Southeast Asia's Chinese Minorities 0582710383

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STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTHEAST ASIA

SOUTHEAST ASIA'S CHINESE MINORITIES

MARY F. SOMERS HEIDHUES

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LONGMAN

Longman Australia Pty Limited Hawthorn Victoria Australia Associated companies, branches, and representatives throughout the world

Copyright

© 1974 Longman Australia

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced wtorpd

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or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

without the permission of the Copyright owner. First published 1974 ISBN 0 582 71038 3 (Cased) ISBN O 582 71039 1 (Lilnp) Typeset by Dudley E. King Linotypers Pty Ltd Melbourne

Printed in Hong Kong by Dai Nippon Printing Co., (Hong Kong) Ltd

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Demography and Diversity of the Overseas l

Chinese

1 Chinese in Southeast Asian Economic Life: the

Commercial Man

8

2 Assimilation: Whether 'Chinese' Remain 'Chinese'

30

3 The Organizational Life of Chinese Minority Communities

45

4 The Chinese Minority in Malaysian Politics

59

5 The Chinese Minority in Indonesian Politics

74

6 China and the Overseas Chinese

87

7 Chinese Minorities and Southeast Asian Majorities Glossary

of Foreign Terms

100

113

Bibliography

115

Index

119

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Introduction

THE DEMOGRAPHY AND DIVERSITY O F THE O V E R S E A S C H I N E S E

In the course of the last generation, the characteristic which has attracted the interest of scholars and journalists to persons of Chinese origin living abroad, their close tie to their Chinese homeland, has altered beyond recognition and, as far as can be judged today, irreversibly. The drying up of the waves of Chinese migration to the Nanyang (the South Seas, as the Chinese called Southeast Asia) during the Second World War, and in particular after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, has meant that over half the "Chinese" now resident in Southeast Asia are local-born and that even the minority who were born in China have for the most part been continuously resident in Southeast Asia for two, three, or more decades. Deliberately, then, the title of this book refers to Southeast A.sfr,°a's

Chinese, for its central theme is that the Chinese communities of the Nanyang are now both culturally and politically more influenced by their Southeast Asian environments than by their Chinese motherland. Nor is the use of the plural "minorities" without forethought: a recuwent theme of the following chapters will be the varied ways of adaptation of these persons of Chinese origin to

their countries of residence, for the second characteristic which has attracted the attention of outsiders to the overseas Chinese, their unassimilability' to the indigenous culture is, if not an illusion, an exaggeration. Their social, cultural, and political diversity which resulted from adaptation to the Southeast Asian environment makes them many and not one-minorities- In fact, the traditional term, 'overseas Chinese', is rapidly losing its remaining content as the

Chinese abroad are subjected to intense pressures from their host 1

2

SOUTHEAST ASIA'S CHINESE MINORITIES

nations while at the same time the Peking government dissociates itself from their interests. Of course, the ethnic Chinese are not geographically localized as are the indigenous ethnic minorities of Southeast Asia, most of whom inhabit a definable territory, often on the boundary between two or more countries. Chinese are largely concentrated in urban areas, but not exclusively so. Whereas indigenous minorities with a geographical base often seek political or administrative autonomy to maintain their identity against the majority, present-day Chinese minorities strive to buttress their separate identity through essentially cultural institutions, in particular schools and the Chineselanguage press. These very institutions have aroused the watchfulness of Southeast Asian governments in recent years, not least because of the political ramifications of such 'cultural' activities ; schools and newspapers have been controlled, supervised, and frequently suppressed. The ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia are preponderantly engaged in trade. A final feature, however, distinguishes them from other minorities (and majorities) in Southeast Asia-except the Europeans, the ultimate in sojourners: the Chinese enjoy extraordinary supranational communications, particularly where commerce is concerned. Not even the Indian trading minorities have such welldeveloped contacts across national boundaries, much less the indigen-

ous businessmen. This is far more ,complex than mere contact with the motherland or some other two-way trading path; it involves a net of relationships within Southeast Asia, focusing on Singapore and Hongkong and extending out to the Japanese, European, and North American markets and sources of capital, as well as to China and Taiwan. Commercial considerations and not political loyalties draw this network together.

The Number of Overseas Chinese As one scholar put it, 'Being a Chinese is, in Southeast Asia, essential-

ly a matter of self-identi{ication'.1 Is a Chinese only a person born in China or at least a Chinese national? Is he someone whose mother tongue is Chinese or who meets an objective racial or cultural definition of 'Chineseness'? The 'Chinese minorities' in the Nanyang include many persons born outside China, holding citizenship papers of a Southeast Asian land, speaking little Chinese and reading less.

Not a few so-called 'Chinese' adhere to family and religious practices which differ markedly from those on the mainland, both past and present, and some are visibly of mixed Chinese-Southeast Asian parentage. Yet, however inadequately they meet objective criteria of 'Chineseness', these persons consider themselves to be Chinese

and are so regarded by other residents of their host country. The

THE DEMOGRAPHY AND DIVERSITY

3

imprecision of definition makes an exact count of the 'Chinese' an impossible undertaking, not least because many persons consider

themselves 'Chinese' in some contexts, but not in others. The thorny question of who is a Chinese will be more fully treated in subsequent chapters. Since, however we need to know with how many persons we are dealing, the following table offers some estimate of the numbers of ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, compared with the total population. The distinction between 'ethnic' Chinese and 'Chinese

nationals' is a useful indicator of the distinction between those who regard themselves, or are so regarded by others, as Chinese in a broad or cultural sense, but are citizens of the Southeast Asian country they inhabit, and those persons actually holding Chinese citizenship. Table 1 Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia (/970 estimate)

Total Chinese Brunei Burma Cambodia Indonesia Laos West Malaysia East Malaysia (Sarawak and Sabah) Philippines Portuguese Timor Singapore Thailand North Vietnam South Vietnam

32,000 440,000" 435,000 3,100,000b 58,000 3,250,000 455,000 520,000° 6 ,000 1,500,000 3,400,000d 208,000° 1,200,000!

