by Odd Westad
When the colonial empires collapsed after World War II and new states, based on some form of national identity, emerged all over Southeast Asia, the situation for Chinese minorities became more problematic. A bit like the situation for European Jews in the first half of the century, overseas Chinese were criticised for being rich, even though few were. Or they were accused of being Communist agents, even though fewer still were. In Malaya, quite a number of ordinary Chinese ended up in the rebellion of the Malayan Communist Party, mostly out of fear of being marginalized in an independent Malay state. After the rebellion was crushed, the Chinese-Malaysians had to accept living in a country where they were excluded from political influence. In other places things got far worse. In Indonesia several thousand Chinese-Indonesians were murdered after the 1965 coup, even though they had not been involved in politics. But the worst atrocities against Nanyang Chinese happened in countries where Communist China had supported the very authorities that then turned on their Chinese populations. In Cambodia the CCP-supported Khmer Rouge killed half of the country’s Chinese-Khmer population after 1975. In Vietnam after reunification Chinese-Vietnamese merchants and shopkeepers were hit by the Communist regime’s antibourgeois campaigns, which developed into a racist campaign against people of Chinese origin. Half of Vietnam’s Chinese population left; 60 to 70 percent of the refugees who left by boat from South Vietnam were of Chinese descent. In the north at least 200,000 fled across the border to China.
In other countries, integration has progressed well, at least on the surface. In the Philippines the Chinese have prospered without being politically excluded. Both the independence hero Emilio Aguinaldo and President Benigno Aquino Jr. are of partly Chinese descent. There are schools and newspapers using Chinese, while most younger Chinese are integrated into Filipino culture through the use of English or Tagalog or both. In Thailand, although there is resentment against Chinese influence, the main banks and much of the country’s industry are run by people of Chinese descent. In the country at large, at least three Thai prime ministers have been of partly Chinese origin, including the controversial Shinawatras, whose great-grandfather came from Meizhou in Guangdong province. The great, mostly unspoken, fact in Bangkok is that the Thai royal family originates in part from a Guangdong immigrant in the eighteenth century. In Thailand, as in most of Southeast Asia, the Chinese presence is woven into the fabric of the countries themselves and cannot be easily extirpated by nationalists of any kind.
Nationalism has also led to problems for overseas Chinese who returned to China. In the 1930s and 1940s the Japanese occupiers regarded them as British or American spies. The Guomindang tried to draw those who had left the motherland back to it, to participate in Chiang Kai-shek’s modernization efforts and denounced them as traitors if they did not. But the worst period for overseas Chinese in China was during the Communists’ great campaigns, from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, when any sign of foreign connections could mean a death sentence. Villagers on the coast had to fight Red Guards who wanted to attack their clansmen who had come back from abroad. Even though ties with relatives or friends abroad were never entirely cut, even in the depths of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese who had lived and worked abroad were met with suspicion in China. Ironically, they became victims of a nationalism that many of them, or their ancestors, had helped create by bringing foreign ideas to China in the early twentieth century.
Today most of the mental rejection within China of countrymen who have lived abroad is gone. There are still hurdles that people who travel between countries have to jump in order to be tolerated in China, but the idea that you can live abroad and still be Chinese is more or less accepted. For those who see themselves as partly Chinese, or have their primary identification as a link in a transnational network or family, things are still somewhat unsettled. Transnationalism as a concept does not sit easily with Chinese nationalists of any breed. But still there are whole regions along the south China coast that depend on family ties abroad for their economic development. These qiaoxiang, sojourner villages, have large numbers of foreign-born Chinese or people who have spent time abroad who now contribute decisively to the Chinese economy by transferring skills or starting companies. Moreover, they feed into the export-led economic growth by having relatives or contacts in Southeast Asia, or in Catalonia, or in Belfast. It is very hard even for the most rigid Chinese nationalist to beat this basic economic argument for qiaoxiang ties or transnational existences.
ONLY IN ONE PLACE OUTSIDE CHINA did Chinese become the majority population and predominant in politics and business. That was in Singapore, the colony the British set up at the tip of the Malayan peninsula in 1819 to serve as a business entrepôt and a strategic outpost, controlling the Strait of Malacca. When Singapore was created, there was already a substantial Chinese population in the region operating in close connection with Batavia (now Jakarta), Penang, and Malacca. By the 1840s, Singapore was already a predominantly Chinese town whose activities revolved around trading and transport. In the 1880s, it was the port of entry for Chinese laborers who came to work on the plantations and in the mines that the colonial authorities had set up on the Malayan peninsula and on the islands. The exploitation of newly arrived workingmen from China was so bad that the British established what they called Chinese Protectorates in the Straits Settlements, with William Pickering as the first Protector. Pickering, a veteran of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service who spoke both Mandarin and Fujianese, became a key figure in convincing local Chinese that they could benefit from the protection of the British empire.
And benefit they did, or at least some of them. By the early part of the twentieth century, Chinese owned rubber plantations and opium farms, banks and trading companies, shipping lines and machine factories. While the majority of Chinese remained as poor as other inhabitants, some used Singapore as a kind of double entrepôt, importing cheap Chinese labor, learning foreign skills, accessing capital, and following the trading opportunities that the British empire provided. It is not surprising that the Singapore Chinese bourgeoisie became almost manically loyal to the British throne. The inscription on the statue of the queen, which the Chinese organizations presented to Victoria at her Golden Jubilee in 1887, calls attention to “the loyal affection of Her Majesty’s Chinese subjects and their gratitude for the benefit of her rule.” Some were knighted for their services to the empire. The Cambridge-educated lawyer Sir Song Ong Siang (Song Wangxiang) founded schools and newspapers, and the Malaccan Sir Tan Cheng Lock (Chen Zhenlu) set up businesses and Chinese organizations.
But Sir Cheng Lock also symbolized the direction that many Southeast Asian Chinese were moving in. A firm supporter of the empire before World War II, he became an advocate of an independent Malayan union, with Singapore as part of it, after the war ended. Tan Kah Kee (Chen Jiageng) is another example of new forms of thinking. Born in Fujian, he went to Singapore in 1890 and built a vast fortune in the rubber industry, earning him the nickname “Malaya’s Henry Ford.” But by the late 1930s war relief work in China preoccupied him more and more, and in 1950, after the CCP victory in China, he moved to Beijing, where he died in 1961. The two directions—integration within a new Malay-dominated Malaysia and loyalty to Chinese nationalism—threatened to destroy the position of Singapore in the late 1940s and 1950s. But in 1965 after two unhappy years within the same federation, Singapore was thrown out of Malaysia because of its resistance to the government’s taxation policies and preference for Malays in public office. The People’s Action Party (PAP) has ruled the city state ever since, first under Lee Kuan Yew (Li Guangyao) and since 2004 under his son, Lee Hsien Loong (Li Xianlong).
PAP rule in Singapore stresses authoritarian government, social welfare, and multiracialism in a meritocratic setting. Though it is a democracy in theory, in practice Lee Kuan Yew wanted a regimented state that emphasized economic development over liberal politics. Originally a social-democratic party, the PAP began to veer toward free-market economics in the
late 1970s. Watching Hong Kong’s success, Lee concluded that “state welfare and subsidies blunted the individual’s drive to succeed.” “I watched with amazement,” he wrote, “the ease with which Hong Kong workers adjusted their salaries upwards in boom times and downwards in recessions. I resolved to reverse course on the welfare policies which my party had inherited or copied from British Labour Party policies.”1 By the 2000s, Singapore, with 77 percent of its population ethnically Chinese, was rated top on the free-market index alongside Hong Kong, even though the government continues to control around 60 percent of the total GDP.
IN THE EAST, ACROSS THE OCEAN, the Chinese imagination saw mountains of gold as news of the California gold rush spread in 1848. Just as people in other parts of the world, Chinese wanted to be part of this accumulation of riches in the region they called Jinshan, Gold Mountain. Thousands came in the decade that followed to the US West Coast and western Canada. Even though there had been small numbers of Chinese in North America for almost a hundred years—some came with the Spanish from the Philippines and others followed the trade routes to both American coasts—it was 1848 that became the great dividing line. By 1880 there were more than 100,000 Chinese living in the United States, working in all kinds of trade: mining, railway construction, garment making, canning, farming, or in services such as laundering and cooking. An even larger number had sojourned in North America and later returned to China. In Southern China, which went through a bad time because of rebellions and famines, Gold Mountain began to be seen as a preferred destination for the most adventurous travelers, who hoped to settle permanently across the ocean.
The Chinese dream of being treated like other immigrants in North America was never realized. During the economic downturn in the 1870s, racist agitators blamed the Chinese for having taken jobs from white Americans, and began to argue for ending all immigration from China. Some West Coast labor leaders were particularly active: The Workingman’s Party in California mobilized under the slogan “The Chinese Must Go.” An 1879 pamphlet of theirs argued that Chinese exclusion was a matter of life or death—“Either we must drive out the Chinese slave, and humble the bloated aristocrat, or we shall soon be slaves ourselves.”2 Intellectuals of various kinds were also brought in evidence. The poet, travel writer, and translator of Goethe’s Faust, Bayard Taylor, wrote:
It is my deliberate opinion that the Chinese are, morally, the most debased people on the face of the earth. . . . Forms of vice, which in other countries are barely named, are in China so common that they excite no comment among the natives. They constitute the surface level and below them are deeps . . . of depravity so shocking and horrible that their character cannot even be hinted. There are some dark shadows in human nature which we naturally shrink from penetrating [and which] inspired me with a powerful aversion to the Chinese race. Their touch is pollution, and, harsh as the opinion may seem, justice to our own race demands that they should not be allowed to settle on our soil.3
The US government banned Chinese immigration in 1882. It is the only restriction Congress has ever enacted directed against all citizens of a specific country. The ban lasted up to 1943, when Chinese officials managed to sufficiently embarrass their wartime ally to have it withdrawn. Exclusion cut the growth in population, though it never succeeded in reducing the overall number of Chinese in the United States (or Canada, which restricted immigration from 1885 to 1947). Within Chinese communities, the racist agitation against them set off soul-searching and resistance in roughly equal amounts. Some Chinese felt that they were targeted because they were different in culture, customs, and language, and responded either by leaving or by attempting to assimilate fast. Others put up a fight. In the United States, as in China itself, Chinese protested an exclusion arrangement that was unfair and racist. When the traditional Chinese organizations in the United States failed to protest effectively, new organizations, such as the Chinese Equal Rights League in New York and the Chinese American Citizens’ Alliance in San Francisco, emerged. While the new generation of American-born Chinese were able to progress socially in the early part of the twentieth century, the cutting of ties with the old country that exclusion represented created both economic and cultural problems for them, which they had to work hard to overcome.
