MANILA, Dec. 5 (Xinhua) -- As political turmoil continued to shake the Philippines in 2025, Imee Marcos, chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, described the year as "traumatic" and "dramatic" in a recent exclusive interview with Xinhua, and warned that the country must not be turned into "a proxy" or "a frontline" for foreign diplomatic and military strategy.

Early in the year, the House of Representatives initiated impeachment proceedings against Vice President Sara Duterte. Shortly afterward, former President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested and brought to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

In the midterm elections that followed, the administration suffered setbacks in many areas. After the new congress convened, a large-scale corruption scandal involving flood-control projects broke out, triggering sustained mass anti-corruption protests across the country.

Imee Marcos, the elder sister of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., has repeatedly criticized him this year. Although the Supreme Court eventually dismissed the impeachment case against the vice president, she said that the impeachment move sealed the break of what was known as the unity team between the Marcoses and the Dutertes.

Speaking of what she called the "kidnapping or extraordinary rendition" of former president Duterte to The Hague, she said this was "even worse": "We basically surrendered our sovereignty as well as surrendering the former president."

The Philippines has also been hit by strong earthquakes and typhoons this year, causing severe damage in some regions. Imee Marcos said the extreme weather events brought an unbearable toll in lives and livelihoods and exposed long-standing weaknesses in critical infrastructure.

Many rural facilities, she noted, "derive from the time of my father -- 50, 60, even 70 years ago," and "by right, they are no longer useful and they shouldn't only be rehabilitated but be rebuilt."

On the tariff arrangement reached this year between the Philippines and the United States, Imee Marcos said that while the Philippines was pressured to give U.S. products zero tariffs, the United States imposed a 19 percent tariff on Philippine goods. This, she argued, shows "how little regard the United States has for the Philippines" and is "a real wake-up call that we're back to the status of being little brown brothers of the colonial era."

She added that Washington is extending its foreign and military policy into the Philippines, "utilizing and exploiting the weakness of the Philippines as a proxy and volunteering us as a frontline," which she called "utterly despicable" and "not acceptable to anyone in the Philippines."

Imee Marcos also shared her impressions of China. She first visited China in the 1970s, accompanying her father, then President Ferdinand Marcos, and has returned many times since. "Going to China today is like visiting an entirely different continent," she said. "One of the great stories of humankind is bringing 800 million people out of extreme poverty in four decades."

"China's development is extraordinary and it has really reached the grassroots -- it's reached every community and every corner," she said. Beyond shared prosperity, she added, China offers "a new concept of modernization," because it "remains Chinese" and "doesn't sacrifice modernization and prosperity to becoming alien or becoming Western."

In China, she said, development "goes hand in hand with thousands of years of civilization," and "this is something everyone must emulate." Enditem