Total Population

Percentage of Chinese

116, 000 26,980,000 6,701,000 117,000,000 2,893,000 9,000,000 1,581,000

27 1 6 2 2 36

37,158,000

1 1

590,000 2,017,000 34,738,000 21,340,000 17,867,000

28

74

6 6 4 6 0 1 1 4 0 5 0

10 1 0 5 5

a Because large numbers of Chinese have entered Burma illegally since the

Second World War, this figure is largely based on conjecture. b

Probably just over half of this number are Chinese nationals.

c In 1960 the number of Chinese nationals in the Philippines was given as 18I,626; Census of 1960, cited in Victor Purcell, The Chinese in Southeast Asia, London: Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 494. It is estimated that a million or more Filipinos have 'Chinese blood'. a The 1960 Census lists 409,508 Chinese nationals in Thailand, Purcell, op. cult., P. 168. e George McT. Kahin, 'Minorities in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam', Asian Surwegy, July 1972, pp. 580-586, cites North Vietnamese estimates of 200,000 et-hnic Chinese in 1968 174,644 in the official 1960 census, most of whom were substantially acculturated to Vietnamese society and only a small minority of whom still held Chinese citizenship. Purcell, op. c'it., p. Sl, cites the Statistical Yearbook of Viet-Nam, 1958-1959 that there were 128,498 Chinese nationals in South Vietnam. Before the Draconian measures 'nationalizing' alien Chinese, the number of Chinese

nationals may have been four times this figure.

4

SOUTHEAST ASIA'S CHINESE MINORITIES

SOURCES : Purcell, op. cit., passim ; Lea E. Williams, The Future of the Overseas Chinese 'in Southeast Asia, New York: McGraw Hill for the Council on Foreign Relations, 1966, p. 11 ; Statistical Office of the United Nations, Demographic Yearbook 1970, United Nations, 19T1 ; Kahin, op. cit., p. 582 ; William E. Willmott, The Chinese in Cambodia, Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1967, p. 15;

C. P. FitzGerald, The Third China: The Chinese Communities in South-East Asia, London: Angus and Robertson, 1965; and Chang Sen-do, 'The Distribution and Occupation of Overseas Chinese', Geographical Review, January 1968, pp. 89-107.

Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia are less than 6 per cent of the total population, but because of their concentration in urban areas, they are a very conspicuous minority, that is, they appear to be more numerous than they are. Furthermore, because they engage

primarily in commercial pursuits, their influence is greater than their numbers would suggest. Naturally, in countries where they are more numerous, they are correspondingly more influential. For that reason (and because we are further handicapped by a lack of studies on the subject), the following chapters will contain comparatively little about the Chinese of Burma (where they have, historically, been outnumbered by Indians as an alien trading minority) , and of North Vietnam and Laos, where they are relatively

small and unimportant minorities .

Origins of the Overseas Chinese On animal in Southeast Asia, the immigrants who were ancestors of the present-day Chinese in Southeast Asia already displayed considerable diversity. Their diversity was not a matter of social

class, for they came almost exclusively from the ranks of petty rural traders and, in the great migrations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of the rural poor. Although all but a handful of the migrants originated in the two southern Chinese maritime provinces of Kwangtung and Fukien, they spoke a minor babel of mutually unintelligible tongues and exhibited some variety in customs as well. Five speech groups (or dialect groups or, as one distinguished author calls them, 'tribes'2) are of major numerical importance in Southeast Asian Chinese communities: Hokkien, Teochiu, Cantonese, Hakka, and Hainanese (see map p. v).3 Hookier: originating from the vicinity of Annoy in Fukien province, they are numerically dominant in Penang, Malacca, Java, and in the

Philippines (where they were about 95 per cent of the Chinese

THE DEMOGRAPHY AND DIVERSITY

5

population in the late nineteenth century) and are probably the oldest settlers from China in Southeast Asia. They gravitated to urban areas and to trade. Only about 8 per cent of the Chinese population of South Vietnam, the Hokkiens dominated the rice trade there, they also provided most of the Chamber of Commerce presidents. More recently, a 'handful' of Hokkien businessmen in Saigon-Cholon turned wartime conditions to advantage by monopolizing the trade and export of scrap metal There is evidence that some (assimilated) Khmer peasants in Cambodia are actually of Hokkien ancestry; we know that descendants of I-Iokkiens became assimilated to Philippine society. In Java and Malacca, Hokkiens were ancestors of the acculturated Peranakan OI' Baba element. Teochiu: the most numerous group in Thailand and Sumatra, 75

per cent of the Chinese in Cambodia, the second largest group in South Vietnam and West Kalimantan, and third in Java, Teochius originated near Swatow in eastern Kwangtung province. Today, there are more Teochius in Bangkok than in Swatow. Teochius most

frequently entered trade or became unskilled laborers, in Thailand they control the more prestigious occupations. Like Hokkiens, whose

language closely resembles Teochiu, Teochius seem to have been relatively susceptible to assimilation. Hakka: the largest group in West Kalimantan and in Sabah, and

second largest in West Malaysia and Java, Hakkas came from both Kwangtung and Fukien provinces. Their migration to Southeast Asia was a continuation of an earlier southward movement within China, hence the name Hakka, which means 'guest', Hakkas entered agriculture in disproportionate numbers; peculiar to them were the

mining-agricultural

settlements

or kongsis in West Kalimantan.

The Hakkas of Sabah, however, migrated en masse to North Borneo

from Hongkong in the twentieth century. Perhaps because of their settlement patterns. I-Iakkas appear to be less easily assimilated than the previous groups. Known as a sturdy folk, Hakka women

did not bind their feet; the elderly stand today in visible contrast to their lily-footed Hokkien counterparts in Javanese towns. Cantonese: this speech group came from around the city of Canton (but not from the city itself as only the countryside had a reservoir of potential emigrants) and is the most numerous group in South Vietnam, where Cantonese is a lingua france among the Chinese, and in West Malaysia outside Penang and Malacca (where I-Iokkiens predominate). Before the Teochiu migration of the post-Second World War decade, Cantonese were the largest group in Cambodia ;

now they are second. Famed as cooks, Cantonese dominate the

6

SOUTHEAST ASIA'S CHINESE MINORITIES

Chinese restaurant trade in most lands. Like Amoy, Canton has a long history of trade with the Nanyang and of contact with the Western powers, even before the Opium War (1839-42) opened China to Western influences.