Today Chinese represent one of the most successful groups of immigrants to the United States and Canada. More than half of those over twenty-five have earned a college degree (as against a quarter of the general population), and they have a higher-than-average family income. Even though discrimination still exists, the example of prosperous Chinese American entrepreneurs or scientists such as Jeffrey Yang (founder of Yahoo!) or Steve Chen (founder of YouTube) help the overall image of success to the point that some young Chinese in the United States are now afraid of being branded as geeks and nerds. Still, most of the population started their road to prosperity at the very bottom. Out of 3.5 million, more than two-thirds were born abroad, increasingly in the People’s Republic of China. Most struggle to make a living after arriving in the States, often taking jobs that demand much fewer qualifications than they had when they entered. The bright future that all immigrants hope for has yet to arrive for most of those Chinese who have arrived since the 1980s.
One part of the United States where Chinese have faced less discrimination overall, and where they today make up a larger percentage of the population than in any other state, is Hawaii.4 Chinese were already well established on the islands before the US annexation in 1898. Even though exclusion was attempted there too, fewer left as a result of discrimination, probably because of better employment opportunities and especially because of a largely missionary-run multiracial educational system that suited Chinese hopes for their children. Hawaii became an important staging ground for Chinese politics and enterprise, and a key link between the Chinese in Southeast Asia and those in the United States. It also saw a large number of intermarriages between Chinese and other ethnic groups much earlier than in the rest of the United States. Perhaps in Hawaii, almost halfway to Asia, Chinese and other Americans found it easier to begin a process of collaboration and of reaching out to other continents that would in the end enrich them all.
Because of the consistent European attempts to exclude them from the temperate zones of the world, some Chinese often first settled in the tropics. Thus, we find longtime Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. In a few countries, Chinese immigration was of great consequence, either as labor or in terms of trade networks. It also created links between China and faraway places that were often surprising and always enlightening, and which in some cases last up to today. When, for example, a Brazilian political leader of Chinese descent pays an official visit to China, it means something beyond the very small amount of background that guest and hosts share. For the Chinese it illuminates their country’s centuries-long engagement with the rest of the world. For the visitor it reminds him of a heritage to be proud of. He will likely be given opportunities that would rarely come the way of other foreign visitors. Most importantly, such visits create ties that both sides will want to strengthen.
In South America, the largest numbers of Chinese can be found in Peru and Cuba. In Peru most came as contract laborers from the 1850s on, working under very brutal conditions on sugar plantations, in the guano mines, or in building the Andean railroad. Most felt they were treated little better than slaves; they were cheated out of their wages or flogged or starved for any infraction of the rules. Exclusively male, the immigrants became increasingly restless because of the horrible living conditions and racism they encountered. During the War of the Pacific of 1879–1883, which pitted Chile against Bolivia and Peru, any Chinese who could sided with the invading Chileans, whom they saw as liberators. Some served in the army of Admiral Patricio Lynch, who had picked up a smattering of Cantonese while serving with the British during the Opium Wars. Close to a thousand Chinese died, most of them killed by Afro-Peruvians who had borne the brunt of the Chilean
attack.5
During the twentieth century, Chinese-Peruvians gradually gained respect and prosperity. Most married Peruvian women, and some settled in small towns in the Amazon, working as traders or farmers. Today Peruvians who have some Chinese background—about fifteen percent—see their ethnicity as an advantage. Some have spearheaded Peru’s linking into international networks of trade and finance, while others have gone into politics. Two recent prime ministers—José Antonio Chang and Víctor Joy Way—are of Chinese descent.
The other Latin American country to which Chinese came in large numbers is Cuba. At least 125,000 arrived between 1847 and 1874, mostly to work on the sugar plantations. Treated almost as cruelly as those who went to Peru, the Chinese resisted their Spanish masters and appealed to the Chinese emperor:
His Majesty’s kindness is like a wide ocean, extending to all corners of the world. . . . We, as ordinary civilians, are humble and foolish laborers with misfortune. Youths trapped in a land faraway from home; adults wasting their lives in a foreign country. We regret that we are poor and sickly. We feel woeful that the harsh government here is making more cruel policies. That is why we dare to voice our grievance to you.6