by Amy Chua
Kanchana’s reply: “But the Thai are Chinese.” She then instantly retreated: “Well—part Chinese. I have Chinese blood. Everyone in Thailand does. Well . . . almost everyone does.”
Thailand is a fascinating case. On the one hand, it shares with the other Southeast Asian countries the phenomenon of a wildly disproportionately wealthy, market-dominant Chinese minority. The Chinese in Thailand today, although just 10 percent of the population, control virtually all of the country’s largest banks and conglomerates. All of Thailand’s billionaires are ethnic Chinese. On the other hand, as Kanchana’s comments suggest, unlike elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the Chinese have assimilated quite successfully into Thailand, and there is relatively little anti-Chinese animus. In Thailand today, many Thai Chinese speak only Thai and consider themselves as Thai as their indigenous counterparts. Intermarriage rates between the Chinese and the indigenous majority (many of whom, at least in Bangkok, have some Chinese ancestry already) are much higher than elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Perhaps most strikingly, the country’s top political leaders, including a recent prime minister, are often of Chinese descent, although they usually have Thai-sounding surnames and speak little or no Chinese.
Although interethnic socializing and intermarriage may seem perfectly normal to Westerners, it bears emphasizing how markedly Thailand differs in this regard from her Southeast Asian neighbors. In Indonesia and Malaysia, for example, rates of intermarriage between the Chinese and the indigenous majority are close to zero. The Chinese in these countries remain a conspicuously insular minority, living, working, and socializing entirely separately from the indigenous majorities.
Many have speculated about the reasons for the starkly different rates of intermarriage and assimilation. According to one professor of law from Singapore, the main reason is the “pork factor.” “Indonesians and Malaysians are mostly Muslims,” he explains, “and they don’t eat pork. The Chinese love pork; they eat it all the time. And for Chinese, eating is a huge part of their lives. Thus, social interactions are impossible.” This professor was being facetious, but he is clearly right that religion has played an important role: Thailand is not Muslim but largely Buddhist, a cultural affinity that has made assimilation much easier for the Thai Chinese, many of whom adhere to a syncretic combination of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism.
In any event, despite the persisting, glaring market dominance of the Thai Chinese, there appears to be little anti-Chinese sentiment in Thailand today. To be sure, some ambivalence toward the Thai Chinese remains. Kanchana, for example, made some slightly contradictory remarks in our conversation. “All the gold shops are owned by rich Chinese—I mean, pure Chinese,” she said at one point. And: “When the economy gets bad, then Thais resent the Chinese more.” Still, the fact remains that ethnic relations today between the Chinese and indigenous Thais in Thailand are remarkably civilized.
Thus Thailand, which began democratizing in 1992, is arguably a counterexample to the sobering predictions of the previous chapters. In Thailand today, ethnic hatred and demagoguery do not seem to be problems despite recent market and democratic reforms in the presence of a market-dominant ethnic minority.
Unfortunately, things are not quite so simple. The telltale question with respect to Thailand is: How did the country come to be the way it is? In significant part, the answer is decades of coerced assimilation and cultural eradication by the Thai government, aimed at eliminating the Chinese as a distinct ethnic group. In other words, the Thai government in earlier decades pursued its own version of a backlash against a market-dominant minority. If ethnic relations in Thailand do seem hopeful, the Thai path to assimilating its Chinese minority is unlikely to provide a useful policy model today.
“The Jews of the East”
The Chinese were not always so welcome in Thailand. After 1842 in Thailand (then known as Siam), large numbers of immigrants arrived from China. These principally male immigrants typically married Thai women and prospered. Indeed, the Chinese in this early wave of immigration were more or less completely absorbed into the Thai population.
