More than a century before the Philippines became one of Asia's fastest-growing economies, a 28-year-old ophthalmologist living in exile wrote an essay predicting the downfall of Spanish colonial rule. That essay was The Philippines: A Century Hence ( Filipinas dentro de cien años ), and its author was Jose Rizal, the Philippines' national hero.
Written between 1889 and 1890 and published in four installments in the Barcelona journal La Solidaridad , the essay asked a bold question: what will happen to the Philippines in the next hundred years?
Rizal laid out three possible futures: