Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  Relationships between Chinese and foreigners also put pressure on the family system. In the nineteenth century, some Chinese women in the cities became the lovers of foreign men, only to be left by them when the men returned home. Typical of colonial presences, these relationships were profoundly unequal, but still in many cases provided women with knowledge and wealth that they otherwise would not have had access to. In the twentieth century, many more such affairs became lasting marriages, even though negative Western attitudes toward interracial marriage persisted. In 1927 the British Commissioner of Police in Shanghai declared that “mixed marriages are not in the interest of the force.”32 But still such unions took place, and both Chinese and foreigners were forced to accept them. Some Chinese wives of foreign citizens became cultural interlocutors. Anna Chennault, who was born Chen Xiangmei in 1925 and married US General Claire Chennault, has influenced Sino-American relations for fifty years. Chiang Kai-shek’s son Chiang Ching-kuo married a Soviet citizen during his long exile in Russia: Faina Vakhreva, known as Jiang Fangliang, became the first lady of the Republic of China on Taiwan.

  For more ordinary Chinese and Westerners, love across national and cultural borders was difficult, but increasingly common. Foreign soldiers in China married Chinese girls: 9,000 Chinese wives went with their American husbands back to the United States after World War II. A number had married at a time when US immigration laws still forbade them from ever living in their husband’s country. Some foreign wives lived with Chinese husbands in China, not only in the cities, but also in the countryside, especially in villages in Guangdong and Fujian. Mary Yue, née Ferguson, a Scottish-born New Zealander, in 1890 traveled with her children to her husband’s village in Taishan, where the children grew up. Her family was essentially transnational, part of the global China that we will discuss in the next chapter. But it was also local: The presence of foreign wives changed the villages in which they lived more than many locals would admit.33 Sometimes the cross-cultural strains became too much. Esther Cheo Ying, the daughter of a Chinese student at the London School of Economics and his Cockney wife, sympathized with both her parents:

  It could not have been easy for my working-class mother to understand what marrying a Chinese Mandarin’s son entailed. She was too young to understand and too ignorant of the different cultures of East and West to try to conform even a little to the customs of Chinese life. My father’s family ostracized him for marrying a “foreign devil.” The odds were too great for either of these two young people to try to make the marriage work.34

  In spite of the cross-cultural tensions, love between Chinese and foreigners influenced the international history of the region and the world. Equally important was the debate in China about new forms of relationships between men and women and between generations. For some people the foreign was a threat, for others it was about freedom and opportunity. In China, these perceptions fluctuated throughout the century and up to today. Mao Zedong, whose hatred for arranged marriages helped transform the role of women in China, also attempted to cut off much of China’s interaction with the rest of the world, leaving many transnational Chinese families stranded or divided. But even Mao’s regime was unable to completely cut China’s international family ties, or reduce the worth of Chinese families. In the end family love was more important than concepts of nation, nationalism, or ideology.

  THERE ARE MANY, often contradictory, ways of interpreting the role of foreigners in China before 1949. Some observers focus on the exploitive colonial aspect of the relationship, which did so much to undo China’s first period of interaction with capitalist modernity. In this negative version China often is seen as regaining its autonomy and its nationhood only through the expulsion of foreigners after 1949. Others find in the hundred years between 1850 and 1950 more that is positive than negative in Chinese interaction with foreigners, and tend to emphasize that foreign interactions helped produce modern China. The discussion is not helped by the Chinese Communist government having written most foreigners (except their favorite few) out of Chinese history; my students today often do not know the degree to which China was an open country before 1949 or the key role foreigners played in China’s development. On the other hand, though, foreigners often do not understand the sense of humiliation today’s Chinese feel when they look back on the past, at least in the version they get presented: The concessions, the extraterritoriality, the financial reparations, and the haughty behavior of foreigners in China would be a bad example of international interaction for any country, but they particularly rile a generation grown up on spoonfuls of government-sanctioned nationalism.

  In reality, foreigners in China played as many roles as the Chinese did. Some came there out of enthusiasm for China and its people. Some came to win souls for Christ or for commercial advantage. Some became Chinese (as some Chinese became foreign). Some came for love and some came for the need to punish and destroy. Their lives bear witness to these roles, and to how they were often combined in one person. Think, for instance, of Silas Hardoon, a Baghdadi Jew who lived in Shanghai for six decades, made his fortune in real estate development and cotton, and died the richest man in the city. A British subject (though he had never been to Britain), married to a Chinese woman (though he barely spoke her language), he was buried according to Jewish and Buddhist rites. Hardoon stood for everything that made empires suspicious and nationalists mad. Neither Iraqi nor Chinese nor British, he had a massive impact on China. Any nationalist attempt at writing him or other “foreigners” out of Chinese history will diminish its complex reality.

  The relationship between the “Chinese” and the “foreign” in the twentieth century is also about understanding historical change, in politics as well as terminology. China did not retrieve its full sovereignty only in 1949, as is often claimed, but step by faltering step between 1925 and 1946, under a Guomindang government. It was during this period—well before the Communists took over—that customs autonomy and foreign concessions reverted to China. Its new government wanted to plan the country’s future according to nationalist principles, and resented the “chaos” that allowed foreigners and Chinese to regulate their own lives. The war against Japan and the Communist victory only put the final nails in the coffin of China’s “foreign century.”

  CHAPTER 6

  ABROAD

  IN SPITE OF OFFICIAL DISAPPROVAL, Chinese traveled, sojourned, and settled abroad in increasing numbers at the end of the Qing era. An eighteenth-century trickle turned into a nineteenth-century flood, with Southeast Asia being the main destination. Of the twenty million or so Chinese who went overseas to stay before 1949, around half in the mid-nineteenth century and more than ninety percent in the 1920s went to the countries to China’s south. The British-ruled states on the Malayan peninsula received 6 to 7 million, the Dutch East Indies 4 to 5 million, and French Indochina 2 to 4 million. Three and a half million went to Thailand and a million to the Philippines. The rest of the world, including the Americas, saw a Chinese immigration of two and a half million.

  The numbers for Chinese emigration are significant, but small compared to the scale of European outward migration. While the Europeans took over and settled three continents, mostly exterminating the local population in the process, Chinese migration was limited to following commercial advantages as they arose, mostly along the trade routes set up by European empires. As a result, more than 350 million people of European origin live outside Europe today, while only 40 million people of Chinese descent live outside China. Even if one counts Chinese settlement of China’s border zones (Manchuria, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Yunnan, and Tibet) the number of migrants and their offspring is substantially lower than that for Europeans abroad. The significance of what became the Chinese diaspora is therefore not in numbers, except in parts of Southeast Asia, but in the impact these Chinese had on the countries where they came to live and, especially, in the impact they were to have on China itself.

  As from Europe, there were many diff
erent types of Chinese emigration. Push factors included poverty, wars, natural disasters; pull factors were commercial opportunities, education, land. Most Chinese who went abroad had to battle attempts to drive them out from where they wanted to be, and almost all arrived poor. The Chinese taught themselves to follow the edges of empires, where it was easier to be let in and where economic opportunities were likely to arise. The story of Chinese settlement abroad is therefore to a great extent the story of European maritime trade routes along the South China Sea and across the Pacific. A new stage began when the Suez Canal opened in 1869, connecting Europe and Asia more closely. Still, travel across these vast distances was more often organized by Chinese than by any foreign agencies. Chinese migration, from the beginning, was first and foremost a Chinese affair.

  Just as elsewhere, emigration from China was often a two-stage process. People moved to the cities to find work, and then went abroad. Most emigration was voluntary, to the extent that emigrants made a conscious decision about going abroad, although labor recruiters were known to trick or even abduct laborers to fill their recruitment quotas. Most emigrants went to work the fields or factories of others; they grew cotton or sugar, dug mines or tunnels, or made ammunition or foodstuffs. Some sewed, cooked, or laundered. Their employment was as varied as that of European migrants. Most stayed poor, and a larger percentage than among European migrants eventually went back to live in their hometowns. Some got very rich, especially in Southeast Asia, or, in a few cases, in the Americas in the late twentieth century. But the number of rich Chinese was always far smaller than many in their host nations believed.

  There were waves in the pattern of Chinese emigration, even though the numbers overall show a steady increase until hit by economic depressions or immigration restrictions. Emigration doubled in the late 1870s, with further peaks right after the 1911 revolution and in the 1920s. The number of women emigrants increased sharply from the 1920s on, meaning there were more settled Chinese families abroad. In some cases, though, Chinese male emigrants who could afford it had families both abroad and in China, through various forms of concubinage. Degrees of integration among Chinese who chose or were allowed to stay vary from country to country, but are not dissimilar to first- and second-generation European migrants; they soon begin counting themselves as locals (but with a significant part of their Chinese identity intact).

  The great majority of Chinese migrants came from the south and especially from the coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian. Though leaving from the same ports, these southern Chinese went to very different destinations. More than thirty percent of the original emigration to Southeast Asia was from Fujian, while more than half of those who settled in the Americas were from Guangdong. As in China, the emigrants always joined brotherhoods or companies, which protected them and gave them some form of collective say in the new country. The first to be established were usually the gongsuo, which can loosely be translated as guilds or commercial associations. Since merchants and traders were more powerful than others, they were usually the first to organize. These were followed by huiguan or tongxianghui, different forms of native place organizations, which helped look after Chinese from one region, village, or clan. Bang (societies) and hui (associations) then followed. The latter were often mutual-help groups or political gatherings (such as of the Guomindang), but in some cases criminal organizations, later known as underground societies or triads. The abilities Chinese had to organize and stick together made life easier abroad but could lead to exploitation within the communities themselves.

  The most significant role of Chinese emigration was as a conveyor of ideas and technologies between China and the rest of the world. Chinese who had lived abroad came home with new thoughts and goals; they stimulated others to travel and set up new businesses and organizations. Along with foreigners living in China, they introduced new products and tastes, and new concepts of how people should live their lives. They organized visits for others to their places of residence abroad, set up Chinese schools, and formed business networks. By the late twentieth century transnational Chinese families often thrived in several places at once—in Hong Kong, California, and Singapore, for example, or in London, Taiwan, and Shanghai. The origins of China’s resurrection as an economic great power after 1980 would be impossible to explain without the framework that such families provide. They were, and are, the glue that holds China’s relations with the world together, in good times and bad.

  NANYANG, THE SOUTH SEA, became the main destination for Chinese emigration in the eighteenth century and has remained so ever since. The Chinese concept of Nanyang encompasses all of what we today would call Southeast Asia, with extensions as far away as Australia and the east coast of India. Trade and limited degrees of settlement by Chinese in parts of the region go back centuries. There are a thirteenth-century tomb of a Chinese envoy in Brunei and a fifteenth-century tombstone of a Brunei sultan in Nanjing. For centuries commercial motives drove the interaction; as we have already seen, the Chinese concept of paying of tribute to the emperor in Beijing often went hand in hand with commerce. By the late eighteenth century, groups of Chinese began to settle in Southeast Asia as European colonial control expanded, and in the nineteenth century, this trickle became a constant stream of people moving back and forth between China and Southeast Asia. In no other part of the world has Chinese immigration been so significant for the region and for China itself.

  A very large group of Chinese settlers in Southeast Asia came from Fujian province. Today their descendants make up roughly half of all Chinese in Indonesia and Malaysia. This coastal province could serve as a microcosm of Chinese emigration. Its population, 36 million today, is made up of several dialect and population groups and is very diverse in terms of social conditions; there are rich merchants in cities on the coast and a very poor upland group where survival has always been tough. About a quarter of the population is Hakka, a distinct Chinese ethnic group that settled in the province in the fourteenth century. From the eighteenth century Fujianese colonized Taiwan, where they today form around 70 percent of the population. The combination of seafaring skills and products to sell (notably tea: the English word for the product comes from Fujianese, te) made for lengthy expeditions to surrounding countries and paved the way for labor migration. Today every village in Fujian has families with relatives overseas, and many residents in these villages have spent time overseas.

  Most Chinese who traveled to Southeast Asia went as laborers, and even if some brought commercial skills from home, most remained poor. Compared with life in their home provinces in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Chinese who migrated to Southeast Asia still counted themselves lucky. For a long time, they benefited from political stability and economic opportunities and relished their relative autonomy and ability to send remittances home. As a result, their numbers grew. Today around thirty percent (7.5 million) of the population in Malaysia is of Chinese descent. In Indonesia the figures are three percent (6 million), in Thailand ten percent (6.5 million), and in the Philippines two percent (2 million). In Brunei, twenty-five percent of its 400,000 people are of Chinese descent. Elsewhere in the region, from Indochina to Burma, elites of Chinese origin are well represented in business and industry. By the late twentieth century, Chinese immigrants had contributed significantly to Southeast Asia’s modern transformation.

  The Nanyang Chinese have had a profound effect on China. Even during the Japanese occupation or during Mao Zedong’s campaigns, it was impossible to completely cut ties between Chinese in Southeast Asia and the homeland. Money, letters, and sometimes people found their way in. In the worst of times, the most daring went upriver from Hong Kong or across from Taiwan without asking for visas or other documents. Since the reform period started in the late 1970s old links to Southeast Asia were renewed. Instead of Marx and Mao on the wall, many villages in Guangdong and Fujian now have pictures of their overseas benefactors. Investment in those provinces has flourished, mostly through
Hong Kong. The Thai company Charoen Pokphand, among the largest foreign conglomerates in China, was founded in 1921, when Xie Yichu and his brothers, originally from Chenghai in Guangdong, started the Chia Tai seed shop in Bangkok’s Chinatown. They imported seeds and vegetables from China and exported pigs and eggs to Hong Kong. Xie’s son, who uses the Thai name Dhanin Chearavanont, is Thailand’s richest man and has been close to all Chinese leaders since Deng Xiaoping.

  As both Chinese and Southeast Asian nationalisms grew in the twentieth century, the Chinese presence in the region became more significant for China and more problematic locally. Nanyang Chinese early on became key supporters of the Guomindang, and after World War II some joined up with local Communist parties. The Chinese revolution of 1911–1912 and the GMD’s conquest of power in the 1920s could not have happened without Southeast Asian assistance—Sun Yat-sen used to call the overseas Chinese “the mother of the revolution.” The amount of money that came in from organizations in the region kept Sun’s project alive through the lean years out of power, and fueled the GMD takeover in 1928. At the same time, Chinese nationalism in China gave some Chinese Southeast Asians a new identity they could take pride in. They were no longer just from their village or province but from a reawakened China. While the majority of Nanyang Chinese sought integration of a kind, some groups took pride in being outsiders.