Discord between the two peoples began after 1910, with the rise of nationalism in both China and Thailand. In 1909 the Chinese government passed a nationality law proclaiming that all persons with Chinese fathers were Chinese, no matter where they were born. This included most Thai Chinese, who suddenly found themselves with an identity crisis. There was another critical factor: After about 1910, Chinese women began accompanying their husbands and sons in significant numbers to Thailand, raising a barrier to intermarriage and assimilation. In any event, by the early twentieth century it was the strong opinion of the nationalist Thai king Vajiravudh, also known as Rama VI, that the Chinese were a “problem” for Thailand, because they remained stubbornly “ethnic Chinese,” insultingly refusing to take on Thai national identity.
Thus, in his famous tract The Jews of the East, King Vajiravudh compared his country’s Chinese minority to the European Jews. His main arguments, summarized by historian Victor Purcell, are as follows:
In Siam . . . there exists a situation analogous to the Jewish question in countries of the West. This is “The Yellow Peril.” The danger arises solely from the Chinese from whom the Siamese are even more different than Europeans are from the Jews. The first similarity between the Chinese and the Jews is in the matter of “racial loyalty.” No matter where they live, what nationality they assume, Chinese remain essentially Chinese. But theirs is race loyalty, not love of country. . . .
It is argued that Chinese intermarry with the people of the country: so do the Jews. But when a Chinese man marries a Thai woman, the woman becomes a Chinese and adopts Chinese customs in every detail. Their children become Chinese also. But if a Thai man marries a Chinese woman she continues to be Chinese. The man finds himself adopting Chinese ways and conforming to the Chinese pattern of life. As for the children, even though they are Thai in name they are psychologically Chinese. . . .
The second characteristic of the Jews is found developed in the Chinese also. That is, the Chinese, like the Jews, are an ancient race, whose high civilization was developed at a time when our ancestors had not emerged from savagery. They divide the world into two classes—the Chinese and the barbarians. . . . They are likely to think that we exist only to be robbed or cheated. . . .
Chinese are willing to undergo any sort of privation for the sake of money. Anyone who has watched Chinese coolies eat cannot help but feel a sense of revulsion, since it seems that the food they eat would hardly attract the curs which roam the streets. And if one speaks of the places where they lie, it is amazing that so many persons can squeeze themselves into a space so small that no other race on earth could manage to breathe in it. This being the case, it is not surprising that the Chinese can manage to corner all the available work for themselves.3
King Vajiravudh’s pamphlet was enormously influential. Before its publication, fear and dislike of the Chinese was principally limited to elite Thais. After the king’s pamphlet was disseminated, large numbers of ordinary Thais were filled with suspicion and hostility toward the Chinese in their midst. This popular anti-Chinese resentment intensified as Chinese market dominance increasingly asserted itself at every level of society. By the 1930s the Thai Chinese minority dominated finance, commerce, and virtually every industry in the country, minor and major. Minor industries included food vending, salt, tobacco, pork, and the traditional Chinese stronghold—birds’ nest concessions. (The nest of the swiflet, made of the bird’s own saliva, is considered a delicacy among the Chinese.) Major industries included shipping, petroleum, rice milling, tin, rubber, and teak. In addition, the Chinese were major landowners in central Siam.
By contrast, 80 percent of the indigenous Thai majority were abjectly poor rice growers. In a pattern all too familiar in Southeast Asia, the Thais came to blame their extreme poverty on the Chinese, especially Chinese moneylenders. One Thai, upon hearing in 1939 that the government had passed anti-Chinese le
gislation, responded: “[T]he poor peasants are liberated from the bonds of the blood-sucking ‘shylocks.’”4 Unlike the other Southeast Asian countries, however, Thailand pursued a unique strategy. It decided to “solve” its “Chinese problem” by eliminating the “Chineseness” of the Chinese minority—that is, by “turning Chinese into Thais.” Starting in the 1930s the Thai government began a systematic and ruthless campaign of forced assimilation.
