chinese operatives employed to bolster their reputations as anticommunists, enrich themselves, and attack their ‘communist’ enemies.Footnote 5
As Philip Kuhn and others have shown, adaptability is a well-documented theme in histories of the Chinese diaspora, but mostly from the perspective of efforts to forge hybrid and plural ethno-cultural identities and to circumvent discriminatory socio-economic policies.Footnote 6 This article argues that practices of what I call ideological accommodation were essential to how Chinese adapted to being resident ‘aliens’ in Philippine society.Footnote 7 Racial and cultural aspects of Chineseness such as one's physical appearance and language were impossible to shed, while becoming a naturalized Philippine citizen was a difficult and expensive process that in general only the wealthiest and most well-connected Chinese undertook.Footnote 8 But it was easy to perform or fake one's beliefs and demonstrate conformity to orthodox civic ideals. For Chinese actors, doing so proved to Philippine officials that they were ideologically acceptable and politically useful, despite being members of a suspect minority group and mostly foreign nationals. In this manner, they used ideology to bridge the differences in ethnicity, culture, and nationality between themselves and Filipinos.
By using the term ‘accommodation’ and stressing its contexts, I do not mean to imply that anticommunism was merely reactive in nature and that the individuals involved were at the mercy of the Philippine government or international forces. Rather, it was a productive strategy, in which members of Chinese society competed with each other to accumulate anticommunism as a kind of resource and achieve social prominence. The Philippine state figured into their calculations as an arbiter of such prominence, a legal and coercive institution, and a source of political patronage. Yet, as we will see, it was also dependent on these actors for intelligence and, consequently, was often the one being manipulated. The Chinese involved demonstrated a clear awareness of their positions within local power structures, the Philippines’ alignment and relations with the United States, and the similarly close ties between Chinese in the country and the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan.
This article begins by describing how an anticommunist, Sinophobic environment emerged in the Philippines during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Fears of Chinese communism, I show, preoccupied the Philippine state and Chinese society, incentivizing ideological accommodation. I then examine the anticommunist practices of three groups of Chinese actors that represented different institutions, factions, and classes within Chinese society. First, I discuss the Philippine-Chinese United Organization in Support of Anti-Communist Movement, which Chinese elites such as the businessmen Alfonso Sycip established to raise funds and conduct propaganda activities in support of anticommunism. I then turn to persons who disrupted the established social order. Shih I-Sheng and a Korean-Chinese pharmacist, Edward Lim, both affiliated with the KMT, used their standing within the party to forge for themselves reputations as experts on Chinese communism and blackmail local Chinese. Third and finally, I describe a Chinese criminal gang, led by a man named Antonio Chua Cruz, that the DND employed to gather intelligence on Chinese society. Like Shih and Lim, Cruz and his confederates exploited their relationship with the state to threaten other Chinese and profit from anticommunism, destabilizing Chinese society and temporarily elevating their social positions in the process.
Anticommunism and Sinophobia in the early Cold War Philippines
From the late 1940s onwards, fears of Chinese communism in the Philippines persisted despite the apparent disappearance of the Chinese communist movement there from the public scene after the Second World War. By 1948, leftist newspapers such as the Chinese Guide (Huaqiao daobao) and Chinese Commercial Bulletin (Qiaoshang gongbao) had been raided by the military, with the help of local KMT forces, as had Chinese schools and labour unions suspected of communist leanings. The editors of these papers, many of whom had been leaders of wartime anti-Japanese guerrilla forces such as the Philippine-Chinese Anti-Japanese Guerrilla Force (Feilübin huaqiao kangri zhidui, or Wha Chi as it was known) and Philippine-Chinese Anti-Japanese and Anti-Traitors League (Feilübin huaqiao kangri fanjian datongmeng, or Kang Fan) had fled or been deported to China. The few members of these groups who remained in the Philippines either ceased their activities entirely or went underground.Footnote 9 After 1948, all that remained of the Chinese communist movement in the islands was the Chinese Bureau—a small, highly secretive organization loosely connected to the Communist Party of the Philippines (Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, or PKP), but which accomplished nothing of note.Footnote 10
Filipinos at the time, particularly those involved in intelligence and policing, remained wary of the subversive potential of Chinese communism. Everywhere they turned, communism appeared to be in the ascendancy, not least in their country, where the PKP's armed wing, the Hukbalahap, launched a full-scale rural insurgency against the state in 1948.Footnote 11 Communist uprisings, some more short-lived than others, also erupted in Malaya, Burma, and Indonesia that same year, seemingly at the instigation of the Soviet Union at the Calcutta Youth Conference in February.Footnote 12 In China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had won the civil war against the KMT. By the time the People's Republic of China (PRC) entered the Korean War in late 1950, Chinese communism had become a distinct, territorialized, and racialized subset of the global Red threat.