Also numerous enough to mention are the Hainanese, emigrants from the island of Hainan in Kwangtung province. As late participants in coolie emigration they were limited to more menial occupations in Singapore , or to the opening of new opportunities in trade, such as in Thailand where they followed the railroads into new eommercial territory , or in South Vietnam where they lead in European-

style restaurants. On the other hand, two centuries ago some Hainanese settled in Cambodia as peppergrowers. Hainanese women

only migrated to Southeast Asia in the 1920s; the arrival of the Erst boatload in Singapore is said to have occasioned a riot by irate husbands who had made other familial arrangements in the

colony. Other speech groups, from farther north in coastal Fukien (Henghua, Hokchia, Hokchiu), from Taiwan, or from Kwangsi province, are much fewer in number and less significant in influence, although Hokchius were as numerous as Hakkas (70,000) in Sarawak in 1960. 'Northerners' or persons from outside these provinces (most of them speaking Mandarin) are a rarity and found, for example,

as teachers in Chinese-language schools and as practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine or dentistry. Once a basic principle of social organization, the speech group distinctions have gradually become less important in the midtwentieth century, partly as a result of the popularization of ku-yii or Mandarin, the Chinese national language and the vehicle of instruction in modern Chinese schools. Nevertheless, t-heir influence is still evident in occupational specialization, social interaction, including intermarriage, and settlement pattens .

Why did just these provinces, Kwangtung and Fukien, send emigrants to Southeast Asia? This region of China has had trading links with Southeast Asia for centuries, enjoying particularly active commercial relations during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Emigration naturally followed the trading routes. In addition, Kwangtung

was drawn into Western commerce in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Here the 'pull' forces, the news of economic opportunity in the Nanyang, could make themselves felt. Of course, there were 'push' factors at work as well. The two thickly-settled provinces needed an outlet for their excess population. And repeatedly, but especially at the time of the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64), the area was devastated by war, Hood, drought, and famine. Not all sections of these provinces participated equally in the movement abroad. Certain counties and even single villages were

THE DEMOGRAPHY AND DIVERSITY

7

emigration-intensive, others stay-at-homes. This aspect of Chinese emigration has yet to be satisfactorily explained. Probably the reason lies partly in the organization of emigration along family lines - fathers or uncles sent for sons and nephews to join their enterprise abroad or an older brother brought a younger brother to enter business or to get an education. Some villages in southeastern China are formed by a single (male) lineage. The disproportionate representation of certain family names from certain southeastern Chinese counties in virtually all Southeast Asian Chinese communities testifies to the tendency of kin to emigrate to places where other kin were already established. Since unskilled labourers, or

coolies, as will be seen, were recruited more impersonally, that side of immigration may have been independent of family ties. Too little is known to justify further generalizations. Like many other questions relating to the overseas Chinese, the field of 'specialization' in emigration has yet to be satisfactorily ploughed. References

l G. VVillia1n Skinner, 'Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 1959, p. 137. 2 The late Victor Purcell, drawing on British colonial practice. The nineteenth century immigrants, having little sense of China as a political entity and absorbed in mutual rivalries, may well have seemed like 'tribals' to British observers. 3 These are the most commonly used versions of t-he names of the speech groups. In Mandarin, Wade-Giles transcription, they would be, respectively, Fu-chien-jen, Ch'ao-chou-jen, Kiang-nmg-jen, K'e-chia-jen, and Had-nan-jen. 4 Tsai Maw-Kuey, Les Chinois au Sud-Vietnam, Bibliotheque Nationale, 1968, pp. 95-8.

Chapter One

CHINESE I N SOUTHEAST ASIAN ECONOMIC LIFE : THE COMMERCIAL MAN

The routes of international commerce which fan out from Singapore into Southeast Asia touch most of the major settlements of that area's Chinese minorities: Rangoon, Penang and the western Malay peninsula ; the Riau archipelago, Medan, Palembang and Sumatra's east coast, including Bangkok and Billiton, Djakarta and Surabaja

on Java's north coast; Pontianak, Singkawang, and the west coast of Borneo, Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Saigon-Cholon, and Manila. To the north, the paths of trade meet again in the British colony of Hongkong, long the second great entrepOt handling Southeast Asia's exchanges with the rest of the world and, of course, a Chinese city. The involvement of Southeast Asia's Chinese minorities in commercial activities is their first and most important common

characteristic. Commerce - or at the very least economic opportun-

ity - brought them to the Nanyang and commerce is their most favored profession to this day. As the archaeologists' finds of porcelain pots and carved jade trinkets attest, and as Chinese travellers' accounts from past

dynasties confirm, Chinese and indigenous Southeast Asians have

done business to their mutual enrichment for centuries. The peculiar position of Chinese in Southeast Asian commerce today, however, is the product of changes since the mid-nineteenth century, in particular during the 'high colonial' era of 1870-1940. During the nineteenth century, bulk products became Southeast Asia's most profitable exports, steamships and the Suez Canal shortened the trip to Western markets while the luxury trade fell into relative

insignificance. At the same time, European powers extended their 8

CHINESE IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN ECONOMIC LIFE 9

r

control over the area, so that the colonies which were isolated trading or military outposts at the begininning of the 1800s became continuous and contiguous pieces of European-owned real estate. Even Siam, managing to escape direct Western colonization, succumbed to the indirect influence of Western-induced economic change. Economic Position of the Cha:nese before 1850 In the first decades of the nineteenth century, certain patterns typified Chinese settlements and Chinese economic activity in

Southeast Asia. Most Chinese lived and did business in and around the harbors, being restricted by law in some cases from settling outside the cities. The majority of the Chinese were local-born and therefore probably of mixed blood, since Chinese women did not

emigrate to Southeast Asia at this time. They made their living primarily in trade and in processing local products (even in Cambodia, they controlled rice marketing long before Western colonization

of the kingdom), as artisans, shopkeepers, or labourers. A major focus of their trade abroad was China, via junk. A few became wealthy by tax-farming for the European colonial governments

or indigenous courts, or by leasing monopolies on the periodic markets, slaughtering, gambling, alcohol, or the import and distribution of opium. To this last group belong, for example, the owners

of the so-called private lands in northwest Java, whose deeds of possession of tracts of land gave them title to a portion of the l a b o r and produce of the inhabitants. Such sale or lease of taxes or monopolies was, of course, known to the world's rulers since ancient times and readily open to abuse. This comparatively tiny group of monopolists acquired by far the worst reputation for

exploitation, although opium, alcohol, and gambling, at least, were primarily Chinese vices, and the victims of exploitation were other

Chinese more often than natives. Furthermore, both colonial and native administrations derived considerable revenue from sale and lease of such privileges and were reluctant. to forego them, even

as late as the twentieth century, when Chinese coolies provided ready customers for opium and gambling houses. The Chinese in the port cities of Southeast Asia were a minority

among minorities, both European and Asian. Like the cities themselves, they were a foreign body in a larger society almost exclusively

composed of peasants and to a considerable extent were isolated from that society. Still, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, many Chinese had penetrated the non-urban areas of Southeast Asia. In the Philippines, some descendants o f Chinese-Filipina unions (Me8tizos) had,

by this time, become large landowners. With the owners of the

10 SOUTHEAST ASIA'S CHINESE MINORITIES

private lands in Java, they seem to be unique among ethnic Chinese in operating as landlords. In most Southeast Asian countries, Chinese were restricted from settling in the rural areas (as, indeed, immigrants

from China were restricted in the Philippines, and both immigrants and descendants of the Chinese in Java were confined to urban areas after 1837). In Siam, where no laws prohibited Chinese from opening up agricultural land, few if any did, the exception being Chinese market gardeners around Bangkok. Elsewhere ethnic Chinese did choose to work the land. In the seventeenth century the Dutch encouraged Chinese to settle in the environs of Batavia to grow and process sugar and other crops; their descendants stayed on, despite the laws requiring the Chinese to live in urban areas, until the present. Cambodia today harbours a community of Chinese pepper-growers whose origins go back to the late eighteenth century. Almost from its founding in 1819 the area around Singapore was host to Chinese truck gardeners and producers of pepper and gainbier for export, Chinese gardeners served other major cities, too. In their orientation to the nearby urban or to the world market, however, these gardeners were a far cry from the

indigenous subsistence farmers living about them in Southeast Asia . Into the rural areas not yet subjected to intensive rice cultivation and as yet relatively free from colonial rule, West Borneo and the Malaypeninsula, Chinese immigrants brought an economic institution peculiar to them, the mining and farming /c0nq8il The most famous of these, the Lan-fang Kongsi, was an organization of Hakka gold miners in western Borneo founded in the late eighteenth century by immigrants from China. Until the Dutch exerted their authority

in the area in the mid-nineteenth century, the kongo enjoyed political autonomy and economic self-sufiiciency. It elected its own

officers and administered justice within its ranks, and gold and

agricultural produce were divided among the members (although indigenous sultans might exact tax on yields). Other rival kongsis, most of them Hakka, existed in West Borneo in the first half of the nineteenth century. When the Dutch subdued the kongsis in midcentury, the gold deposits were already depleted and the remaining miners increasingly turned to cash crop farming and wet-rice agriculture.

By about 1820 communities of Chinese settlers, also called kongsis, were beginning to exploit the rich deposits of tin on the Malay peninsula, taking over the field from small-scale Malay miners who were unable to meet the rising demand for tin. By mid-century, however, the communities yielded dominance of tin mining to the great Chinese entrepreneurs who worked the mines with gangs of imported coolie l a b o r , and the kongsis faded into the background.

CHINESE IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN ECONOMIC LIFE

I1

Chinese in the Southeast Asian Economy in the High Colonial Era The nineteenth century brought many changes tO the economy of Southeast Asia, and to the economic position of the Chinese. Although many continued to be traders, the kind of trade also altered substantially. The peasant, subsistence agriculture of many areas of Southeast Asia became, in the course of the nineteenth century, an exportoriented, cash crop economy. Even such previously rice-exporting countries as Siam, Cambodia, and Vietnam were caught up in the world market in a way unknown in the eighteenth or early nineteenth

century. As the world market penetrated, as it were, village agriculture, so did the Chinese. This process began about 1850 and continued into the 1920s.2 In Siam, for example, after the Bowring treaty of 1855 opened Siam to world trade, the market economy spread into rural areas, and Chinese moved out from Bangkok to take advantage of the changes. When at mid-century the Spanish lifted restrictions on residence and commerce of immigrant Chinese outside the major cities of the Philippines, they, too, moved into rural areas. In 1849, 92 per cent of the Chinese lived in and around Manila, in 1894; only 48 per cent resided theres, as the collection of abaca, hemp, and to a lesser extent sugar and tobacco drew them to the provinces. The process of penetration of immigrant Chinese to rural areas

of Java seems to have occurred later, probably because restrictions on travel and residence of Chinese outside the cities were only abolished in the twentieth century. It is instructive to study the growth and dispersion of the Chinese popul ation of the Priangan residency, that is, the interior of West Java, including Bandung. Until 1871 the area was closed to Chinese set-tlement, and all foreign enterprise was hampered by the requirement that natives cultivate and deliver to the colonial government certain products for export,

a system ended only in 1908. Once the area was opened to free enterprise, the Priangan became an even richer export producer. In 1905 fewer than 10,000 Chinese lived in the Priangan, 88 per cent of them in the six principal towns. By 1920 there were over

20,000 Chinese, but only 69 per cent lived in the seven largest towns ; in 1930 the census recorded some 45,000 Chinese, of whom 65 per cent lived in the largest towns.'* A similar movement can be demonstrated for other export-producing areas of Java, in all cases, as in Siam, the Philippines, and elsewhere, the Chinese moving into rural areas were predominantly immigrants and not from the long-settled stock of the Southeast Asian cities. This group of Chinese traders helped finance agricultural investment and participated in or monopolized the gathering, marketing,

and exporting of major crops, a process which in many cases led

12

SOUTHEAST ASIA'S CHINESE MINORITIES

to chronic indebtedness of the peasants. Authors of the 1930s, such as Dennery (for Indochina) and Gator (on the Netherlands Indies), give a picture of the Chinese trader-exploiter in the villages, advancing Money to the impecunious and improvident peasant for his not-yet-ripened crop. The peasant, struggling to meet the

usurious interest payments, had no hope of repaying the principal was that desired by his creditor, who preferred to