Prior to the 1930s, most Thai Chinese spoke Chinese, attended Chinese schools, studied Chinese history, and maintained Chinese customs. In the 1930s the Thai government declared that Chinese schools were “alien” in character. Their very purpose was “to preserve the foreign culture of a minority population, to perpetuate the Chinese language and Chinese nationalism.” Accordingly, the government passed a decree requiring that in a 28-hour school week, 21 hours were to be devoted to studies in the Thai language. Mathematics, science, geography, and history were all to be taught in the Thai language. In addition, teachers in Chinese schools were required to pass difficult examinations in the Thai language.
As intended, the effect was a severe restriction of the Chinese language. As time went on, the government began closing Chinese schools altogether; twenty-five private Chinese schools were closed in July 1939, followed by seven more a month later. In addition, Chinese books were banned and Chinese newspapers shut down. Chinese social organizations were prohibited, and regulations were passed requiring “Thai dress and deportment.” Chinese culture generally was suppressed in a calculated effort to destroy ethnic Chinese consciousness and identity. At the same time, more subtle pressures for assimilation played a role as well. As late as the 1960s and 1970s, any Chinese with ambitions to succeed had to pursue a Thai education, adopt a Thai surname, speak the Thai language, and, ideally, marry into a Thai family.5
Interwoven with these attacks on Chinese language and culture were a draconian series of anti-Chinese economic policies. Particularly in the 1930s and again in the 1950s, anti-Chinese commercial restrictions were enacted, discriminatory taxes levied, and Chinese industries nationalized. Chinese families were harassed for showing loyalty to China; several wealthy Thai Chinese were jailed for remitting money to the mainland.6 During this period, fearful of confiscation, expulsion, and imprisonment, the Thai Chinese—like the billionaire Chiaravanont family, originally Chia—began shedding their Chinese surnames and Chinese traditions. As my student Kanchana put it, “You can tell who the Chinese are because they’re the ones with the longest last names. That’s because they felt they had to ‘out-Thai’ the Thai and because the Chinese weren’t allowed to take on Thai surnames that already existed.”
This, then, is the darker aspect of what many have described as the “seamless” or “blissful” integration of the ethnic Chinese minority into Thai society. To be sure, the fact that the Thai government’s assimilation campaign worked as well as it did may reflect other factors, such as the close cultural affinity between the Thais and the Chinese. Indeed, it is often suggested that the Thais and the Chinese share the same “ethnic roots.” Most Thais are believed to descend from people who lived in southwestern China until they were forced into what is now Thailand by the Mongols.7 It is impossible to know for sure, but a government campaign to assimilate the Chinese into Indonesia or to encourage more ethnic intermarriage in Malaysia or the Philippines might not have worked at all.
The fact remains that the Thai government consciously pursued, in the name of the indigenous Thai people, policies to “eliminate” the Chinese as a distinct ethnic minority. Although Thailand’s policies were certainly preferable to the genocide pursued by Milosevic or the Hutu Power regime, it is obviously open to question whether an assimilation achieved through decades of confiscation, coercive social policies, and cultural obliteration is an end that justifies its means.
A recent final twist is worth noting. With the rise of China as an economic power in the last several years—not to mention the explosion of market opportunities on the mainland—an increasing number of Thai Chinese are reclaiming their Chinese identity. After decades of suppressing their Chinese heritage, many Thai Chinese are sending their children to newly established Chinese language schools, visiting China in record numbers, investing in China, and reassuming Chinese surnames. Whether this renewed sense of ethnic Chinese pride and identity among Thai Chinese will have a destabilizing effect remains to be seen. Thus far, anti-Chinese resentment among indigenous Thais remains muted, although there are also indications that the acceptance of Thai Chinese by indigenous Thais is by no means complete. Today there are still restrictions on the use of the Chinese language. The Thai government recently forced a local cable television network to cancel its Chinese-language shows, citing long-standing regulations limiting broadcasts to Thai or English with Thai subtitles.8
More fundamentally, it is important to remember the limits of intermarriage and assimilation as an antidote to ethnic hatred. In Latin America and the Caribbean, extensive ethnic intermixing over many centuries has blurred ethnic lines, almost certainly helping to dampen ethnic conflict. But “ethnicity” is a highly artificial and manipulable concept, and “us against them” dynamics have repeatedly been generated even in countries where a market-dominant minority is highly assimilated or intermarrying in significant numbers with other groups. Assimilation did not protect Spanish Jews from repeated bloody attacks in the fifteenth century or German Jews in the Weimar Republic.
