But merchants were not the only Chinese attracted to the islands.
In 1574, three years after the Spanish moved their base from Cebu to Manila Bay, a squadron of Chinese corsairs — sixty-four war junks and three thousand men under Li Ma-hong — assaulted Manila and torched the town. Unable to drive the Spaniards out of their fortress, Li sailed north to Sual Bay, where he built a fort of his own and started a Chinese colony. A few months later, along came the Spaniards in what amounted in those days to hot pursuit. Three hundred angry conquistadors and twenty-five hundred easygoing Malays laid siege to Li Ma-hong’s fort, burned his fleet of junks, and kept the Chinese bottled up for months till their provisions ran out. Li was no fool. He had his men dig a tunnel to the sea, and one moonless night he slipped away, leaving the islands to the Spaniards. Or so it seemed.
The Philippines, like other Spanish colonies, became a theocracy. Its administrators were less interested in heavenly estate than in real estate. As friars arrived and set about converting Malays, they acquired immense landholdings. In time, priests controlled twenty-one gigantic haciendas around Manila.
These Spaniards were fearful of the Chinese because of their incomprehensible language and customs, their greater numbers, their ambition, their financial acuity, their capacity to endure hardship, their secretiveness, and their clannishness. They put a ceiling on Chinese immigration, restricted their movement, confined them to Manila ghettoes, and barred them from citizenship or direct ownership of land. Periodically, Chinese were massacred.
Most Spaniards, like the Chinese, came to the islands without women and made temporary arrangements with Malay girls, producing prodigious numbers of illegitimate mestizochildren. Fortunately, Chinese mestizochildren were not considered Chinese. Raised as good Catholics by their Malay mothers, they could come and go at will, own land, and engage in business, more or less as Malay Filipinos did. However, since they had access to Chinese credit and often inherited their fathers’ business sense, Chinese mestizoswere in a much better position to buy property, and to act as middlemen or moneylenders, which gave them exceptional leverage.
Ordinary Malays foolishly but naturally tried to emulate their Spanish rulers by throwing pig roasts on feast days, christenings, confirmations, weddings, or any other occasion that came along. Without cash, in a rice and fish subsistence economy, they had to borrow money from the Chinese, using their traditional land as collateral. When the debt could not be paid, the land was forfeited. By this indirect form of extortion, more and more land came under the ownership of Chinese mestizos. The original Malay landowners became mere tenant farmers in their own country.
For Spanish mestizosthere was a different path to wealth and power. Lacking the business sense, energy, and credit system of the Chinese, they turned to the professions, primarily to the law. Using the law, they enlarged their personal landholdings by entangling the original Malay owners in costly litigation. Any native Malays who had not already forfeited their land to the grasping Iberian friars were soon caught between the money squeezing of the Chinese mestizosand the legal squeezing of the Spanish mestizosand were turned gradually into a nation of serfs.
In 1896, the mestizosturned on their pure-bred Iberian masters and plotted revolution. The Spaniards responded by arresting and executing the wrong man — the celebrated poet and novelist José Rizal, who had remained aloof from the conspiracy. His barbaric execution drove the whole country into rebellion.
The rebel general Emilio Aguinaldo waged an effective military campaign against the Spaniards. Treachery always proving to be more effective than combat, the Spaniards offered Aguinaldo 800,000 pesos, to be paid in three installments, if he would leave the islands. Planning to trick the Spaniards and use the money to buy arms, Aguinaldo accepted the first installment and went off to Hong Kong, where the Americans found him the next year in somewhat shortened circumstances. He had spent all his money to buy weapons from a Japanese agent provocateur named Toyama Mitsuru, founder of the secret ultranationalist Black Ocean Society. After taking the money, Toyama claimed that the shipload of weapons from Japan had sunk.
The intervention of America at this point was less than praiseworthy. The United States now stretched from coast to coast, its frontiers were settled, a depression was eroding confidence, and politicians were looking for a diversion. A crusade against Spanish colonial oppression in Cuba and elsewhere seemed convenient. Chronic meddlers and robber barons went to work with the help of legions of Potomac jingoists. War became inevitable with the sinking of the battleship Mainein Havana in February 1898.