The imagined threat of Chinese communism was inseparable from anxieties over the Philippines’ porous borders and immigration policy. Officials and politicians feared that Reds lurked among the 2,700 or so Chinese ‘overstaying temporary visitors’ who had entered the islands during the Chinese Civil War and then refused to leave for China after their three-month visitor visas had expired.Footnote 13 National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NICA) reports from the period lay bare the state's belief that pro-communist Chinese smugglers and corrupt local officials were facilitating the inflow of CCP propaganda (along with gold, drugs, and other contraband) into the Philippines and the outflow of foreign exchange and illicit arms to China. CCP agents were rumoured to have entered the country to join up with local Chinese Reds and the Huks and infiltrate Chinese society: the Immigration Commissioner testified to the House Committee on Un-Filipino Activities (CUFA) in October 1948 that, of the 561 known communist agents in the Philippines, at least 50 were Chinese, some of them ‘prominent socially and in business’.Footnote 14 In language that typified Philippine fears of the Chinese as fifth columnists, one NICA report declared that ‘if nothing is effectively done in advance’ to check the ‘Chinese Menace’, this country ‘may later become a “Little China”’.Footnote 15 Another asserted, without supporting evidence, that ‘Of the officially estimated 200,000 Chinese residents in the Philippines, 36,000 have been identified as communists and communist sympathizers. This figure exceeds even the native communist forces’.Footnote 16 In 1951, Magsaysay, then Secretary of National Defense, dialled down this figure to 30,000—or around 13 per cent of the Chinese population of approximately 230,000.Footnote 17
Officials treated Chinese communism as a subset of the wider ‘Chinese problem’ in the country, as they had since the US colonial period. Stereotypes of the Chinese as corrupt businessmen and inclined towards opium smoking, gambling, frequenting prostitutes, and other vices originated in the early twentieth century,Footnote 18 as Richard Chu has shown, while, during the 1930s, communism emerged as a threat to political order in the 1930s with the formation of the PKP and a Chinese communist movement in the islands.Footnote 19 Cold War concerns and post-colonial Filipino nationalism helped weld together Sinophobia and anticommunism. In Filipino eyes, to cite NICA again, the Chinese as a race were ‘passive and individualistic in temperament’, but also capable of being ‘energized by propaganda’ and hence susceptible to CCP indoctrination.Footnote 20 At the same time, local Chinese had ‘nurtured their ties with the motherland, operate cohesively as a race, and in many instances claim dual citizenship. Their unassimilability [sic] and their financial or commercial influence make them effective instruments of probable aggressive Chinese foreign policy’.Footnote 21 Race and nationality were inseparable aspects of Chineseness in the eyes of Filipinos.
Populist expressions of these (often contradictory) anti-Chinese prejudices took multiple forms. Politicians and journalists were given to inveighing against Chinese in the local newspapers to drum up support for their election campaigns and boost their readership, respectively. On the legislative front, the postwar Philippine Congress passed a series of bills aimed at curbing Chinese dominance of the country's economy. Magsaysay signed into law the most comprehensive of these, the so-called Retail Trade Nationalization Act (Republic Act No. 1180), in 1954 after years of lobbying by nationalistic congressmen and their Filipino business associates.Footnote 22 Such measures were widespread across Southeast Asia. However, large-scale anti-Chinese riots, the likes of which had happened during Spanish and American rule and that would break out in Indonesia and Malaysia, did not take place in the post-colonial Philippines. Individual Chinese were, rather, the targets of corrupt, unscrupulous, or simply clueless representatives of the state (whose Chinese partners-in-crime I examine shortly). Manila's police were known to raid the shops of Chinese merchants, carrying with them search warrants and small quantities of opium, ammunition, and Chinese communist propaganda. If the merchants refused to pay them off, the police pretended to have found such contraband on their premises and arrested them.Footnote 23 Intelligence agencies and the police were also ignorant of the Chinese language and thus subcontracted the gathering of intelligence on Chinese society to local Chinese, rendering themselves vulnerable to inaccurate or fabricated reports on alleged communists. Chinese arrested by the state, if found guilty by the Deportation Board, were deported as foreign nationals to Xiamen or, after 1949, Taipei. Police criminality was such a serious matter that it went all the way up to ROC Foreign Minister George Yeh himself, who protested to a Philippine official in Taipei in April 1951 that the police ‘act in such a way that the Chinese people live in a constant fear. They have instilled a feeling of insecurity among the Chinese nationals and a reign of terror spread among them’.Footnote 24
The prospect of being extorted, arrested, and deported by the state was among a host of fears for local Chinese the time. In the chaotic period immediately following the end of the Second World War, Chinese society was convulsed by killings, kidnappings, and extortion cases, carried out by thugs and former guerrillas, particularly on the left, for reasons ranging from personal grievances to alleged collaboration with the Japanese.Footnote 25 From the 1950s onwards, Chinese frequently faced demands for money from CCP officials in China. Foreign exchange controls that the Philippine Central Bank imposed in December 1949 prevented local Chinese from remitting money to their relatives in China—a prohibition that they overcame largely by channelling their remittances through third-party brokers in Hong Kong.Footnote 26 It became increasingly common after then for local Chinese to receive letters from their relatives, written at the instigation of CCP officials, asking for further sums of money, either small amounts on a regular basis or an immediate large lump sum. At least 50 per cent of Chinese, according to a KMT member's report to the US Embassy in Manila, acceded to these demands, afraid of what might happen to their relatives if they did not.Footnote 27 Reporting such incidents to the authorities was not an option for victims of these schemes, given the illegality of remitting money overseas and the charges of aiding the CCP that law enforcement could easily level against them for doing so.
From the late 1940s onwards, it thus became expedient for Chinese to adopt anticommunist positions in their everyday lives. As the actions of anti-Chinese politicians, corrupt policemen, and Chinese communists suggest, opportunities abounded from the late 1940s onwards for individuals or groups—even outside the country—to profit from the social instability that Filipino anti-Chinese prejudices and fears of communism caused. In the absence of authentic Chinese communist threats to national security, anticommunism became a new and valorized ideological resource that Chinese competed with each other to accumulate and transform into social and political gains.
Alfonso Sycip and the Philippine-Chinese United Organization in Support of Anti-Communist Movement
Established in January 1951, the Philippine-Chinese United Organization in Support of Anti-Communist Movement (Feilübin huaqiao fangong kang'e houyuanhui, or ACM) exemplified the efforts of Chinese elites to show that they were good anticommunists and patriotic residents of the country.Footnote 28 The ACM was formed at the height of the Korean War and the Huk Rebellion, and shortly after a visit to KMT-controlled Taiwan in August 1950 by 46 Philippine-Chinese, who became the first ever overseas Chinese community to do so. In the Philippines, anticommunism was flourishing. Magsaysay's United States of America-supported counterinsurgency campaign against the Huks had yielded the capture of the PKP's entire secretariat in late 1950. CUFA had been created weeks after the Korean conflict erupted to define what the state regarded as ‘un-Filipino’ behaviour.Footnote 29 At the level of civic society, organizations such as the ACM and the American and Filipino-dominated Philippine Anti-Communist League (PACL) had emerged with the stated objective of mobilizing and educating people against the Red menace.
