By Arnold Padilla
ILPS Philippines
The deepening crisis of monopoly capitalism has marked the past twenty-five years in the Asia Pacific region. Such a deepening crisis has been characterized by the sharpening contradiction between the United States and China, the intensification of militarization and fascist repression, and, at the same time, the resurgence of peoples’ resistance and revolutionary struggle. The region has become both a center of inter-imperialist contradictions and a principal theater of anti-imperialist struggle.
The fundamental backdrop to developments in the Asia-Pacific is the unresolved and worsening crisis of the global monopoly-capitalist system. The world capitalist economy remains trapped in prolonged stagnation, overproduction, financial instability, worsening inequality, and ecological destruction. The monopoly bourgeoisie in the major capitalist powers has failed to resolve the crisis of overproduction despite decades of neoliberal restructuring, financialization, and militarization. Instead, the burden of the crisis has been shifted onto workers and oppressed nations through austerity, debt dependency, land and resource grabbing, neoliberal globalization, and wars of aggression.
Professor Jose Maria Sison traced how the current contradiction between the US and China developed in the past 25 years. China’s capitalist restoration transformed the country into a major site of imperialist accumulation, export-oriented manufacturing, and capitalist expansion. US imperialism integrated China into neoliberal globalization to expand markets, reduce production costs, and sustain profitability amid crisis. The US outsourced large-scale manufacturing to China while concentrating on finance, high technology, and military production. China, in turn, used state planning and state-owned enterprises to rapidly accumulate capital, acquire technology, and expand globally.
For a period, the US and China collaborated closely within the framework of neoliberal globalization. The US viewed China as a profitable partner and a stabilizer for the world capitalist economy. China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) twenty-five years ago symbolized this integration. Yet this cooperation contained within it the seeds of the current inter-imperialist contradiction between the US and China. China’s rapid economic rise has gradually transformed it from a subordinate partner of US imperialism into a strategic rival.
Over the last 25 years, US policy toward the Asia Pacific has evolved from selective engagement with China to open strategic confrontation. During the Bush era after 9/11, counterterrorism temporarily displaced strategic rivalry, and Washington sought cooperation with Beijing while reinforcing military alliances across Asia. But under the Obama administration, the “Pivot to Asia” or “Rebalance” openly signaled a shift toward containing China’s rise through military redeployment, alliance-building, and economic initiatives such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Under Trump, the contradiction sharpened dramatically into an open trade war, technology war, and geopolitical confrontation. China was explicitly labeled a “revisionist power,” while the US launched tariff wars, semiconductor restrictions, sanctions, and intensified military deployments in the Indo-Pacific. Under Biden and continuing into the second Trump administration, strategic competition has become institutionalized through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, AUKUS, Indo-Pacific military architecture of expanded bases, troop deployments, alliances, and technological networks, and aggressive naval operations in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait.
The Asia Pacific region has therefore become the central arena of the contradiction between a declining hegemon desperately trying to preserve its dominant position and a rising imperialist power—both seeking markets, resources, investment fields, and strategic control and spheres of influence.
This sharpening contradiction between the US and China is expressed most concretely in the Philippines, which has become one of the key frontline states in Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy. Especially under the Marcos Jr. regime, the US has rapidly consolidated and expanded its military control over the country through a network of agreements, troop deployments, and strategic infrastructure projects. The 1951 PH-US Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT), which is now 75 years old this year, has been aggressively operationalized through the 1998 Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) and the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) to transform the Philippines into a major platform in Asia Pacific for US power projection against China. The MDT was further updated through the 2023 Bilateral Defense Guidelines to make it more relevant in the context of China’s rise and the assertion of US imperialism’s hegemony.
Additional EDCA sites, which are the present form of US military bases in the Philippines, have been opened, including in strategic locations facing Taiwan and the West Philippine Sea, allowing for expanded rotational presence of US troops, the prepositioning of weapons and fuel, the construction of military facilities, and enhanced intelligence and surveillance operations. The annual Balikatan war exercises have grown into some of the largest joint military drills in decades, involving not only combat simulations and missile systems but also participation from allied powers such as Japan and Australia. These war exercises under Marcos Jr. are no longer routine training but have become a platform for full-spectrum war preparation.