- nor indeed

maintain control over the coming harvest rather than have his money back and to see his customer freed from debt. The system flourished partly because there were no other adequate

sources of rural credit: even when the Netherlands Indies' authorities sought to replace the Chinese in rural lnoneylending with stateowned pawnshops in the 1920s, they had great difficulty in winning the confidence of the peasants. Furthermore, the Chinese retailer-

moneylender catered to new needs of the peasants, who were now caught up in a money economy. Where previously the peasant could satisfy his wants by purchasing at periodic markets, he now needed imported or locally produced manufactured goods to maintain his household. The 'mortgaging' of the immature and, for this purpose, undervalued crop provided security for loans where, as in most of Southeast Asia, Chinese were not allowed to obtain title to agricultural land. But, when abused, or even carried to its logical eonelusion,the system resulted in a debt bondage of the peasantry almost as hopeless as landlessness and tenancy themselves. The moneylender, on the other hand, was not the free agent he is often pictured to be, but was himself indebted to a higher level, trader-creditor who dealt in processing or exporting of the products collected by the rural retailer and supplied him with his goods for sale. Chinese traders were somewhat more philosophical about their own indebtedness, as is best illustrated in a study by T'ien Ju-kang in which a Chinese

tokay, or big businessman, of Sarawak assured him 'that the secret of doing good business was not to make a high profit of one's customers , but to get other peoples' money as capital, since only in this way was it possible to build up a large scale business . . "Buy for ten, sell

.

for seven, give back three, keep four".'5 The European and Chinese importers and manufacturers who utilized Chinese retailers for the distribution of their products accommodated themselves to this

way of doing business. In bad times, of course, the entire system was subject to collapse, the debtors taking refuge in bankruptcy

proceedings, an outlet provided by the extension of European commercial law to the Chinese. The Chinese rural retailer and the trader-creditor he dealt with were middlemen par excellence, they were key links in the colonial

CHINESE IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN ECONOMIC LIFE

13

economy. Yet the organization of trade from the export-import business down to the retailer-moneylender in the village was typical of Southeast Asia without being universal. Each nation and, within each nation, each province showed deviations from this 'typical' pattern. British Malaya, for example, exported few native agricultural products, except for smallholder rubber. The village customer-producers in this ease, as in Sarawak and West Borneo, could be Chinese as well as native. Other areas, notably Atjeh and Minangkabau in Sumatra, Negri Sembilan in Malaya, and parts of the Philippines, although producing crops for export, gave the Chinese little foothold; here it was natives who took over most of the collecting and retailing. That the Chinese specialized in the collection and export of peasant agricultural products is one reason why Saigon~Cholon vastly outstripped Hanoi-Haiphong as a centre of overseas Chinese activity. Cholon's merchants handled not only the export trade of the rice-rich south of Vietnam, but, under colonial rule, that of Cambodia as well. Chinese continued, in the period after 1850, to dominate small business in the major cities of Southeast Asia, Rangoon, with its large Indian population, being an exception. Not only did they own the shops; most of their employees were Chinese as well. Many shopworkers were recent immigrants who apprenticed themselves to the owner in the hope of so mastering the trade that they, too, might open a business of their own. Often a, younger brother, nephew, relative, or someone from the same village (which is to say a relative in many villages of southeastern China) as the shopkeeper followed this path to gain entry to business in the Nanyang. Because family and local ties were so important in managing business, certain language groups acquired dominance of certain occupations in particular countries. Bangkok in the early 1950s, for example, still displayed vestiges of such specialization by speech group :

bankers, gold and jewelry merchants, rice merchants and exporters, and rice-mill laborers all came disproportionately from the Teoehiu group, Hainanese maintained some specialization as ice-plant proprietors, hotel proprietors and employees, sawmill proprietors and labourers; Hakkas were unusually active as silversmiths

and newspapermen, Cantonese as machine-shop proprietors, machinists and auto repairmen, and so on. Hokkiens attained some dominance as rubber exporters (even though the manufacturers tended to be Teochiu), probably because of their connections to

the Hokkien-speaking rubber merchants of Singapore. Although there were status differences in speech groups, both owners and employees of rice, hotel, saw-mill, and machine-shop industries tended to come from a single speech group!-'

14 SOUTHEAST ASIA'S CHINESE MINORITIES

A similar specialization of occupations existed, mutatis mutandis, in other Nanyang Chinese societies. In South Vietnam, Hokkiens controlled the rice trade from village to export; all the production of soya bean products in Cholon was in the hands of immigrants from a single district in Kwangtung; l-lakkas dominated small-scale and piecework industry. In the much simpler society of Sarawak not only were certain speech groups dominant in certain professions, they controlled different levels of business . A fine line separated shopkeepers from the traders who operated as middlemen or wholesalers, passing on imported goods and some locally-manufactured articles to the smaller shopkeepers and village or itinerant retailers. By analogy, petty bankers and proprietors of small industries (mostly consumer goods) and of such processing industries as rice mills and rubber factories belonged to this level of trader. Many persons managed a diversified portfolio of commercial undertakings. Before the Second World War overseas Chinese economic influence in Southeast Asia was second only to that of European capital. In many fields, they successfully competed with European investors ; for example, in tin mining in Malaya before the introduction of heavy capital equipment for dredging; rice milling in Cholon, thanks to their control over collection in rural areas; and rice distribution in Java, where business contacts with Chinese millers in Cholon and Bangkok gave them the edge over European (not to mention native) competitors. Furthermore, Southeast Asian and world markets, not the China market, were the main focus of their trade. Nevertheless, only a few Chinese acquired status as proprietors of large Firms (in nearly all cases import-export) on a scale comparable to that of the big European operations. Since they competed with better-financed European houses, and did so successfully, they are