As a civic initiative, the ACM aligned itself with the ideological goals and language of the Philippine and ROC states and derived its legitimacy from being supported by them. The objective of the movement, declared a press release by the ROC Embassy, was to ‘redouble and coordinate the efforts of the Chinese nationals in the Philippines in aiding their legitimate government, now temporarily seated in Taiwan, to which they have all along manifested their loyalty, in its determined struggle against this evil force of Communist aggression’. At the same time, the ACM aimed to assist the Philippine government in combating their common ‘ruthless foe’ in the ‘Soviet imperialists’—a stock expression in KMT propaganda—and their satellites. As the first such organization among overseas Chinese, it was meant to inspire Chinese in other countries to ‘[unite] together … so as to achieve greater strength to bring about the early defeat of Communism’. The movement welcomed Filipinos into its fold and cherished the support of its Filipino ‘hosts’, who were among its ‘first and most ardent supporters’. President Elpidio Quirino had ‘graciously expressed his approval of the project’, while Chiang Kai-shek himself appointed its 25 Standing Committee members.Footnote 30
The formation of the ACM strengthened relations between the Philippines and the ROC and was meant to benefit all three parties. For the Quirino government, local Chinese leaders’ commitment to anticommunism legitimized its ideological crusade against the Huks and signalled the Chinese community's acceptance of state-defined national values. By publicizing the ACM, the KMT regime showed to the world that, despite its collapse on the mainland, it retained the backing of ‘Chinese nationals’ abroad, while the movement's activities would hopefully inspire huaqiao in the Philippines and elsewhere to support the ROC's campaign to counterattack China. In this way, the reputation of the ROC was tied to that of pro-ROC huaqiao. The press release made clear that the ROC understood Philippine-Chinese elites’ support for fangong kang'e as a manifestation of the same patriotic spirit that they had shown during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In what may have been a reference to the Philippine-Chinese Committee in Support of the Resistance to the Enemy (Feilübin huaqiao yuanzhu kangdi weiyuanhui) formed in 1937,Footnote 31 it noted that something similar to the ACM had been established previously in opposition to Japan and that ‘Judging from the successful experience of the late organization, we are certain that the new body will also be able to contribute to the ultimate triumph of the force of democracy’.Footnote 32
The ACM united under the banner of anticommunism representatives of the two largest Chinese organizations in the country: the KMT and the Philippine-Chinese General Chamber of Commerce (Feilübin Minlila zhonghua shanghui).Footnote 33 Although their memberships partly overlapped, relations between them were complex. The chamber was historically dominated by what political scientist James Blaker has called ‘traditionalists’. Such men focused on arbitrating internal community disputes, mediating between the community and the Philippine state, and conserving traditional Chinese values. While they may have identified as Chinese and retained ties to China, they did so mainly in a cultural sense, and to enhance their own influence and prestige in the Philippines. The KMT and KMT-affiliated chamber members, by contrast, whom Blaker labels ‘nationalists’, were oriented towards China in a more overtly political sense and sought to leverage the resources of Chinese society to affect mainland affairs.Footnote 34 The anti-Japanese struggle helped tilt the balance of power in favour of the KMT. In the postwar period, membership of the party and its representation within the Chamber increased. With anticommunism ascendant, traditionalists found it convenient to jump onto the ideological bandwagon.
The membership and leadership of the ACM reflected both the growing influence of the KMT and the increased willingness of traditionalist Chinese to behave nationalistically in response to the changing political environment. Three out of the movement's four vice-chairmen were high-ranking party members (including the incumbent chamber president), while the fourth, although not affiliated to the party, was a staunch anticommunist. The remaining persons on the Standing Committee were largely businessmen, except for a few who represented other important sectors of Chinese society such as the media and education. As KMT secretary general at the time, Shih I-Sheng was also on the committee, but does not appear to have played a major role in the ACM.Footnote 35 In total, 12 committee members also belonged to the KMT.
The chairman of the ACM was a member of the old guard, Alfonso Sycip, who had just stepped down as chamber president in 1950 after a record eight consecutive terms in office.Footnote 36 Born in the Philippines in 1883 and fluent in English and Chinese, Sycip was a naturalized Philippine citizen and one of the richest men in the country, having made his fortune from the import and export business. He was also on personal terms with US officials and Filipino and ROC politicians, including Chiang Kai-shek. For reasons of seniority, social status, linguistic ability, and nationality, Sycip was very much the ideal person to front an organization that sought both the favour of the Philippine political establishment and to rally local Chinese.
He was not, however, a KMT member and, until the 1950s, had never been very nationalistic, certainly not in comparison to party ideologues. At the height of the Sino-Japanese War, he only reluctantly supported the campaign to boycott Japanese goods that more ideological, KMT-aligned members of the community had pressured the chamber to launch. In 1939, with the boycott taking its toll on Chinese commerce, Sycip told a gathering of Chinese businessmen that they should ‘regain their primary mission [as businessmen]’ and ‘must not be excessively indulged [sic] in military and political affairs’.Footnote 37 During the occupation, the Japanese detained him for a year, before releasing him on account of his old age. He then fled to remote Fuga Island, where he hid until the end of the war.Footnote 38 After 1945, Sycip resumed his leadership of the General Chamber and remained disengaged from the politics of China until 1951, his friendship with Chiang notwithstanding. For example, unlike many others on the ACM's Standing Committee, he did not participate in the kaocha visit to Taiwan and pay tribute to the Generalissimo in August 1950. Only after becoming chairman of the ACM did he start taking firm ideological positions in public, and thus it is in the context of the political climate of the times that his shift in public behaviour must be understood.
