SEAC hosted this talk by Dr. Joseph Scalice (SEAC Visiting Fellow) charting the Sino-Soviet Split in the Philippines.
In April 1967 the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) broke in two. The split in the Philippine party followed the lines of the raging conflict in world Communism between the Soviet Union and China. At the same time it expressed sharpening tensions within the Philippine elite in a period of social upheaval. The pro-Moscow PKP supported Ferdinand Marcos and assisted in his imposition of dictatorship; the pro-Beijing CPP allied with Marcos' ruling class rival, Benigno Aquino Jr. This talk will examine how the context of global social upheaval in the 1960s both sharpened the tensions between the erstwhile comrades in the Soviet Union and China and accelerated the scramble for dictatorship in ruling circles in the Philippines, bringing about an alignment of rivalries between Marcos and Moscow on the one hand, and Aquino and Beijing on the other.
Around the world, and throughout the global south in particular, parties split in a similar fashion, the ideological struggle within the Communist bloc finding congruent alignment with rival sets of national social interests. The aligned ruptures were an outcome of a shared set of global class pressures rather than the product of external machinations or domestic disputes. By studying the Sino-Soviet split as a global phenomenon and cognizing its twists and turns from the perspective of the periphery, we gain a deeper insight as well into developments in the core disputants.
A video recording of the event is available here.
Speaker and Chair biographies
Dr. Joseph Scalice is a SEAC Visiting Fellow. Prior to this was a Postdoctoral researcher at Nanyang Technological University. His current research focuses on how the Sino-Soviet split impacted critical political developments in the Southeast Asian region.
Prof. John Sidel is the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and a forthcoming book Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia.