Table Of ContentChinese Encounters
in Southeast Asia
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Chinese ENCOUNTERS
in
Southeast Asia
How People, Money, and Ideas from China
Are Changing a Region
Edited by Pál Nyíri and Danielle Tan
Foreword by Wang Gungwu
University of Washington Press | Seattle and London
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Chinese Encounters in Southeast Asia was made possible by support from
IRASEC (www.irasec.com).
This publication also was supported by the Donald R. Ellegood
International Publications Endowment.
Copyright © 2017 by the University of Washington Press
Printed and bound in the United States of America
Composed in Minion Pro, a typeface designed by Robert Slimbach
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
University of Washington Press
www.washington.edu/uwpress
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nyíri, Pál, editor. | Tan, Danielle, editor. | Container of (work): Nyíri, Pál. Investors,
managers, brokers, and culture workers.
Title: Chinese encounters in Southeast Asia : how people, money, and ideas from China are
changing a region / edited by Pál Nyíri and Danielle Tan ; foreword by Wang Gungwu.
Description: Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016027761 | ISBN 9780295999296 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN
9780295999302 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Southeast Asia—Relations—China. | China—Relations—Southeast Asia. |
Southeast Asia—Civilization—Chinese influences. | Chinese—Southeast Asia.
Classification: LCC DS525.9.C5 C54 2017 | DDC 303.48/259051—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016027761
The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984. ∞
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Contents
Foreword by Wang Gungwu vii
List of Abbreviations xi
Introduction: China’s “Rise” in Southeast Asia from a
Bottom-Up Perspective
Pál Nyíri and Danielle Tan 3
Part 1. Identities
1. Investors, Managers, Brokers, and Culture Workers:
How Migrants from China Are Changing the
Meaning of Chineseness in Cambodia
Pál Nyíri 25
2. Multiplying Diversities: How “New”
Chinese Mobilities Are Changing Singapore
Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Weiqiang Lin 42
3. Translocal Pious Entrepreneurialism: Hui Business
and Religious Activities in Malaysia and Indonesia
Hew Wai Weng 58
Part 2. Livelihoods
4. Border Guanxi: Xinyimin and Transborder
Trade in Northern Thailand
Aranya Siriphon 79
5. Ambivalent Encounters: Business and the
Sex Markets at the China-Vietnam Borderland
Caroline Grillot and Juan Zhang 97
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Part 3. Norms
6. Entangling Alliances: Elite Cooperation and
Competition in the Philippines and China
Caroline S. Hau 119
7. Chinese Enclaves in the Golden Triangle Borderlands:
An Alternative Account of State Formation in Laos
Danielle Tan 136
8. “China in Burma”: A Multiscalar Political Economy Analysis
Kevin Woods 157
9. Water Governance in the Mekong Basin: Scalar Trade-offs,
Transnational Norms, and Chinese Hydropower Investment
Oliver Hensengerth 174
Part 4. Aspirations
10. “Search for Knowledge as Far as China!”
Indonesian Responses to the Rise of China
Johanes Herlijanto 195
11. Stimulating Circuits: Chinese Desires and
Transnational Affective Economies in Southeast Asia
Chris Lyttleton 214
Glossary 235
References 237
Contributors 271
Index 275
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Foreword
Wang Gungwu
Relations between Southeast Asia and other interested powers, most notably
China, are quickly changing. Some events cause alarm bells to ring in state
capitals, distracting attention from developments occurring at nonstate
levels that might produce significant social, economic, or cultural changes.
In this volume of rich empirical studies, the authors seek to understand
what is happening on the ground in Southeast Asia by paying attention to
recent Chinese commercial initiatives and their impact on local societies and
enterprises. In the introduction, volume editors Pál Nyíri and Danielle Tan
highlight a bottom-up perspective and provide a succinct and persuasive
case for a fresh look at new Chinese ventures.
Of particular interest are initiatives in mainland Southeast Asia of
entrepreneurs from China and the Chinese diaspora who are opening up
remote border areas and bringing agents of different hues to these zones.
Are the local responses of the multiplicity of mountain peoples harbingers
of modernization or not? Regardless, these activities are helping the states of
Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam to consolidate their hold over often
inaccessible areas. How these efforts affect future interstate relations, particu-
larly those with China, will be of growing interest to neighbors throughout
Southeast Asia. There is a case for taking a longer perspective on regional
change where the agency of the Chinese is concerned. The contributions in
this volume foreground two questions surrounding Chinese engagements
with Southeast Asia: who defines what is Chinese, and can old and new ideas
of statehood coexist?
