At the time they won’t believe that the Philippines would consistently lose to Japan, Taiwan, and Korea in baseball either.
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Any books on that ?
Recently passed through Manila and watched some YouTubes of what commuting is like there. I think Manila itself is holding back the rest of the Philippines.
They should start again with a new capital city and ring fence Manila 
.
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Did The Philippines have US money pumped into it like Taiwan did?
Taiwan? No, funnily enough. At least not in English. You’d think someone would have studied it, wouldn’t you? If anyone knows of any such book - Chinese or English - I’d be very interested.
I’d say it’s simultaneously holding it back, while also being the sole source of income. The Philippines is basically driving with the accelerator and the brake pedals both pushed to the floor.
FIFY 
oooh, loads. Where do you think Marcos got his fortune from?
Cash My Check got in on the game a bit earlier, of course.
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I wonder whether religion had something to do with it, then. The Catholic Church has always been very successful at holding people back.
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Quite possible, but the CC and Filipino culture sort of feed into each other. Although Manila might well have looked very “modern” while the Americans were there … well, so did central Africa while the Belgians were building their little model villages. It was all a mirage floating on a sea of fiat currency.
Between 1951 and 1965, Taiwan received about 1.48 billion dollars worth of US aid, mostly in the form of loans. In addition, Taiwan received around 4.22 billion dollars in terms of military equipments, mostly left over equipments from WW2.
That’s a total of 5.7 billion dollars worth aid. Taiwan repaid all the loans by 2004. Keep in mind that the US has stopped aid to the CKS regime after CKS lost China, and only restarted aid to Taiwan during the Korean War.
If anyone could provide a figure for US aid to the Philippines then we could compare. As far as I can recall, the US was paying the Philippines $360 million over 10 years for the naval base at Subic Bay before leaving it in 1992.
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American money is not the reason that Taiwan looks like what it does today. There are tons of countries that got/still get significant foreign aid or have huge easily obtainable natural resources. Taiwan was on the right trajectory and the American money helped accelerate it a bit.
I wonder if the different literacy rates affected somehow. It was ~60% in Philippines, and ~80% in Taiwan in 1948/9.
Literacy usually tracks other social factors, so although I doubt that was the cause per se, it was probably a relevant predictor back in the day.
High literacy in Taiwan by 1948/9 can only be attributed to Japanese efforts of educating the Taiwanese public.
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So, Us didn’t contribute to education in Philippines, but Japan contributed in Taiwan, it could affect?
Japan was here for 50 years, the US only owned the PIs for, what, 10 years? And there was an armed insurrection during that time.
USAID is still very active there. The US gov’t still sends $200m+ annually to the Philippines, in various ways.
It’s hard to say exactly how much money flowed into the country during and after WW2, since it was a combination of loans, grants, and direct foreign investment. Total liabilities in the 80s amounted to 10s of billions.
Yeah, plus the fact that the vast majority of it didn’t go anywhere near where it was intended to.
Barangay Boss Bongo “Tough Guy” Santano didn’t exactly go around writing out receipts.
I know that in the debts of Chengda´s library there is a book that compares the aid given to Taiwan and the old country. As Filipinas, it was also poised for greatness, great resources, early manufacture, highly educated population…
Taiwan is special for me in that sense that they let it grow businesses and it thrived in the midst of war and chaos. It grew under Japan, it grew under the KMT. It keep thriving even when all the odds are not in its favor.
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Wasn’t the Philippines a U.S. colony for nearly 50 years?
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Yeah, I might be off there.
My gut feeling is this: CKS was just barely smart enough to realise that you can’t get blood out of a stone, ie., you can’t steal very much if the entire country is wallowing in poverty. Most governments have cottoned onto this simple mathematical fact. Only the really stupid ones stick with the theory that complete chaos is good for the business of looting. So, while KMT rule was dominated by crony capitalism, it was still basically capitalism. . Unfair, but productive. The Philippines is merely unfair and unproductive.
Example: land reform in Taiwan had the explicit aim of using the country’s limited land to make as much money as possible for a select few. Thus we have a whole bunch of moneyed families who basically pull all the strings, but nevertheless do generate employement. Land reform in the Philippines is predicated upon keeping everyone poor, ignorant, and up to their knees in mud.
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