The movement got off to a strong start, particularly on the fundraising front. According to its charter, branches of the organization were to be formed in the provinces and be asked to make monthly and special ‘national salvation’ contributions to its general headquarters in Manila, which would report them semi-annually to the ROC government. A portion of these contributions went towards Quirino's recently established National Peace Fund, which solicited private donations to help finance operations against the Huks and which the Chinese community had pledged 2 million pesos to.Footnote 39 Donations to official government projects enabled wealthy Chinese to prove their value to their host country, perform good citizenship, and assuage doubts about their ideological leanings. The highlight of the movement's early years was a tour of the southern Philippines from 27 March to 5 April 1951 led by Sycip, two of its vice presidents, and ROC Ambassador Chen Chih-ping. The tour aimed to establish the ACM in places like Iloilo, Cebu, Davao, and Cotabato, induct new members into the movement, and raise funds for the ROC through schemes such as the selling of ‘patriotic bonds’ (aiguo gongzhai). In his report on the tour, Chen did not specify how much money it had raised, but said only that its results could not be quantified and that it had made a lasting impact on anticommunist cooperation between the two states.Footnote 40 Statistics compiled by the ROC's Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission (Qiaowu weiyuanhui) give us a better idea of the amount raised. They show that ‘patriotic voluntary contributions’ (aiguo zidong juanxian) from Philippine-Chinese to the ROC in 1951 amounted to US$251,096.14—the highest amount by far among all overseas Chinese communities that year.Footnote 41
Fundraising aside, the ACM opposed communism chiefly through propaganda. For instance, it disseminated anticommunist literature to schools and other civic organizations, assigned speakers to them, held rallies and cultural events, often in conjunction with the PACL, and published articles in the local media. Sycip, the movement's designated spokesperson, occasionally relied on the Fookien Times Yearbook as a mouthpiece, as its publisher was on the ACM's Standing Committee. As a dual-language publication, the Yearbook allowed the movement to reach an audience of Chinese, Filipinos, and Americans. In September 1952, Sycip penned an article in it on ‘The Role of the Overseas Chinese in the Worldwide Struggle against Communism’, in which he exhorted Chinese in the Philippines and elsewhere to strengthen their anticommunist sentiments, help the authorities root out communism, and assist the Nationalist government in every possible way. He also rebuked other Southeast Asian governments for not recognizing and reacting to the communist threat ‘in as clear and as energetic a manner as the Philippines’, thereby positioning his country at the forefront of the Cold War struggle in the region. The same piece also allowed Sycip to update readers on the ACM's achievements, which included contributions to the National Peace Fund, the establishment of 50 chapters in the provinces, and an ‘extensive educational campaign’ involving propaganda in schools and the media.Footnote 42 A year later, he wrote another hortatory piece, ‘An Appeal to the People of Free Nations’, which contained practical suggestions on how ordinary people, not just Chinese, could mobilize on their own or cooperate with their governments against communism. One was helping those who had been ‘forced to become Communists return to the fold of democracy’. The other was reporting communists to the authorities. But, he cautioned, it was important to avoid false accusations.Footnote 43
To illustrate Sycip's and other ACM members’ sensitivity to the ideological climate, let us turn to one of the very few recorded meetings of the movement's Standing Committee. In December 1951, Sy En, president of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and a high-ranking KMT member, proposed changing the registered English name of the ACM to that of a charitable organization in the event that the PRC entered the United Nations and the Philippines recognized it. Were such a scenario to unfold, the ACM, under a different name, would still be in a position to collect donations from local Chinese to support anticommunism. Most members, including Ambassador Chen, opposed the proposal. One asserted that, since the ACM's raison d’être was to oppose communism, it would ‘lose its meaning’ (shiqu qi yiyi) if it changed its name. Another said such a change would signal that the Philippine-Chinese had ideologically flip-flopped; Chen expressed a similar concern that both the ROC and Philippine governments would view this as indicative of a loss of faith and a lack of resolve. Nothing was changed in the end. Sycip, who had the last word, acknowledged the concerns of the chamber president, but came down on the side of the status quo. ‘Whatever happens to Taiwan in the future,’ he said, ‘we Chinese in the Philippines should adhere to the Philippine environment. As the Philippines is an anticommunist country, the name of the organization does not need to be changed.’Footnote 44
The dispute that arose during this meeting suggests how important being perceived in the right way to the right authorities was to the ACM. Sy's proposal betrayed a fear that anticommunism would not enjoy the same social cachet were the Philippines to recognize the ROC. Other members objected to this largely on the grounds that it might undermine the reputation of the organization and the Chinese community in the eyes of the Philippine and ROC states, from which the ACM secured its legitimacy. Sycip underscored his personal transformation into a Cold Warrior and no doubt echoed the concerns of many who were present by calling for the movement to ‘adhere to the Philippine environment’. Thus, even though the opinions of those present may have diverged, they rested on a shared commitment to accommodating the political climate. This, ultimately, was what anticommunism revolved around.