justifiably well known. In this category were certain of Singapore's 'rubber barons' and Oei Tiong Ham of Semarang in Java. The Kian Gwan firm founded by Oei Tiong Ham's father, an immigrant from Fukien, exemplifies the international ties, diversified activities, and shrewd leadership of a successful large-scale overseas Chinese enterprise. The Oei family built up its enterprise by taking advantage of new

opportunities in export of smallholder products and inter-island trade in the Netherlands Indies after 1870. Father Oei Tjie Sien and son Oei Tiong Ham (who led the Kian Gwen in its period of greatest expansion between 1900 and 1930) deviated in at least two significant aspects from traditional Chinese business practice. Although ownership and ultimate decision-maldng power remained

in family hands, Kian Gwen employed non-relatives, even Europeans,

CHINESE IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN ECONOMIC LIFE 15

as managers and technicians and soon abandoned Chinese-style book-keeping for European accounting methods, departures which aided the growth of the firm. By the 1930s, in part driven by the need to weather the depression in raw material prices on the world market, the enterprise had expanded from trade in sugar, tapioca, smallholder rubber, rice, and other raw material exports to enter the shipping, banking, and other fields. It was an agent for European insurance firms, imported many goods direct from European and other foreign suppliers, manufactured consumer goods locally, and had established branches for its activities in the Netherlands,

India., and China, including a factory in Shanghai for production of industrial alcohol. Although constrained in some respects by lack of access to the capital which was available to large European firms, Kian Gwan, with its locally-recruited management, was probably more flexible in taking advantage of alterations in the local market.7 Next to businessmen of all kinds, large and small, the most numerous group of Chinese in prewar Southeast Asia were labourers . Some worked, as mentioned above, in the shops and small factories of their compatriots, but by far the largest and most significant group were the unskilled or coolies, employed largely, but not exclusively, by European plantations and industry. Before the Second World War, they were to be found in the tin mines of Malaya (the smaller of which were Chinese-owned), and of Banka and Billiton in the Netherlands Indies, and on rubber and tobacco

plantations throughout the area (although they were outnumbered by Indian plantation workers in Malaya and by Vietnamese in Indochina, and were increasingly replaced by Javanese in eastern Sumatra). Other coolies performed unskilled l a b o r in the cities : until 1956, for example, most of Phnom Penh's longshoremen and rickshaw or pedicab drivers were Chinese. An informed source estimates that, from 1910 to 1940, Chinese provided 60 to 74 per

cent of all non-agricultural l a b o r , both skilled and unskilled, in Siam. Over 10 per cent of the Chinese in the Philippines in 1903 worked in the warehouses, docks, and factories of the major cities. Here, as elsewhere, demand of foreign i-irms for such labourers

made their importation a profitable business. If Chinese trader-moneylenders exploited the peasants, almost everyone, even fellow workers, exploited the coolies. European investors wanted cheap l a b o r to open up the less densely populated areas of Southeast Asia to their enterprise Experienced coolies

joined the system as recruiters of new laborers. The pressure of overpopulation and war, or the prospect of making a fortune, led many Chinese to emigrate. Whether the coolies were pushed, dragooned, enticed, or freely chose to emigrate, they travelled

from China to the Nanyang under conditions which justified the

16

SOUTHEAST ASIA'S CHINESE MINORITIES

Chinese opprobrium for the whole unsavory traffic, 'pig trade'.

They were herded into godowns in the home ports of Amoy, Swatow, Hongkong, and Kiungchow (Hainan island), indebted for their passage and provisions, and crammed into ships without suitable facilities. Those who survived to reach Southeast Asia in reasonable health were traded to employers like so many animals. Minimal hygienic conditions and freedom to choose a place of employment

were reforms that came slowly, prompted in part by the concern of officials of the Chinese empire and frequently resisted by European businessmen who saw them as restricting the free flow of labour, that is, increasing its price. A convention on regulation of contract labour signed between China, France, and Great Britain in 1866 was not ratified by the European powers; in 1904 China and Great Britain agreed to supervise indentured l a b o r . As late as 1914, however, a law to forbid indentured l a b o r in Singapore remained largely ineffective.

Not waiting for conditions to be improved, the coolies came by the hundreds of thousands each year. Universally, their hope and that of other immigrants was to earn enough to return to China wealthy men -- or at least to bring back some capital. Although coolies were supposed to receive wages for their work, in practice their pay was mortgaged in advance to the employer or his agent, the l a b o r boss (often an ex-coolie), for supplies, consumption of

opium, and gambling debts, not to mention repayment of passage from China. Most coolies saved little more than enough for passage home. Yet more returned than stayed, as the figures on emigration from the Chinese ports demonstrate. Approximately 4,850,000 emigrants left the four principal ports of Amoy, Swatow, Kiungchow, and Hongkong in the years 1876 to 1901, the great majority of them for Southeast Asia. About 4,000,000 returned through these ports in the same period, part of the difference being accounted

for by death abroad. From 1902 to 1907 inclusive, an additional 1,900,000 departed from the four ports; yearly emigration was on the increase.8 Shifting the focus to the Nanyang, Singapore immigration statistics indicate that the years immediately before the First World War in fact brought a boom in arrivals from China: 200,000 in 1910 and 270,000 in 1911. After falling off sharply during the

war, gross immigration from China peaked again in 1926-27 , thereafter the decline in raw material prices on the world market made itself felt in reduced demand for coolie l a b o r . Finally, the Singapore government, fearing restless, unemployed coolies, inter-

vened to limit admission of male immigrants in 1930, allowing women and children to enter without a quota until 1938. A similar

CHINESE IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN ECONOMIC LIFE 17

pattern prevailed in other Southeast Asian countries, as first the Depression, then the Sino-Japanese War, which became the Second World War, brought an end to the coolie trade. It was never to revive. Should a coolie attempt to escape his servitude before paying off his debt, colonial penal legislation was on the side of his master.