More recently, in the former Yugoslavia, intermarriage between Serbs and Croats was common, particularly in cosmopolitan cities like Sarajevo or Mostar. In pregenocide Rwanda, rates of intermarriage between Hutus and Tutsis were also substantial. But in neither country was assimilation or “mixing blood” sufficient to overcome the deadly fantasy of ethnicity as a source of power, a source of hate, and an excuse for mass slaughter.
PART THREE
ETHNONATIONALISM
AND THE WEST
The global spread of free market democracy has thus been a principal, aggravating cause of ethnic instability and violence throughout the non-Western world. In country after country outside the West—from Mandalay to Moscow, from Jakarta to Nairobi—laissez-faire markets have magnified the often astounding wealth and economic prominence of an “outsider” minority, generating great reservoirs of ethnic envy and resentment among the impoverished “indigenous” majority. In absolute terms the majority may actually be marginally better off as a result of markets—this was true, for example, of Indonesia and most of the Southeast Asian countries in the 1980s and 1990s—but these small improvements are overwhelmed by the majority’s continuing poverty and the hated minority’s extraordinary economic success, invariably including their control of the “crown jewels” of the economy.
Democracy, sadly, does not quell this resentment. On the contrary, democratization, by increasing the political voice and power of the “indigenous” majority, has fostered the emergence of demagogues—like Zimbabwe’s Mugabe, Serbia’s Milosevic, Russia’s Zyuganov, Bolivia’s Great Condor, and Rwanda’s Hutu Power leaders—who opportunistically whip up mass hatred against the resented minority, demanding that the country’s wealth be returned to the “true owners of the nation.” As a result, in its raw, for-export form, the pursuit of free market democracy outside the West has repeatedly led not to widespread peace and prosperity, but to ethnic confiscation, authoritarian backlash, and mass killing.
What does all this have to do with the West? Is the non-Western world perhaps just hopeless—too divided, backward, and violent to sustain free market democracy? Perhaps the United States and the other Western nations should simply wash their hands of underdeveloped societies and their intractable, horrendous problems. In the end, what do market-dominant minorities and ethnonationalism have to do with us?
Actually, they have everything to do with us. Or so this final part of the book will argue.
The next four chapters will show that the explosive confrontation between a market-dom
inant minority and an aroused ethnonationalist majority is by no means limited to the non-Western world. On the contrary, this confrontation lurks beneath some of the most violent, abominable episodes of Western history. Moreover, even today this explosive dynamic is not confined to individual developing countries. It is being played out at regional and global levels in ways that directly affect the Western nations, particularly the United States.
CHAPTER 9
The Underside of
Western Free Market Democracy
From Jim Crow to the Holocaust
Do market-dominant minorities exist in the United States or Canada or Western Europe? The answer is: not today, at least not at the national level.
Take the United States. While some ethnic minorities have outperformed others, the United States economy is absolutely not controlled by any ethnic minority. On the contrary, if any group can be said to dominate our economy, it is the “white” majority. Generally speaking, Caucasians dominate every major economic sector: finance, technology, real estate, professions, corporate ownership and leadership, and so on. The ten richest Americans in 2001—Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer; Oracle’s Lawrence Ellison; Warren Buffett; and five members of the Wal-Mart-founding Walton family1—are all white. (Incidentally, if Jewish-Americans are viewed as an ethnic minority in the United States, they do not remotely dominate the U.S. economy; unlike in Russia, for example, only one or at most two of the ten wealthiest Americans are Jewish.)