Shih I-Sheng, Edward Lim, and the KMT
Sycip's warning against false accusations of communism spoke to real anxieties for Chinese at the time, if not for him personally, then certainly for many others who had been accused. For Shih I-Sheng and Edward Lim, however, the ‘feeling of insecurity’ among Chinese that the ROC foreign minister spoke of was an opportunity for social advancement and personal gain, enabling them to forge ideological identities as ‘experts’ on communism. In acquiring such reputations, they became a source of the accusations that Sycip alluded to. Both men were affiliated with the Philippine KMT; Shih in fact was instrumental in its consolidation of influence after 1945. Born in Jinjiang in 1901, Shih first arrived in the Philippines in the late 1930s and became one of three KMT Standing Committee members there. Having been trained at the Central Political and Military Academy in Chongqing,Footnote 45 he commanded the Chinese Volunteers in the Philippines (Feil übin huaqiao yiyongjun, or CVP), the largest of the four right-wing Chinese anti-Japanese groups in the islands, during the Pacific War. For his and the CVP's efforts, Shih received the ROC's highest military decoration and a medal from the KMT in China.Footnote 46 Following the war, the KMT's Central Executive Committee in China delegated Shih and ten others the responsibility of rebuilding the party in the Philippines. He retained his position on the Standing Committee of the Philippine KMT, and was the party's secretary general from the late 1940s to October 1951, when his criminal activities and duplicity finally caught up with him and he resigned from his position before going on a tour of the United States of America, Central and Latin America, Europe, and Southeast Asia. Shih returned to the Philippines in April 1952 and remained on the party's Executive Committee well into the 1950s.Footnote 47
Biographical details surrounding Shih's contemporary Edward Lim are less clear, but he appears to have come from a very different background from Shih. Lim claimed to have been born in Shanghai, but was likely born in Pyongyang and grew up in China. Having studied pharmacy in the United States of America, Lim served in the US army in the First World War and then returned to China to practise medicine. Prior to arriving in the Philippines around the same time as Shih did, he was a doctor with the rank of lieutenant general under a pro-Chiang warlord, through which he acquired a ROC passport and became involved in KMT intelligence activities. He spent the Second World War with anti-Japanese guerrillas on Panay Island and engaged in anti-Japanese broadcasting. Because of his fluency in Chinese and English, the KMT employed him after the war as an intermediary between the party and the state. Until 27 June 1950, he was, in his own words, the party's ‘General Secretary of Foreign Relations’ (Waiwu zongganshi), but was then demoted to a ‘liaison officer’ on account of his claims to speak on behalf of the entire party to the government. Our trail on him runs cold around the same time as Shih left for the United States of America, at which point Lim, previously described as ‘thoroughly pro-American’ by American intelligence, was now under investigation by the Philippine authorities on suspicions of being a communist. The outcome of this investigation is unknown, but Lim does not appear to have been arrested and deported to Taiwan. It is likely that he remained in the Philippines and faded into obscurity, beyond the grasp of its justice system, as so many were.Footnote 48
Shih and Lim were not typical Chinese elites such as Alfonso Sycip, whose social status was owed chiefly to their commercial success. Neither he nor Lim—a converted Chinese—was a member of the General Chamber of Commerce and possessed the wealth that was needed to forge durable social ties. Both were basically political operatives. Descriptions of Shih make it clear that he was never accepted as an insider, even by his own party. American intelligence described him as a ‘thorough-going opportunist whose proprietary attitude toward the party has been a matter of concern to the Chinese Embassy’, having an ‘arrogant personality’, and being disliked by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce.Footnote 49 The Embassy described him as a ‘swindler and bluffer’ (zhaoyao zhuangpian) who was fond of ‘speculation’ (maikong maikong). It claimed that he had only become a KMT Standing Committee member in the Philippines and then secretary general because others were too busy running their own businesses and community organizations to devote their full attention to party affairs. Moreover, they felt that his ‘foolhardy and extravagant’ (yuyong haochu fengtou) behaviour might be of use to them. Consequently, left to his own devices, Shih often got away with issuing orders contrary to party regulations and without the prior knowledge or consent of the committee.Footnote 50
What Shih and Lim did have going for them were affiliation with the KMT and skills that were valuable at a time of heightened ideological tensions in the Philippines. By virtue of his role as a guerrilla leader during the Second World War, Shih built up connections with US and Filipino military and intelligence officials that he would continue to exploit in the years to come. His party's reputation was high among police and intelligence agencies because of its role in helping them defeat the Chinese left after the war. Shih's role in this campaign is not explicitly documented, but all the evidence that exists suggests that he, the CVP, and the KMT were involved in helping the authorities identify suspected Chinese Reds and their social organizations, interrogate detainees, and translated confiscated documents.Footnote 51 By providing such services, the KMT compensated for the police, military, and intelligence agencies’ ignorance of Chinese and the reluctance of Chinese suspects or detainees to speak Tagalog, even if they knew it well.Footnote 52
Shih's background as both an anticommunist and intelligence operative helped him carve out a special role for himself in Philippine society. Although he did not hold any leadership positions in the ACM, he represented the Chinese community in the PACL, of which he was a vice chairman. Through the PACL, Shih cultivated ties with leading Filipino anticommunists such as Colonel Agustin Gabriel of NICA and Tito V. Tizon, the chairman of CUFA,Footnote 53 becoming a go-to person on Chinese communism within the intelligence community. To burnish his image even further, Shih was also the publisher of a journal called Free China Magazine, which was staffed by KMT members and written in English so as to keep his contacts in government abreast of the party's propaganda work and cooperation with the authorities. Its ROC National Day (‘Double Tenth’) issue in 1951 featured photographs of Shih donating radio sets to the Philippine Army and gifts of food, wine, and cigarettes to Philippine soldiers returning from Korea. Shih was also described as participating in a PACL rally in Tacloban, Leyte.Footnote 54 Much like Sycip's pieces in the Fookien Times Yearbook, publications such as Free China Magazine helped maintain the social visibility of particular individuals and groups. But, whereas Sycip and the ACM targeted a general public, Shih's audience was narrower. Lacking Sycip's wealth and ties to Chinese and Filipino society, Shih sought to impress a different social circle from Sycip's.
The intelligence that Shih provided to his Filipino political contacts was poor at best and often maliciously false. Invited by Tizon to speak at CUFA on 18 June 1950, Shih avoided any detailed analysis of Chinese communism and engaged in fearmongering. Corruption within the Philippine government was comparable to that in China three years earlier, he asserted. The security situation in the islands was so bad that, in three years, ‘the Philippines will be overcome by the communists’. The Philippines, he said, ‘cannot deal with the Huks. If we Chinese were allowed to do so, we would be able to get rid of them in a very short time’. This was a self-aggrandizing boast aimed at fuelling the anti-Red climate that Shih's social status and career depended on. Backing up such claims with good evidence proved problematic. On one occasion, Shih claimed that the CCP had secreted a staggering US$200 million into the Philippines.Footnote 55 On another, he wrote to the US Embassy warning that 100 or more Chinese communists, mostly Wha Chi guerrillas, were posing as security guards at Clark Air Base and were stealing and selling arms to the Huks. Shih did not substantiate this claim or respond to a request for details on these alleged Reds. Four days later, the embassy received a verbatim copy of the same letter, on the same KMT letterhead, but signed by Edward Lim, who likewise said nothing more about it.Footnote 56
When Shih did furnish the authorities with lists of Chinese communists, the names on them were of individuals from whom he was unable to extort money or against whom he had a grudge.Footnote 57 Shih's criminal activities were intertwined with more respectable anticommunist practices such as civic associationism, self-fashioning through the media, and information-mongering because the social and political gains resulting from these practices put him in a position of power vis-à-vis other Chinese. As KMT secretary general, his words carried weight among those in the Philippine state with the coercive, legal, and illegal means to affect Chinese society. Lim Tian Seng's letter to Magsaysay shows that Chinese knew well that Shih was connected to Philippine intelligence and military officials. Lacking these connections, his targets often found it simpler to pay him off rather than risk being harassed, arrested, and deported by the authorities. Losing personal wealth to a blackmailer was preferable to risking one's reputation as a law-abiding, non-communist Chinese resident of the country.