Only the fortunate found a more agreeable position as labourer or a niche in a nearby city. Since most coolies returned to China within a few years of their arrival, new immigrants were constantly arriving to take their places. Those who remained in Southeast Asia might better their position by becoming labour bosses or recruiters of coolies in China for the plantation or mine for which

they worked. A few (during the Second World War several hundred thousand) ex-coolies settled on the land, many of them without any legal title to it. The preferred goal, however, was to move into trade, as a street hawker or apprentice in a shop. When cooliedom was the road to trade, it might also be the road to prosperity and, in some cases, to great wealth, Southeast Asia's Chinese being

no strangers to 'rags to riches' legends. A small number of Chinese Fitted into the white-collar class in pre-Second World War days. These were, in the first instance, schoolteachers, both in Chinese-language schools and in other schools, and journalists, again both in Chinese-language and other newspapers, and a small but increasingly influential group of Westerneducated professionals, lawyers, doctors, and dentists (not including those eminently skilled artisans, the traditional Chinese dentists and herbalists). But the role of bureaucrat failed to attract them. Virtually no one of Chinese origin worked as a government servant

-

in any Southeast Asian country prior to the Second World War associates of the Thai and Cambodian courts and the occasional adviser to other indigenous royalty being striking exceptions.

Finally, in delineating the occupational and economic structure of Chinese communities in Southeast Asia before the Second World War, mention must be made of the Chinese engaged in agriculture. In general, partly because of their preference for commercial activities and partly because legal restrictions limited their settlement to urban areas or forbade their acquiring farmland, comparatively few Chinese opted for agriculture as an occupation. Apart from the communities of Chinese farmers established before the midnineteenth century (referred to above) and a few plantation owners,

mostly in Malaya, the largest new group of Chinese agriculturalists were Malaya's 'squatters'. During and after the Depression, unemployed Chinese labourers and their families moved onto unoccupied lands on the edge of the Malayan jungle, a movement which

18

SOUTHEAST ASIA'S CHINESE MINORITIES

greatly accelerated during the Japanese occupation in the Second World War, when it was the only alternative to starvation. By 1945 this group numbered about 300,000 persons, most of whom had no title to the land they worked, and who posed an enormous problem, not least a security problem, to British colonial authori-

ties. Subsistence agriculture remained, however, by and large the province of the natives, Chinese, when in farming, engaged in commercial farming. Malaya's squatters raised pigs or grew vegetables and fruits for market, while the Chinese farmers of western and northern Borneo became rubber smallholders. Even as an

agriculturalist, the overseas Chinese was a businessman. The Plural Society Colonial Southeast Asian society, particularly that of Malaya and Indonesia, is frequently represented by the model of Furnivall's plural society. Simplified, the plural society model looks like a great pyramid in which a few hundred thousand Europeans, colonial government officials, businessmen, and managers, occupied the narrow peak of wealth and power; a larger number of Chinese or other immigrant Asians took the somewhat broader middle level, while the masses of largely impoverished natives formed the wide base of the social pyramid. Class was synonymous with race. Seen from the statistics, the 'avera.ge' Chinese in Southeast

Asia ranked between European and native in per capita wealth, level of education, and other indicators of social and economic status. In another sense, too, the Chinese were a middle group, because of their special position in retail trade: they were intermediaries between the native producer/consumer and the European dominated import-export trade or the world's markets.

However, the foregoing discussion 01"the kinds of economic activity engaged in by Nanyang Chinese should have made clear that the Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia were too vast and differentiated

a group to ever have fitted neatly into a single class segment of the plural society's pyramid. Individual Chinese could be poorer than most natives and richer than most Europeans; the larger the Chinese minority, the more differentiated, and the more potential for internal competition and conflict it might harbour.

Singapore and Hongkong

Centres of Economic Activity in the

Nanyang The development of Singapore and Hongkong as centre of Southeast Asian trade, a role these ports maintain to the present time,

greatly facilitated the Chinese economic incursion into Southeast

CHINESE IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN ECONOMIC LIFE

19

Asia. They were, as one writer has put it, a 'base' for Chinese activity in the Nanyang. Founded in 1819 on the site of a Malay village, Singapore was a British colony and a free port. Only thirty years later, in 1849, Chinese formed a majority of the city's population of nearly 53,000. In 1901 they were nearly three- quarters of the population, a propor-

tion they maintain to this day. The Chinese of Singapore are no minority group, but a self-conscious majority, as their political activity demonstrates. Singapore developed superior facilities for handling, storing, sorting, processing and, if necessary, financing or finding buyers for raw materials such as rubber, tin, tobacco, rice, copra, and pepper. Not least of these facilities were the familial and other contacts of its Chinese businessmen with compatriots in other Southeast Asian lands. Soon after its founding, Singapore received much of neighboring countries' produce for trans-shipment to Europe and North America and even to destinations in Southeast Asia. In addition to the bulk of Malaya's exports, much of Indonesia's trade passed through Singapore.

Even in the handling of human cargo, the coolie labourers coming from China, the city assumed the position of entrepOt. Arrivals from China were literally 'sorted' in Singapore, according to their skills and sturdiness, retained in the city, or sent on to the plantations and mines of Malaya and the Netherlands Indies. Finally, Singapore was a source of capital for overseas Chinese and other investors in the Nanyang. At first, loans were part of a familial or other traditionally-linked business connection ; in recent decades, Singapore's modern banking business has expan-

ded. Transcending overseas Chinese activity, the government of Singapore has even entered the field of government-to-government loans in the last few years.

