I'm surprised your silly Asians would tolerate a foreign intervention of such magnitude.
They've grown used to it. When Spain colonized the Philippines they were looking for gold. silver, and jewels; the gold and silver were here, but the Spaniards never found them. The only profitable enterprise that ever developed here was the China trade, and even that was marginal, as goods had to be shipped to Mexico, carried across to the Atlantic, and hence to Spain. The upshot of all this was that the crown took little interest in the actual administration of the colony, since there was little or no money to be made from it. The friars did take an interest, and the crown was only too willing to let them deal with it; for all practical purposes, the country was effectively run by the Catholic church for 300 years.
People are gradually waking up, and the influence of the church over the masses in political matters has been substantially reduced. Politicians still fear the exposure of the skeletons (often cemetaries) in their closets, though; the church leaders use this fear, and their own rather extensive records on who's been doing what to whom, to maintain their influence in their priority areas of policy. |