Shih's downfall underscores the importance of reputation to Chinese in the Philippines—and, indeed, to the ROC. It came about through a combination of his own missteps, internal feuding within the party branch, and cooperation between the Philippine and ROC authorities. Sometime in mid-1951, Pua Chin Tao, leader of the Philippine branch of the Chinese Youth Anticommunist and Resist Russia League (Zhongguo qingnian fangong kang'e hui), accused Shih of breaking the law. Shih was by then already under investigation by Magsaysay's DND for the sorts of activities that Lim Tian Seng accused him of. Shih retorted in typical fashion by forging a communist memorandum featuring the signatures of well-known Chinese Reds who had fled to China and placing it in Pua's possession. The letter ‘revealed’ that Chinese communists had infiltrated army intelligence and had established an assassination squad whose targets included four Philippine politicians and Shih himself. It also spoke of a submarine base on Hainan Island that the CCP was going to use to conduct covert operations in Vietnam, the Philippines, Singapore, and other parts of Southeast Asia. When Philippine intelligence obtained this letter, it suspected that Shih was behind it and sought the embassy's cooperation in dealing with him.Footnote 58
Shih's misdemeanours placed the ROC in a delicate position. To prepare for its counterattack on the mainland and improve its reputation within the international community, the KMT regime had embarked on an ambitious reform campaign that aimed to purge ‘selfishness, corruption, and bureaucracy’ from the thinking of party members.Footnote 59 Shih was just the type of divisive, corrupt figure that the party wished to be rid of. But, unlike cases of suspected communists or smugglers, Shih's case involved the highest-ranking KMT member in the Philippines. By sanctioning his deportation to Taiwan, which the DND desired, the embassy believed that it risked harming the reputation of the ROC rather than improving it. Citing an ancient proverb on the need for ‘brothers quarrelling at home’ to ‘join forces against external attacks’ (xiongdi xi qiang, wai yu qi wu), it decided not to support deportation. Instead, by way of compromise, it advised the rest of the party's Standing Committee to urge Shih to resign as secretary general and asked the Philippine government to allow him to leave the country quietly.Footnote 60 Separately, a special committee of KMT elders in Taiwan, including Chiang Ching-kuo, intervened in the dispute between Pua and Shih and persuaded each to withdraw his accusation against the other.Footnote 61
The case of Edward Lim offers useful parallels with Shih's and, in particular, sheds further light on the role of the media and self-publicity in the self-fashioning of oneself as a Chinese ‘leader’, or qiaoling, in the Philippines. Many local Chinese, wrote an overseas Chinese educator and KMT member on his first visit to the country in 1948, described themselves or were described as qiaoling, owing to the proliferation of Chinese organizations there.Footnote 62 Lim was one of these self-described leaders. In January 1947, at the urging of Shih's predecessor as secretary general, Lim founded the Philippines-China Cultural Association (ZhongFei wenhua xiehui, or PCCA) to ‘promote trust and understanding’ between Chinese and Filipinos through encouraging the study of Tagalog, Chinese, and the history, customs, and culture of both countries, and helping Filipino students in pursuing their higher education in China. On paper, the PCCA boasted impressive credentials. The Secretary of the Interior served as its president and Lim its secretary. Prominent party members, Chinese leaders, and Filipino politicians and officials, including the mayor of Manila, its chief of police, a Supreme Court justice, and Alfonso Sycip's brother Albino, were on its board of directors. Its regular members included the likes of Shih, military police commanders, provincial governors, educators, and journalists. The association had branches in the provinces and was supported by the KMT and ROC Embassy, although not the Chamber of Commerce.Footnote 63
The PCCA also published the monthly Philippines-China Cultural Journal, which featured poems, fiction (including a serialized version of Lim's novel, Two Beauties of the South), inspirational quotations, and articles on assorted topics such as Philippine-China relations, opera in the Philippines, and ‘Manchuria, China's Mindanao’. Lim's contributions to the journal included pieces such as ‘Oriental Democracy’, which argued that democratic freedoms had taken root in ancient China, and ‘Why Americans are Reluctant to Help China’. The latter, written in late 1947, reflected the darkening, conspiratorial mood among ROC partisans at the time. It warned that, if China fell to the CCP, the rest of Asia would soon follow, and spoke of the American government and society being ‘honey-combed with Moscow-paid agents’ seeking their destruction. The journal was not an explicitly ideological organ in the way that Free China Magazine was. Anticommunism was, rather, both the subject of occasional pieces such as the above and encoded into many others, from ‘Oriental Democracy’ to Chinese proverbs emphasizing filial piety to an article on the role of women in Nationalist China's war effort to an article by Madame Chiang Kai-shek's on the New Life Movement.Footnote 64
Beyond publishing this journal and establishing provincial branches, the PCCA did little. In the provinces, PCCA activities seem to have been occasions for Lim to eat, drink, and socialize with Filipino and Chinese officials. In practice, promoting ‘trust and understanding’ between the two ethnic groups was limited to the forging of personal ties between the PCCA's founder and a small handful of its supporters like the Secretary of the Interior, whose patronage kept the association afloat and who might also pen the occasional article for its journal. The vast majority of its members, including Albino Sycip, appear to have contributed nothing to it. By the time Lim was demoted from his position within the KMT in June 1950, it was apparent that the PCCA was one front among several for Lim's illegal activities. The erstwhile KMT ‘General Secretary of Foreign Relations’ was also the head of two other professional-sounding organizations: the ‘Southeast Asia Association’ and the ‘Edward Lim Hospital’ in Davao (where Lim owned only a small drugstore). Through them, Lim was able to extort some 50,000 pesos from Chinese residents in the southern Philippines. His modus operandi was virtually identical to Shih's. The ROC Embassy obtained a letter that he wrote to one of his victims, which went simply as follows:
Recently, someone has reported to the Defense Department that you have close ties to underground communist agents. I heard that the Department has ordered your arrest. I am shocked at this news and hope to reach a compromise with the authorities before this happens. What are your views on this? Please reply to my letter as soon as possible.Footnote 65
More so than Shih, Lim was an active participant in the culture of rumour-mongering within Chinese society at the time. One of his many targets, it appears, was Shih himself—although, sadly, no further details are available on this conflict. Ambassador Chen was also on the receiving end of Lim's accusations during the period when Lim was under investigation by the Philippine and ROC authorities. In October 1950, Lim reported to NICA that a communist agent was working in the ROC Embassy to facilitate the escape of Chinese communists from the Philippines, and had secured his employment on the recommendation of Chen's university classmate Young Ching-tong, a former Chinese communist leader in the Philippines. Two months later, he retracted this claim and instead accused the embassy, the KMT, and the General Chamber of shielding a man whom the Philippine authorities had found guilty of smuggling arms to China and would soon deport to Taiwan.Footnote 66 By April 1951, Lim's accusatory counteroffensive against his persecutors had failed. His son Daniel made a last-ditch appeal to, of all people, Madame Chiang, claiming that his father truly loved his motherland. But this was met with a firm response from Chen to her detailing Lim's crimes and his provision of false intelligence to the Philippine and US authorities. In an ironic twist, Lim, by all accounts a committed Nationalist, was now tarred with the same brush as he had used against others—despite a conspicuous lack of evidence proving that he was a communist.Footnote 67
Shih and Lim's behaviour captures the dynamics of ideological accommodation in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Anticommunism was not a limited resource, the scramble for which yielded only overt social conflict with clear winners and losers. Organizations such as the ACM and the PCCA could coexist with each other and overlap in membership and function, without mutual antagonism. Yet certain practices of accumulation such as blackmail and rumour-mongering did result in social gains for some at the expense of others. They could likewise backfire on their exponents, as the downfall of Shih and Lim shows. Providing intelligence to the Philippine authorities on Chinese communism was inherently risky because no one person or group enjoyed a monopoly on access to these authorities and inaccurate intelligence could result in a swift reversal of one's social status. The state's limited capacity to surveil the Chinese community created opportunities for all manner of Chinese actors to prove their utility their country of residence, further their own social ambitions, and make money in the process.
Antonio Chua Cruz and Philippine military intelligence
One such group of Chinese actors was, until November 1951, employed by the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) of the Philippines and led by Antonio Chua Cruz. Born in Jinjiang as Cai Wobai, Cruz was banished from his home village at the age of 16 for an unspecified crime and subsequently joined a gang in Shishi that menaced villages in Fujian and engaged in smuggling along the South China coast. After the leader of this gang was arrested in 1932, Cruz fled to the Philippines, where his father lived, and registered himself under the name of Cai Jie. Multiple aliases, in addition to the inconsistent Romanized forms of their Chinese names, made it difficult for the authorities to track individuals like him. Cruz would later fake his Philippine citizenship. During the Second World War, he headed the overseas department of the pro-Japanese Chinese Association (Huaqiao xiehui) and profited from helping Japanese naval intelligence against the Chinese resistance. Right after the war, he was shot by several Chinese snipers for collaboration, but survived to embark on another career in crime.Footnote 68
Cruz's class background differed from Shih and Lim's, but he was more well-connected than them. His postwar criminal network started from the very top of the military establishment in the person of Major General Calixto Duque, Chief of Staff of the Philippine Armed Forces. Besides Duque, Cruz also counted among his friends the Secretary of Justice, senators, and the Speaker of the House Jose Bengzon. How he forged these friendships is unclear, but the intelligence gathered on him by the ROC Embassy described his ‘beautiful’ Filipina second wife as being close to Bengzon and implied that she played a major role in his social prominence. Through his personal ties to Duque, Cruz secured the appointment of George Co, Ching Boc, and Celestino Cua as MIS agents at a time when it badly needed Chinese speakers and sought to prove to its political masters that it was capable of identifying and eliminating foreign communist threats.Footnote 69 Claiming that they had in their possession a list of 3,000 communists that their new employer had furnished them with, and working closely with a Filipino MIS agent, Cruz's associates blackmailed and extorted money from other Chinese, proceeds from which went to Cruz's own gang and into the pockets of Duque and his Chief of Intelligence. US intelligence estimated that, by late 1951, his gang had obtained 1.5 million pesos in this manner. Besides these activities, Cruz's operatives also reported on the ROC and KMT's activities in the country to MIS, in effect helping the state use one group of informants against another and avoid overdependence on any particular source.Footnote 70
Cruz's other anticommunist practices after 1945 also resembled those of Lim and Shih, except that there is no evidence to suggest that he had any ounce of belief in the Nationalist cause. A self-founded, appropriately titled social organization, the Free Asia Publishing House served as the pretext for Cruz to strong-arm individuals into paying him money—in this case advertising fees for its journal, the Free Asia Magazine—or be denounced as a communist to the state. At a time when visits to Taiwan were becoming increasingly popular in the Philippines, Cruz planned one for Filipino journalists in the name of promoting ‘Sino-Philippine relations’ and offered to pay part of their travelling costs. When the ROC Embassy refused to grant him clearance for the trip, Cruz not only pocketed the money that the unsuspecting journalists had given him, but also retaliated against Chen Chih-ping—an easy target for criminals like him and Edward Lim.Footnote 71 In June 1951, he leaked rumours to The Bullseye tabloid that the ACM was harbouring communists and that Chen had promised 5 million pesos that he had received from the Chinese community during the early years of the Korean War to the organization. Chen, it turned out, had friends on the paper's board of directors, who had the article immediately withdrawn.Footnote 72
