Restless Empire (31 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.