For the first time in the history of US military exercises in the Philippines, for instance, the US fired a Tomahawk missile using its Typhon missile system during a Balikatan war exercise just a couple of weeks ago, which traveled more than 600 kilometers within Philippine territory. Japan, US imperialism’s long-time junior partner in the Asia Pacific, also fired Type 88 surface-to-ship missiles, which traveled about 75 kilometers offshore from a northern Philippine province. The live firing of a US long-range missile from Philippine soil signals a new and more dangerous stage in the escalation of tension in the region.
Under the guise of “defense cooperation” and “regional security,” US imperialism is effectively converting the entire Philippine archipelago into a forward operating base in preparation for possible confrontation with China. This militarization directly threatens Philippine sovereignty and drags the Filipino people deeper into the danger of inter-imperialist war and dangerously stokes war in the Asia Pacific.
US consolidation in the Philippines is also advancing through economic and technological mechanisms tied to its strategic competition with China. In recent years, the rivalry between the two powers has increasingly centered on control over advanced technologies, semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and critical mineral supply chains.
Within this context, Washington increasingly views the Philippines as strategically important to its efforts to counter China and secure US dominance in emerging technologies. Projects such as the Luzon Economic Corridor, promoted together with Japan and other allies, aim to integrate key Philippine infrastructure, ports, railways, logistics systems, energy networks, and industrial zones into the broader US-led Indo-Pacific economic architecture.
The Luzon Economic Corridor plays a significant role in the Pax Silica global alliance established by the US in December 2025 to secure global technology supply chains and achieve dominance in the era of artificial intelligence for both industrial and military purposes. Pax Silica represents a direct challenge by US imperialism to China’s current dominance in both the upstream and downstream sectors of AI technology. At present, the alliance has 16 members, including six Asia Pacific countries considered among Washington’s closest allies: Australia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the Philippines, and India.
The Pax Silica is now being aggressively rolled out within a so-called Economic Security Zone in the Philippines’ Luzon Economic Corridor. The Economic Security Zone is the first concrete, on-the-ground project, and flagship deployment under the Pax Silica initiative. The zone covers around 4,000 acres, or more than 1,600 hectares, of land that the US is seeking to treat as diplomatic property, on which it will enjoy immunity and extraterritorial rights. What it means is that the Philippines will cede sovereign control over its territory to the US, underscoring that the Economic Security Zone is not merely an investment hub but one of strategic security importance to US imperialism.
The Philippines reportedly rejected the US request, but apparently negotiations are still ongoing. Regardless, the fact remains that a massive size of Philippine lands will be used for US imperialism’s war production, deepen foreign corporate control over strategic sectors of the Philippine economy, intensify the plunder of our natural resources, displace our communities, and further lock the country into a dependent and comprador economic structure. Remember that the 1,600 hectares of the Economic Security Zone will only house the production and processing facilities. However, the raw materials, namely critical minerals, will be sourced from tens of thousands of hectares more throughout the Philippines. Earlier this year, the US signed a bilateral critical minerals deal with the Philippines to secure its technology supply chain. The US has signed such bilateral deals with 22 countries worldwide, eight of which are in the Asia-Pacific region, including the Philippines.
Thus, both militarily and economically, the Philippines and the rest of the Asia Pacific have become crucial nodes in the US campaign to preserve its global imperialist hegemony amid its escalating rivalry with China.
China has emerged as a major imperialist power pursuing its own expansionist agenda. China’s aggressive claims in the West Philippine Sea, militarization of artificial islands, economic penetration, debt diplomacy, and exploitation of resources represent concrete forms of imperialist encroachment. Its Belt and Road Initiative, while presented as development cooperation, often reinforces bureaucrat capitalism, including massive corruption, debt burdens, and strategic leverage over weaker countries.
The peoples of the Asia Pacific confront the dual danger of continued US hegemony and rising Chinese imperialism. The contradiction between these powers intensifies militarization throughout the region. The South China Sea has become a major flashpoint. Taiwan remains a potential trigger for war. Military spending across the region has surged, while fascist and authoritarian tendencies grow under the pretext of national security.
The danger is that the Philippines and the broader Asia-Pacific region may become battlegrounds for a direct or proxy conflict between rival imperialist powers. As Prof. Sison warned, countries and peoples in the Asia Pacific are “in the direct line of fire” should armed conflict erupt between the US and China. The region is increasingly saturated with military exercises, missile systems, naval patrols, intelligence operations, and strategic encirclement.