When I first wrote about the “Nanyang Chinese” in 1958, I was struck by
the way China’s officials in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911)
dynasties described their subjects who traded to the south, especially those
who had gone abroad without approval. Among the harshest were terms
referring to these people as outlaws, bandits, and pirates from the Min-Yue
(Fujian and Guangdong Provinces). There was no word for them as “Chi-
nese” (or its equivalent in different languages), the name that other groups
vii
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viii Foreword
used as a generic term for people from that large empire. The Qing intro-
duced the culture-based term Hua, which could include Manchu and Han.
At the end of the nineteenth century, faced with new ideas of national iden-
tity, the ending qiao (“sojourn”) was added to help all Hua in the Nanyang
(Southern Sea) to see themselves as sojourners temporarily living abroad
but no less subjects of the empire. Until then, these trading peoples from
southern China had thrived in a terrain without clear borders. The Chinese
state was not greatly interested, and local kingdoms and European colonial
and trading authorities found merchants from China, who, most of the time,
cooperated profitably, useful.
Different Chinese communities thus learned to look after themselves
locally. When they wanted to extend their activities, they did so through a
variety of tightly knit networks. During the twentieth century the Republic
of China, and later the People’s Republic of China, affirmed that all Chinese
should be treated as a single group of Nanyang Huaqiao. These disparate
communities, given a distinct name, were identified by the government as
belonging to the Chinese nation. The right to decide who is Chinese became
increasingly political. By the 1950s the label “Nanyang Chinese” no longer
described the Chinese in Southeast Asia. In the countries I knew something
about—Indonesia, Malaya, Philippines, and Thailand—the differences
among the population that was called “Chinese” seemed as great as their
similarities. On the ground, even the various Chinese groups within Malaya
were different from one another. A new kind of polity, the nation-state, was
replacing the colonial state, which further underlined the difficulties the
Chinese in the region faced thereafter.
Chinese Encounters in Southeast Asia draws attention to another feature
of diversity throughout the region. As the countries made their transition
to new sovereign states, even greater differences emerged when in the 1990s
the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) achieved its regional
identity with the addition of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam. This
called for new views concerning the future place of Chinese immigrants in
these countries. Three of these countries have historical overland relation-
ships with China, and Cambodia (like Thailand) has had significant overland
(especially along the Mekong River) and maritime links. Through extensive
fieldwork, several authors show that land borders may be no less open than
maritime borders. Their contributions highlight phenomena that have been
true for centuries but neglected in the scholarly literature, in part because the
global forces of modernization depended more on transportation by sea. The
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Foreword ix
fact that borderless oceans could determine the range and scope of a modern
world economy in ways unknown before the eighteenth century led many to
ignore overland connections.
The essays in this volume thus point to something that the Chinese had
never been seen to have done before. Under certain circumstances, as in the
highlands of the northern Southeast Asian mainland, the Chinese could
represent a force for modernization. On one side, typically viewed as posi-
tive growth, are roads and railways, plantations and factories, fresh urban
sites with the latest technical facilities. On the other are developments that
are strikingly negative: innovative gambling centers, vicious crime, and
mindless consumerism on an unheard-of scale, on top of the traditional
vices of drugs, human trafficking, and alcoholism for which the region had
been renowned. The difference is that this modern mix of activities now
takes place in countries with internationally recognized borders. Concerned
officials are quite aware of the role of a new wave of adventurers from China,
as well as of other diasporic Chinese, in shaping these developments. How
these realities consolidate control for the young states, and whether or not
that consolidation will reinforce their boundaries, deserves closer attention.
Exploring these themes may contribute additional insights into the nature
of state building among new nations.
The chapters on developments in island Southeast Asia are no less inter-
esting in demonstrating the interactions resulting from a rising China and
dynamic local economies. The Muslim Hui from northwestern China, for
example, have added novel features to Chinese enterprise in Malaysia. Chi-
nese princelings have reached out to their equivalents in the Philippines,
and these partnerships illuminate innovative political dimensions in Sino-
Filipino business cooperation. For the first time in centuries, Indonesian
entrepreneurs seek to explore opportunities with Chinese in China that had
been largely forgotten during the colonial era. Not least remarkable is how
the unique multicultural identity of Singapore, and the exceptional relation-
ship between China and Singapore, is being tested by local Singaporean
Chinese responding to the arrival of hundreds of thousands of xinke (“new
guests”) from the People’s Republic.
Many scholars expected that the reemergence of a strong and prosperous
China would usher in changes for Southeast Asia, not least for those of Chi-
nese descent. But no one anticipated the speed and scale of China’s rise. Few
could have predicted that new Chinese could enter the region in so many
new ways. Chinese Encounters in Southeast Asia provides a view of what has
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