Several months after his failed attack on Chen, the criminal careers of Cruz and his gang came to an end. Defense Secretary Magsaysay had by then become aware of these men, and had ordered a complete reorganization of MIS and for them to be deported.Footnote 73 In November 1951, MIS arrested Cruz's associates. Cruz himself was, not for the first time, targeted for assassination—this time via a bomb. After surviving yet again an attempt on his life, he reported to the authorities that cigarette tycoon and ACM Standing Committee member Peter Lim was responsible for it. Lim had apparently paid a communist called Tang to kill him, but this would-be assassin, it turned out, was one of Cruz's lackeys at the Free China Publishing House whom Cruz was quite willing to betray to save his own skin. When the authorities arrested Tang at his home, they found 18 telegrams about secret arbitrage agreements with communist banks in Hong Kong. Tang, in his defence, said that Cruz had forged the telegrams to extort money from Chinese businessmen. He refused Cruz's attempts to bribe him into confessing that the documents were authentic and that Lim was behind the bombing. In desperation, Cruz first accused a CVP member—whom he said was a communist, despite his membership in the KMT organization—and then special agents of the ROC Embassy of trying to assassinate him. Who actually did so and who ordered it will remain a mystery. But, by this point, MIS was hot on his heels. In January 1952, it arrested Cruz, charged him with forging his identification documents and multiple counts of bribery and extortion, and he was sent to the Deportation Board, which ordered him to be deported to Taiwan.Footnote 74
It was symptomatic of the political environment in the Philippines at the time that criminals who made a living from accusing others of being communists frequently ended up labelled as Reds themselves. Cruz himself merely ‘lacked a patriotic and national mentality’ (haowu guojia minzu guannian), according to the ROC authorities, but his associates were accused of being communists and formerly of the Wha Chi. In its recommendation to the president that he deport these men, the Deportation Board said that they had propagandized and solicited contributions for the CCP in the country, attended its meetings, and maintained relations with Chinese Reds who had previously been based in the Philippines. Ching Boc and Celestino Cua were charged with using blackmail and forgery to extort money from a Chinese businessman, who, after refusing to pay the men, ended up arrested by the police for having in his possession a (forged) communist pamphlet. The two were also reported to have delivered to another of their victims the equivalent of 1 million renminbi for remittance to China, and then demanded from him 10,000 pesos to ‘fix’ his violation of exchange control regulations. The amount would be used to bribe not only MIS chiefs, but also Magsaysay, who sought their deportation. George Co and six other men had posed as military intelligence agents and threatened to arrest the wife of a Chinese businessman unless she paid them off—which she did. Police raids on their houses had yielded a large quantity of guns and ammunition, which they did not have licences for.Footnote 75
Conclusion
Coming from very different class backgrounds, businessman Alfonso Sycip, political operatives Shih I-Sheng and Edward Lim, and criminal gang leader Antonio Chua Cruz participated in the creation of a highly localized Cold War social order in the early post-colonial Philippines. Of them, perhaps Shih and Lim were true Cold Warriors, given their involvement in the KMT. But how far they were committed to eradicating communism and to the ROC's counterattack against the CCP is besides the point of this article. I argue here that Chinese anticommunism as a social phenomenon was never really about opposing actual Chinese communists, since they had almost all departed the Philippines by the late 1940s. It was rather a means by which Chinese actors adapted to being ethnic minority residents of a state that was hostile to communism and often its Chinese population as well. At a time when Filipino suspicions of Chinese as ‘un-Filipino’ communists ran high, Sycip, Shih, Lim, and Cruz engaged in practices of ideological accommodation to forge for themselves reputations as anticommunists in the eyes of the Philippine government and exploit the political climate for personal and social gain. While they might never have been able to overcome their racial and cultural Otherness, they could certainly display their conformity to Filipino ideals and prove themselves useful to anticommunism as a nation-building project.
This article has examined multiple practices of ideological accommodation that cut across the social classes and factions that the four principal actors represented. Through civic associations such as the Philippine-Chinese United Organization in Support of Anti-Communist Movement and Lim's Philippines-China Cultural Association, local Chinese secured the patronage of Filipino and ROC politicians and officials and raised their profiles as qiaoling in Philippine-Chinese society. English-language propaganda served a similarly legitimizing purpose. Through the Fookien Times Yearbook, Free China Magazine, and the Philippines-China Cultural Journal, Sycip, Shih, and Lim ensured their visibility in the public sphere and fashioned proof of their ideological credentials to a wide audience.
Ideological accommodation had a darker side and was a source of social conflict, as Shih, Lim, and Cruz's criminal and ethically dubious activities amply illustrate. Organizations such as the PCCA and Cruz's Free Asia Publishing House often masked various forms of criminal activity in the name of anticommunism. Acting as providers of intelligence on Chinese communism to MIS, Shih, Lim, and Cruz insinuated themselves into positions of power over their fellow Chinese that their non-elite social backgrounds would not normally have allowed them to hold. By leveraging the institutions that they were affiliated to (such as the KMT) and their connections with the state, they blackmailed other Chinese, threatening to accuse their victims of being communists and planting forged evidence if they did not pay up. As the preceding sections have shown, even the likes of ROC Ambassador Chen Chih-ping and ACM Standing Committee member Peter Lim were vulnerable to being smeared as communists or communist sympathizers. Elites like them and Sycip were well aware of the harm that false accusations could pose to their standing in society and acted accordingly to ensure that their ideological reputations were beyond reproach. The respectable and criminal dimensions of anticommunism were, in this sense, inseparable.
