The Chinese Diaspora In South East Asia

As Qing Dynasty China disintegrated, economic hardship and civil disorder led to millions of Chinese men and women seeking their fortunes abroad, many journeying south into French Indochina. These emigres settled into tight-knit communities called huiguan: organisations which closely mirrored the religious, social and economic constitution of their own places of origin. Here, Tracy Barrett sheds light on the overseas Chinese communities in French Indochina and the interactions between them and French colonial authorities. She also addresses the nature, scope and effectiveness of the congregation system - an institution designed by the French to control Indochina's overseas Chinese but eventually extended across the greater French empire as a means of monitoring 'foreign Asiatics'. Including a close analysis of French colonial law and of the economic and social networks between Chinese settler communities across Indonesia, "The Chinese Diaspora in South East Asia" provides an important insight into the characteristics of Chinese migration.

Leading scholars in the field consider the profound importance of meanings of place and the spatial processes of mobility and settlement for the Chinese overseas. Visit our website for sample chapters!

New perspectives on the past and present contributions of the 25 million strong Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia to the development of contemporary society. Case studies feature organisational, community, religious, and other arenas of Chinese activity and identity definition, and the book analyses the interplay of local, regional, global and transnational networks and identities.

Only recently has the role of Chinese minorities at the forefront of Southeast Asia's rapid economic growth attracted world attention. Yet interactions between Chinese and Southeast Asians are longstanding and intense, reaching back a thousand years and making it difficult, if not specious, to attempt to disentangle what is Chinese and what is indigenous in much of Southeast Asian culture. Sojourners and Settlers, now back in print, written by some of the most distinguished specialists in the field, demonstrates the depth of that relationship. Contributors: Leonard Blussé, Mary Somers Heidhues, Jamie C. Mackie, Anthony Reid, Craig Reynolds, Claudine Salmon, G. William Skinner, Wang Gungwu, O. W. Wolters.

Combining a historical approach of Chineseness and a contemporary perspective on the social construction of Chineseness, this book provides comparative insights to understand the contingent complexities of ethnic and social formations in both China and among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. This book focuses on the experiences and practices of these people, who as mobile agents are free to embrace or reject being defined as Chinese by moving across borders and reinterpreting their own histories. By historicizing the notion of Chineseness at local, regional, and global levels, the book examines intersections of authenticity, authority, culture, identity, media, power, and international relations that support or undermine different instances of Chineseness and its representations. It seeks to rescue the present from the past by presenting case studies of contingent encounters that produce the ideas, practices, and identities that become the categories nations need to justify their existence. The dynamic, fluid representations of Chineseness illustrate that it has never been an undifferentiated whole in both space and time. Through physical movements and inherited knowledge, agents of Chineseness have deployed various interpretive strategies to define and represent themselves vis-à-vis the local, regional, and global in their respective temporal experiences. This book will be relevant to students and scholars in Chinese studies and Asian studies more broadly, with a focus on identity politics, migration, popular culture, and international relations. “The Chinese overseas often saw themselves as caught between a rock and a hard place. The collection of essays here highlights the variety of experiences in Southeast Asia and China that suggest that the rock can become a huge boulder with sharp edges and the hard places can have deadly spikes. A must read for those who wonder whether Chineseness has ever been what it seems.” Wang Gungwu, University Professor, National University of Singapore. “By including reflections on constructions of Chineseness in both China itself and in various Southeast Asian sites, the book shows that being Chinese is by no means necessarily intertwined with China as a geopolitical concept, while at the same time highlighting the incongruities and tensions in the escapable relationship with China that diasporic Chinese subjects variously embody, expressed in a wide range of social phenomena such as language use, popular culture, architecture and family relations. The book is a very welcome addition to the necessary ongoing conversation on Chineseness in the 21st century.” Ien Ang, Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies, Western Sydney University.

Fast-paced economic growth in Southeast Asia from the late 1960s until the mid-1990s brought increased attention to the overseas Chinese as an economically successful diaspora and their role in this economic growth. Events that followed, such as the transfer of Hong Kong and Macau to the People's Republic of China, the election of a non-KMT government in Taiwan, the Asian economic crisis and the plight of overseas Chinese in Indonesia as a result, and the durability of the Singapore economy during this same crisis, have helped to sustain this attention. The study of the overseas Chinese has by now become a global enterprise, raising new theoretical problems and empirical challenges. New case studies of overseas Chinese, such as those on communities in North America, Cuba, India, and South Africa, continually unveil different perspectives. New kinds of transnational connectivities linking Chinese communities are also being identified. It is now possible to make broader generalizations of a Chinese diaspora, on a global basis. Further, the intensifying study of the overseas Chinese has stimulated renewed intellectual vigor in other areas of research. The transnational and transregional activities of overseas Chinese, for example, pose serious challenges to analytical concepts of regional divides such as that between East and Southeast Asia. Despite the increased attention, new data, and the changing theoretical paradigms, basic questions concerning the overseas Chinese remain. The papers in this volume seek to understand the overseas Chinese migrants not just in terms of the overall Chinese diaspora per se, but also local Chinese migrants adapting to local societies, in different national contexts. Contents: Chineseness and “Overseas” Chinese Identifications and Identities of a Migrant Community:Five Southeast Asian Chinese Empire-Builders: Commonalities and Differences (J Mackie)Providers, Protectors, Guardians: Migration and Reconstruction of Masculinities (R Hibbins)Tasting the Night: Food, Ethnic Transaction, and the Pleasure of Chineseness in Malaysia (S-C Yao)Multiple Identities among the Returned Overseas Chinese in Hong Kong (J K Chin)Chinese or Western Education? Cultural Choices and Education:Chinese Education and Changing National and Cultural Identity among Overseas Chinese in Modern Japan: A Study of Chûka Dôbun Gakkô [Tongwen Chinese School] in Kobe (B W-M Ng)Chinese Education in Prewar Singapore: A Preliminary Analysis of Factors Affecting the Development of Chinese Vernacular Schools (T B Wee)Hokkien Immigrant Society and Modern Chinese Education in British Malaya (C H Yen)The Search for Modernity: The Chinese in Sabah and English Education (D T-K Wong)Fitting In: Social Integration in the Host Society:Language, Education, and Occupational Attainment of Foreign-Trained Chinese and Polish Professional Immigrants in Toronto, Canada (Z Li)Career and Family Factors in Intention for Permanent Settlement in Australia (S-E Khoo & A Mak)No Longer Migrants: Southern New Zealand Chinese in the Twentieth Century (N Pawakapan)Singapore Chinese Society in Transition: Reflections on the Cultural Implications of Modern Education (G K Lee) Readership: Academics and lay people who are interested in social studies of Chinese immigrant societies. Keywords:

About 80 percent of the ethnic Chinese outside China live in Southeast Asia. This book examines that community in the context of both national and international dimensions.

The series Chinese Diaspora and Southeast Asian Coastal Cities adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the materiality of culture from architectural, geographical, sociological, anthropological, cultural, political and other perspectives. Through the knowledge obtained from the tangible living environment, the series aims to increase recognition and promotion of the value of integration of Southeast Asian cultural diversity. The first set of monographs in the series focuses on Indonesia (coastal cities of Semarang, Palembang, Pontianak, Tegal) and will be published in 2005. Subsequent sets of monographs, to be published in 2006 and beyond, will focus on coastal cities of Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Brunei, Myanmar and Singapore. The Singapore Chinese Heritage Centre is a non-profit international institution with a special focus on the history and culture of the Chinese Diaspora. The keynote of a monograph series by the Singapore Chinese Heritage Centre, Th