In the Philippines, successive regimes have exploited the US-China contradiction for their own comprador interests while sacrificing national sovereignty. Duterte, the previous President, maneuvered between Washington and Beijing while deepening ties with both. Marcos Jr., the current President, meanwhile, has aligned more openly with the US, granting expanded access to military bases under EDCA and supporting US strategic positioning against China. The ILPS Philippines rejects both the pro-US and pro-China camps within sections of the Philippine ruling elite and calls for an independent foreign policy.
The growth of authoritarianism across the Asia Pacific also reflects the intensifying contradictions and deepening crisis of imperialism. Fascist and proto-fascist regimes have emerged in India, in the Philippines, and in other countries where ruling classes increasingly rely on repression to contain mass discontent. Anti-terror laws, surveillance systems, red-tagging, militarization, and attacks on democratic rights have proliferated.
At the same time, we recognize that inter-imperialist contradictions create both dangers and opportunities for the peoples. Historically, rivalries among imperialists have weakened the global system of domination and created openings for anti-imperialist struggles, national liberation movements, and socialist forces.
The past 25 years have witnessed growing resistance in all its forms throughout the Asia-Pacific and the world. Workers, peasants, indigenous peoples, youth, women, migrants, and oppressed nations have launched struggles against neoliberalism, fascism, environmental destruction, militarization, and imperialist domination. Mass uprisings erupted in Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar, South Korea, and the Philippines. General strikes, peasant mobilizations, anti-war protests, and anti-fascist movements have spread throughout the region. Armed resistance against US-backed reactionary rule and for national liberation persists despite severe repression.
Solidarity protests and movements continue to expand, including mobilizations against the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran and the Zionist genocide in Gaza backed by US imperialism. We must note how the Palestine solidarity movement has become one of the defining anti-imperialist mobilizations of recent years. Millions across Asia Pacific and globally have denounced the US-backed Zionist genocide. This movement demonstrates the growing internationalization of peoples’ struggles.
Prof. Sison characterized our period today as a transition toward the resurgence of the world proletarian revolution. Despite the defeats suffered after capitalist restoration in China and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fundamental contradictions of capitalism have intensified. The neoliberal order failed to deliver stability and prosperity. Instead, it produced greater inequality, ecological catastrophe, fascism, and endless war.
As Prof. Sison said, the strategic task is to build the broadest anti-imperialist united front while maintaining proletarian leadership and revolutionary orientation. The peoples of the Asia Pacific must reject alignment with either US or Chinese imperialism. The struggle is not to choose between rival empires but to fight for genuine national liberation, democracy, social justice, and socialism.
For the ILPS Philippines, the essential perspective is clear: imperialism remains the fundamental enemy of the peoples. US imperialism continues to be the principal aggressor globally, while Chinese imperialism emerges as a rising rival seeking its own sphere of dominance. The sharpening contradiction between them heightens the risk of war and fascism, including in the Asia Pacific. Yet the same contradictions also create conditions conducive to strengthening a broad global movement against imperialism.
As the primary front in this historic period of intensifying inter-imperialist contradictions, the Asia Pacific region will be a decisive battleground in the global peoples’ struggle against imperialism. The region contains both rapidly expanding imperialist ambitions and some of the world’s most militant peoples’ movements. The future will depend not on the maneuvers of rival powers alone, but on the capacity of the oppressed and exploited peoples to organize independently and wage sustained struggle. This requires strengthening our multisectoral struggles against neoliberal exploitation; for land, genuine agrarian reform, and rural development; for the defense of ancestral lands; against plunder and climate destruction; and against militarization, fascism, and imperialist war. It requires international solidarity among peoples resisting imperialism in all forms.
Today, one of the most urgent challenges is to aggressively build, strengthen, and expand our global movement and struggle against imperialist war and plunder, and for just and lasting peace. We must tirelessly and patiently educate the broadest section of the people that imperialism means war and preparations for war, as Lenin famously declared, and therefore the struggle against war and the quest for just and lasting peace are inseparable from the anti-imperialist struggle. Only through unwavering education can we transform the growing spontaneous resistance against imperialist war and plunder into an organized anti-imperialist movement and revolutionary struggle capable of advancing toward genuine liberation and a socialist future.
Note: This was presented at the forum “Imperialism: 25 years ago and today” organized by the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS), May 23, 2026
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