While Singapore was and remains the hub of overseas Chinese commerce in Southeast Asia, its recent development as a producer of consumer and light industrial goods is overshadowing its traditional entrepOt role , at the same time, countries which used to re-export via Singapore are now attempting to deal directly with buyers on the world market. Overseas Chinese inside and outside Singapore have invested in the new industrial opportunities in the city, and its businessmen and workers have adjusted quickly to take advan-

tages of the new opportunities. Defeat in the Opium War (1839-42) forced China to cede Hongkong to Great Britain, the territory being further enlarged by the lease of adjoining territories some years later. The h a r b o r SOON came to handle a large proportion of foreign trade with China, although

Shanghai overshadowed it in the first half of this century, and it

20 SOUTHEAST ASIA'S CHINESE MINORITIES

influenced China's adjoining Pearl River basin in Kwangtung province. Many of China's emigrants to Southeast Asia moved through Hongkong to Southeast Asia and elsewhere . Hongkong served the Philippines and parts of northern Borneo as an entrepOt and 'base', much as Singapore served the rest of Southeast Asia. Until recently, much of the trade of Malaysia and Thailand with the Chinese mainland was masked in the Hongkong trade statistics. In the years 1850-90, while Chinese were expanding their role in the Philippine economy, Hongkong was expanding its role as entrepOt for Philippine trade. After 1870, for example, as rice began to be imported to the islands, it was brought in from Saigon-Cholon via Hongkong; many European and Japanese goods for Philippine consumption or industry travelled through Hongkong. In the late 1940s the majority of Hongkong's imports were re-

exported. A decade later, however, Hongkong's economy was undergoing rapid industrialization; its entrepOt function declined in relative economic importance although increasing in absolute terms. The colony's trade is more and more directed to highly industrialized countries. Nevertheless, Hongkong continues to be important to

Southeast Asia (and its Chinese) as a source of capital and object of investment. Although the latter function has declined relatively since the early 1950s, such investments are presently estimated to be worth as much as several hundred million Hongkong dollars per year."

War and Postwar Attacks on the Nanyang Chinese Economy The Second World War brought drastic changes to the Southeast Asian countries, nearly all of which achieved political independence in the dozen years after 1945. Although it appears safe to assert that overseas Chinese private capital investment in Southeast

Asia is still second only to that of the highly industrialized nations (including Japan) and outstrips native private investment, the upheaval of the war and the subsequent struggles for independence altered the economic position of the Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia irrevocably. SO

Always an 'urban' people, the Nanyang Chinese became even more when war and postwar insecurity in rural areas drove many

into the cities, This in turn dealt a blow to many rural tradermoneylenders, who did not subsequently return to the villages .

In addition, the 'squatters' of Malaya were resettled in towns or 'new villages', a grand total of nearly half a million, mostly Chinese, who at one stroke went from rural to urban residence and have remained town dwellers.

CHINESE IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN ECONOMIC LIFE

21

Another change in the economy of the overseas Chinese resulted from the reduction of China's economic role in the Nanyang in comparison with that of prewar years. Although trade with China and investments on the mainland (apart from remittances, which will be discussed in Chapter Six) were not predominant in overseas Chinese business after 1850 , the years of war and civil war in China, and the Peking régime's emphasis on autarky, may have had deleterious effects on those overseas Chinese traders who did business with the mainland. Shanghai lost the attraction as a source of capital and object of investment it had had in prewar years, despite some attempts by the mainland government to attract overseas Chinese investments. After years of Soviet-bloc-oriented

trade, the bulk of mainland China's trade today goes to the Western industrialized nations and Japan, just as does Southeast Asia's. Only the purchases of certain raw materials from Southeast Asia, most recently rubber from Malaysia, and certain politically motivated aid agreements on an intergovernmental basis form an exception to the general picture. Unfortunately, it is difficult to present more concrete information on the present-day patterns of investment and trade by Chinese in Southeast Asia: there are no secrets like trade secrets. Trade with Hongkong camouflages some Southeast Asian trade with China. On the other hand, Hongkong, Singapore, and to some extent Taiwan have become exporters of consumer and light industrial goods to Southeast Asia in their own right, opening new opportunities for Chinese business houses in the Nanyang, as have contacts with Japan and with European enterprises. Also, China now plays no role in the Southeast Asian labour market. Not only is the flow of migrants to Southeast Asia at an end, few overseas Chinese now view returning to China as a possible alternative to remaining in Southeast Asia.

For the individual overseas Chinese, perhaps the most immediately important new economic factor has been a negative one, the economic nationalism of their host countries. The movement reached its peak in the 1950s, probably because of the effects of declining raw material prices on the world market and a sentiment that political independence had failed to bring prosperity because of the persistence of 'colonial' economic forms, with which the Nanyang Chinese were associated. Virtually every Southeast Asian country (the obvious exception being Singapore) has sought to hobble overseas Chinese economic activity in the interest of opening more favorable opportunities for native endeavour or, barring that, to bring the economy more under governmental control - economic nationalism here merging with socialist goals.

22

SOUTHEAST ASIA'S CHINESE MINORITIES

A major thrust of economic nationalist measures was against the key role of the Chinese retailers as link in the import-export

chain. Such measures in the Philippines date back to the American colonial period, when, in the 1920s, Chinese were required to keep their accounts (or a translation of them) in English, Spanish, or a Philippine language, a mere hint of what was to come after independence. Statistics for 1951 showed that Chinese (aliens), fewer than 2 per cent of the population, owned 13 per cent of retail establish-

ments in the Philippines with 36 per cent of the assets and 46 per cent of the total volume of business. The Retail Trade Nationalization Act of 1954 mounted a concerted attack on this situation : aliens, except Americans, might henceforth engage in retailing only until death or retirement of the owners; their successors would have six months to liquidate the business. Corporations and partnerships were limited to ten years' further existence, only a few small businesses were exempt from the law. In addition, important duty free imports were passed only to Filipino retailers. The Chinese responded to this squeeze in a variety of ways. Many moved into wholesaling or manufacturing. Others took capital out of the country, illegally, to invest it in Hongkong, British North Borneo, or elsewhere. Some set up Filipino 'dummy' firms, others resorted to bribery. Transfer of title to a family member with Philippine citizenship was difficult, Filipino wives of Chinese were legally Chinese nationals ; only common-law wives retained Philippine citizenship. Local-born children of Chinese were also legally Chinese. Naturalization was an expensive and time-consuming process. Filipinos granted special loans to enter retail trade proved poor credit risks and the city government of Manila saw tax revenue from retail businesses drop substantially. Many blamed the economic recession of the following year on the deleterious effects of the Retail Trade law.

A second area of anti-Chinese legislation in the Philippines was the field of import trade. Import and foreign exchange licences were

reserved for Filipinos, many of whom actually passed on their imports to Chinese businessmen, pocketing the profit and forcing the Chinese to raise his price to the