Assimilative integration: ethnic Chinese defending national security through the ‘iron fist’ in a Philippine frontier

For decades from the Cold War (1950s–1980s) to the present time, a strand of scholarships concerning the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia has been persistently informed by the ‘assimilation vs. integration’ debate. At odds with this dualism, this article finds that in contemporary Philippine state-building reality, assimilation and integration of the ethnic Chinese could well co-exist, thus constitute a more nuanced and grounded, if not novel, analytical continuum-spectrum prism of ‘assimilative integration’ instead to better capture the complex dynamics in diverse Southeast Asian state formation processes. Through a historical-ethnographic study of the ‘iron fist policy’ of former Mayor of Tuguegarao City (1988–1998; 2007–2013) – the late Mr. Delfin Telan Ting (丁羅敏; 1938–2022) in a northern Philippine frontier’s multi-ethnic society, this article aims to illustrate why and in what specific ways that indigenous political cultural conceptions of coercive authority and social order remain resilient in informing how the Chinese-Filipino political actors would participate in crucial national security and law enforcement matters, such as counter-insurgency and anti-gambling campaign. Assimilative integration policy position considers the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia as instruments, assets and resources for defending national security and law enforcement.