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Forwarded from the New Paradigms Project [Not Necessarily Endorsed]:
From: Kris Millegan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [CTRL] [1] LORDS OF THE RIM - The Invisible Empire of the Oversea
Chinese
Date: Sunday, January 09, 2000 2:49 PM
-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
LORDS OF THE RIM - The Invisible Empire of the Oversea Chinese
by Sterling Seagrave (C) 1995
G P Putnam’s Son
200 Madison Ave
New York, New York
-----
"Nowhere in the world are there to be found people richer than the Chinese. "
—IBN BATUTA (14TH CENTURY)
“I know not whether most to admire the Chinese for their many virtues or to
despise them for their glaring defects . . . their industry exceeds that of
any other people on the face of the earth, they are laborious, patient and
cheerful; but on the other hand they are corrupt, supple and exacting,
yielding to their superiors and tyrannical to those who fall into their
power."
—SIR JAMES BROOKE, RAJAH OF SARAWAK (19TH CENTURY)
------
INVISIBLE CHINA
Be so subtle that you are invisible.
Be so mysterious that you are intangible.
Then you will control your rivals' fate.
—Sun Tzu
The Art of War
WHEN THE 1990s BEGAN, THE WEST WAS SO SPELLBOUND BY the economic threat of
Japan that it took a while to realize there were more important things
happening next door in China. What was stirring in China was potentially the
greatest consumer boom in history. Editors of The Economist deemed it "the
most significant development since the industrial revolution," and the best
economic news since the 19th century, in a world that desperately needed just
such a boost. While we were looking the other way, China had already become
the third-largest economy in the world, after the United States and Japan.
The World Bank predicts that by 2010 China will be number one (if Japan has
its way, the United States will be number three). By 1994, China's growth
rate reached 19 percent, three years running. Astonishingly, the South China
coastal provinces of Kwangtung and Fukien, where most of the world's Overseas
Chinese originated, were growing nearly twice as fast. While the West crawled
through interminable depression, dramatic developments all over Asia made it
clear that global changes were occurring in the balance of wealth and power.
The force behind most of these changes, in China and around the Pacific Rim,
was and is the enormous vitality and wealth of the Overseas Chinese, a people
of whom we know surprisingly little. In fact, the Overseas Chinese are a
separate world force: Offshore China, if you will. This book is an effort to
fill that void.
Offshore China is an empire of 55 million people, intricately interlaced
by systems of guilds, benevolent societies, tongs, triads, kongsi, and name
and place associations, which, individually and together, supply the personal
connections and financial linkages that make the Overseas Chinese such a
potent force. It is an empire without borders, national government, or flag.
It is deliberately opaque—an invisible empire of conglomerates. In recent
decades, more than a hundred large corporate conglomerates have emerged in
Southeast Asia (not counting Hong Kong and Taiwan), nearly all owned or contro
lled by ethnic Chinese, a number of them U.S. dollar billionaires. They live
and work in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, but all have their roots in South
China. In keeping with tradition, these billion-dollar corporations are
passed down from father to son like neighborhood stores. They are run by the
superrich heads of secretive Chinese commercial syndicates, some of which
(like the Hokkien and Teochiu) have been in existence for more than a
thousand years. These are the Lords of the Rim.
Chinese have been much more successful outside China than inside. The
mandarin bureaucracy of imperial China and the cadre bureaucracy of the
communists suffocated economic activity. You had to leave China to make it
big. The 55 million Overseas Chinese represent only 4 percent of the
population of China. How can 55 million expatriates drive the modernization
of an impoverished continental giant with a population of an estimated 1.2
billion? The answer is that they command resources far beyond their numbers.
The GNP of the Overseas Chinese who live in Asia is $450 billion, a quarter
bigger than China's. They dominate the economies of every country on the
Asian side of the Rim, with the exception of Japan and the Koreas. Their
combined leverage far exceeds that of Japan's corporate shoguns. Per capita,
Taiwan alone has bigger hard-currency reserves than Japan. Bank deposits in
Taiwan exceed $300 billion, and Taiwan is only a small corner of Offshore
China.
The Overseas Chinese have one of the world's deepest wells of liquid
capital. A Singapore banker estimates they control liquid assets of as much
as $2 trillion, not including securities—assets that are salted all over the
world, out of reach of any predatory regime. Japan, with about twice as many
people, had only $3 trillion in assets in 1990. While the Japanese economic
miracle was achieved under tight government control, the Overseas Chinese did
it furtively, as immigrants or sojourners in hostile foreign lands.
The Overseas Chinese are a prosperous multinational middle class with a
small superclass on top Those who have made it very big are different from
Western billionaires; true, they have business acumen and organizational
ability, but they also have a knack for finessing political patronage and
monopoly concessions from difficult governments. As events have shown,
success in Asia is all but impossible without a special skill for bribery and
patronage. It is a fact of life.
The South Seas (Nanyang) were colonized by the Overseas Chinese starting
more than 2,000 years ago. Today, no economy in the region can function
without Chinese involvement; in most cases a government would cease ticking
if the Chinese kicked out the life-support plug. There is no place where the
Chinese are not to be found; they are the fuel that drives new turbines and
old jungle jitneys.
These expatriate wizards did not create the boom in Southeast Asia or in
Mainland China, but they were uniquely placed to take advantage. It was the
pace of change that surprised everyone. Crucial was the Western pullout at
the end of the colonial era, and the convulsive changes in ownership during
and after World War II, when old money fell into new hands—usually Overseas
Chinese hands. The war shook loose great sums of white and black money not in
circulation previously. Property was orphaned. Flight capital from Maoist
China looked for new homes, and nervous Overseas Chinese assets sought better
hiding places So much money was in flux that unusual opportunities arose. The
Overseas Chinese were there to grab them.
Then Western and Japanese investors alike discovered that they needed
Overseas Chinese to gain access to Southeast Asian markets. In country after
country, the doorkeepers were Chinese, and nothing could be done without
their intervention, at a price. At the very moment that Asia began to emerge
as the world's most dynamic market, the revolution in information technology
brought high-speed finance. Crucial changes came from falling regulatory
barriers, tumbling telecommunications and transport costs, and freer domestic
and international capital markets. Boundaries between national financial
markets dissolved. As the barriers came down, Overseas Chinese financial
syndicates, with ancient networks already in place, were the first to turn
the Rim into a borderless economy.
The boom in Mainland China is a desperate attempt by the communist regime
to cling to power by opening the moongate to capitalism. A special invitation
was issued to Overseas Chinese money and management savvy. It was not lost on
Beijing that South China was the ancestral home of a fabulously rich offshore
people. Venture capital, factories, expert managers, and trade poured into
the People's Republic from expatriate Chinese investors in Hong Kong, Taiwan,
Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the United States, Canada, and
Europe.
Offshore China is not rich merely because it is clever and industrious
beyond belief. Its power is not based only on a rare ability to save and
invest. It rests also on unusual ethnic solidarity, underground networks,
political pragmatism, exceptional information, and the capacity to adapt
quickly—faster, even, than the Japanese.
Their work ethic rests on two principles: the obsessive pursuit of .
individual wealth is respectable because it benefits your family and your
community; and it is honorable to protect personal wealth from confiscation
by moving it offshore. Today it is estimated that 60 percent of the world's
money is in hiding offshore. A lot of it is Overseas Chinese money.
Financially and organizationally, the Overseas Chinese dominate the
entire Pacific Rim, the world's biggest market and cheap labor pool. They are
the biggest investing group on the Mainland, and if China holds together,
their influence and leverage will be immeasurably enhanced. The longer-term
outlook is that the Overseas Chinese will greatly increase their commercial
lead over the rest of the world—and if the West does not prepare for that
possibility, it is in for a major shock.
Rather than rest on their laurels, the Overseas Chinese have been
invigorated by the challenge of the opening of China Although China's
government has been feuding with its businessmen for thousands of years,
methods developed by the Overseas Chinese for doing business with hostile
foreign regimes in adopted countries work remarkably well in dealing with
Beijing. The central government of China has a long and dark history of
extreme tyranny. It was this tyranny that created the Overseas Chinese in the
first place.
Just how did the Overseas Chinese come to exist and to grow so powerful?
That is what this book is about, Lords of the Rim is part economic analysis,
part Pacific Rim history, part chronicle of flamboyant characters and the
fortunes they won, lost and won again. Spanning thousands of years, it
encompasses stories of murder and betrayal, bravery and corruption, of
triads, syndicates, kingmakers, merchants, emperors, generals, spies and
pirates.
Part I, "Roots," sweeps from the 11th century B.C. to the 17th century,
exploring the extraordinary course by which the empire came to be. Part II,
"Empire,” travels along the Pacific Rim itself, from Thailand, Indonesia, and
Malaysia to Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan and, via the United States and
Canada, back to mainland China itself, to trace this new world where men of
wealth and power only become wealthier and more powerful. This is both
history and cautionary tale— for the strategies which have proven so
successful for so long for the Chinese are just as effective today.
To begin at the beginning, however, we must go back to the Duke of Chou,
who first started the feud between government and merchants, and thereby set
off a movement south....
=====
Since the stone age in China, the family had been the bedrock, the basic
corporate unit. Hierarchy was not invented by Confucius, just glorified by
him. Ancient China's rank-conscious society sustained itself according to a
rigid pecking order. Beginning at the bottom, each community was subservient
to a family patriarch, a village patriarch, and a provincial patriarch,
culminating in the emperor. Originally, a poor man with talent could rise
high in government, but the Han Dynasty dragged on so long that the system
calcified into a cold-hearted hereditary bureaucracy. Families of officials
had such a grip on power that they were able to remain in position even as
dynasties rose and fell. These great northern families kept hoards of gold
bars and owned vast estates worked by serfs. From time to time, they
cannibalized each other. With the destruction of the north by nomads, the
tradition of family loyalty died out in North China, but was transplanted to
the south by the rich refugees. They used ritual loyalty to maintain control
like the Sicilian or Corsican mafia. For the first time in South China, which
had been so freewheeling, power and wealth became identified with family and
connections. To enhance their prestige, these incoming northern families lied
about their genealogy and built ancestral halls adorned with portraits of
phony ancestors.
What was done by the rich was imitated by the poor, so family arrogance,
in the guise of virtue, became universal in South China. What in the north
ultimately had been loyalty to the emperor, in the south became loyalty to
local godfathers. Outwardly, everyone at least acted loyal and submissive.
Once they were firmly established in South China, the northern families
set about taking over the livelihoods of all the weaker people around them.
This was not easy because there were many commercial warlords already in
place. Powerful families, clans, and mafias became involved in flat-out
predatory commerce, not just rural horsetrading. They told each other,
''Commerce is war!" This made them more aggressive, more imaginative, more
greedy, and led them to invest big sums in expanding their market share.
Never was there enough market share, enough financial security for the family
or clan, so among these northern interlopers, greed remained forever
unsatisfied. They kept at it until they self-destructed. Fierce loyalty was
not just family glue but also commercial glue, binding together ruthless
clans of moneylenders, banking clans, smuggling clans, rice brokers, silk
merchants, gold traders, and clans dealing in merchant shipping and foreign
trade. Whole communities of human beings were attached to each other by the
code of loyalty and the tyranny of trust. No matter where you traveled, no
matter how far, no matter how many years passed, you belonged to a secret
organization. What started as loyalty ended as dried blood.
The most successful families recognized a dangerous contradiction in
moneymaking. The moment wealth was achieved and acknowledged, energy faded
and failure began. They called it the Three-Generation Curse: one generation
sacrificed everything to get rich, the second lost momentum, the third blew
it. So no matter how much money these families had, they practiced extreme
frugality. "They never look down, but they pick up; they never look up, but
they take down.” They allowed themselves no leisure. Children were told of a
dying man unable to speak. He kept raising two fingers. Then his family
noticed there were two wicks in the oil lamp. When was one pinched out, he
died smiling.
Confucianism sanctified and reinforced this discipline and hierarchy, so
that profits were not taken out of the hands of elders and squandered by
young fools. The Western idea of deficit spending is regarded by Chinese with
astonishment and horror, as a form of self-swindle. It should only be done
with other people's money.
One way to dodge the Three-Generation Curse was never to admit that an
objective was achieved, to train each new generation as if prosperity were
forever somewhere down the road. Wealth was kept hidden, rich men dressed in
threadbare gowns, everyone worked in shabby storefronts, feigning poverty.
This contributed to the widespread impression that merchants were too uncouth
to bathe.
Merchants had to be unusually tenacious and calculating because they
operated under very difficult conditions. Risk-taking was condemned by
Confucianism, but as born gamblers, Chinese believed that fortune rewards
only those who dare. They made every effort to be calculating, hence their
endless fascination with Sun Tzu's The Art of War. They adopted the God of
War, Kwan Ti, as the God of Wealth. They taught themselves to stay invisible.
Only those who remained invisible could expect to hold on to their wealth in
the face of continual extortion by imperial eunuchs and bureaucrats.
Among poor Chinese in the south, the family also came first, but for
other reasons. It was the only reliable economic unit. All family income went
into a common treasury that was administered by the current patriarch. Each
member received an allowance for expenses. If the family prospered, all
benefited; if fortunes declined, all suffered. So, for humble poor as well as
predatory richt the family was a closely held corporation with a reinvestment
incentive, like a rolling tontine. Unlike a Western tontine, where benefits
go to an ever-diminishing number of participants as they die off, the Chinese
tontine requires continual reinvestment that is passed from generation to
generation. Secondary benefits expand outward in concentric circles from
family to clan, from native village to native districts and so on. Like a
circus net, this web of responsibility was always there. When famine struck,
rich peasants in a village were obliged to help the poor. When even the rich
peasants became impoverished, survivors moved to other villages, which were
morally bound to help them, according to the invisible filaments of family,
clan, and district that connected them in a magic circle.
When this magic circle expanded to include a number of enterprises beyond
the family, clan or village association, the bigger organization was called a
kongsi, a form of corporation. Kongsi were created to exploit industrial and
commercial operations that might include mines, factories, plantations, or
merchant fleets. They were organized along the lines of miniature republics
to help all members survive and prosper. Members shared in gains and losses,
as if the kongsi were a family. To protect its financial interests, each
kongsi had a private army. Some kongsi armies had as many as 6,000 to 10,000
paramilitaries. Kongsi doubled as labor unions and employment agencies.
Chinese who went overseas without their families regarded their kongsi as a
substitute for the family. Their only protection against persecution was the
kongsi defense force.
pps66-69
-----
The South Seas might be a mystery to the emperor and his court, who were
inlanders, but they were no great mystery to Cheng Ho and the commanders of
his armada. By then, coastal Chinese had been trading privately with
Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean for over a thousand years, since Ancient
Yueh. Chinese junks commonly visited Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines,
Siam, Java, Sumatra, and had ventured beyond to Ceylon, India, Persia,
Arabia, even reaching Africa. A voyage from India to Africa and back was not
as intimidating as it might seem, thanks to the regular cycle of monsoons,
which had been under stood and used for round trips by the Phoenicians.
Although Chinese dynasties rarely showed any interest in foreign geography or
foreign affairs, and private trade was usually illegal, it had been underway
routinely for centuries. The Overseas Chinese are not a modern phenomenon.
p83
----
Most Overseas Chinese say they come from Fukien, Kwangtung, and Chekiang
provinces, along this coast. But to say that someone comes from Fukien is
like saying he comes from Europe. What really matters is your ancestral
village. Anyone else is a foreigner.
Surprisingly, their ancestral villages cluster in only a few districts
around four river deltas. Three of these are in Fukien province: the Min
River flows into the sea at Foochow, the Chiu-lung empties near Amoy; the Han
River begins in Fukien, then crosses the border into Kwang tung before
reaching the sea near Swatow. So while the city of Swatow is in Kwangtung
province, the Han River links it to Fukien. The fourth delta is the mouth of
the Pearl River below Canton.
The people living in these four river deltas each speak a different
dialect, as unlike one another as German, French, and English. People from
Foochow speak the Hokchiu dialect. Those from Amoy speak Hokkien. Between
Foochow and Amoy they speak Henghua. The people of the Pearl River delta and
Canton are often lumped together as Cantonese, although they speak a number
of dialects of which urban Cantonese (Yueh) is just the major one. Most of
the early Chinese immigrants to North America came not from Canton itself but
from a group of ancestral villages southwest of the city, where they spoke a
different dialect called Taishan.
Along the Han River at Swatow in eastern Kwangtung province, 170 miles nor
theast of Canton, they speak Hoklo but call themselves Teochiu, from the name
of a riverside town that used to be the major port in that area a thousand
years ago. It has since been superseded by Swatow The Teochiu people are
culturally unique. They operate what many consider to be the richest, most
powerful underworld network on earth, one of the world's first multinational
corporations. Tightly organized and intensely loyal, all the Teockiu in the
world today are linked by common dialect and common origin to seven village
districts around Swatow. This has been one of the great spawning grounds of
piracy, smuggling, and black-marketeering.
AII these tribal groups have written Chinese script in common, but their
local dialects are mutually unintelligible. Many also speak Mandarin, the
dialect of the national capital and imperial bureaucracy. because fluency in
Mandarin was necessary to qualify for civil service exams and government
jobs. Their coastal diaIects intensify the clannishness of each group,
creating an exclusive membership that is exported to Bangkok, Singapore,
Toronto, Seattle, Amsterdam, and elsewhere in the world. These dialects
evolved from a blend of the ancient tongues of Yueh with the dialects of
various Chinese expelled from the north. Each mix developed in the isolation
of a separate valley girded by mountains, where the local aberrations were
preserved like jars of pickled vegetables.
The central government, always suspicious of the unruly coastal
provinces, deliberately neglected them. Happy to be left alone, the
inhabitants of the coast became self-sufficient, relying on their local ties
of family, clan, county, and dialect. When they left China to live or work in
foreign cultures, these loyalties went with them and became more pronounced.
All who left the Middle Kingdom without permission were considered traitors,
so China's rulers never concerned themselves with the welfare of citizens
living abroad. To look out for themselves, Overseas Chinese formed their own
organizations: native-place associ ations; surname groups; dialect groups;
business guilds; athletic clubs; religious groups; benevolent societies,
tongs, and triads. To outsiders, the proliferation of so many public and
secret Chinese organizations results in a confusing welter of names and
identities. But that is the whole idea. Traditionally these organizations
have been obsessed with secrecy and mystification in order to protect
themselves and their members from persecution by the central government, by
regional warlords, or by rival groups. In the West, triads and tongs easily
became confused with guilds and kongsi. So some simplification is called for.
The key is that, beyond the magic circle of the family/clan, the most
powerful group is the native-place association. All the other organizations,
such as triadst are merely spinoffs or overlays.
The Teochiu dialect group, for example, has seven native-place
associations, one for each of the seven hsiens, or village districts, in the
Swatow region. The most powerful are Mei Hsien, Chin Hai, Yao Ping, and Chao
Yang. As more successful members move up the hierarchy of each hsien
association, they become senior officers controlling or influencing the
affairs of all their members. At the top in each country is an overall
Teochiu Association, a council of leaders from each hsien association. These
are paternalistic civic associations that look after the business affairs,
financial needs, and social welfare of their many members, but each Teochiu
hsien association has its own enforcers, paramilitaries who make up a secret
private army numbering in the thousands. Because these hsien associations
exist in countries all over Asia and the West, and are involved in an
enormous variety of clandestine activities, the worldwide total of Teochiu
paramilitaries alone may be over one million.
In English, these secret armies are commonly known as "syndicates"
because each handles the covert business operations of a separate hsien
association. CoIlectively, the seven Teochiu syndicates have become known
popularly as the Chiu-Chao Brotherhood, or simply Chiu-Chao, the Cantonese
pronunciation of Teochiu, which is used by the Hong Kong police in their
criminal records and by Hong Kong newspapers. Elsewhere in the world they are
most often called Teochiu, and have a somewhat better image. For simplicity's
sake, this book will refer to the dialect group as the Teochiu, and to their
secret commercial armies as the Teochiu syndicates.
The Teochiu themselves number many millions, but the exact total outsIde
China can be estimated only roughly because of the lack of precise census
data in many places. While they are the richest of the Overseas Chinese and
are the majority Chinese popuIation in Thailand, they are only the
second-largest in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Canada, and the
United. States. In the course of their day-to day activities in Southeast
Asia and elsewhere around the Pacific Rim, Teochiu syndicates have been
massi.vely involved in rice smuggling, drugs, and all other conceivable
rackets. Many of th.ese activities have been going on for centuries and are
not in any way unusual for the region. Nor are they necessarily seen by
Asians as being criminal. A sense of scale can be drawn from the
international heroin trade out of the Golden Triangle, dominated by four or
five of the seven Teochiu syndicates, which in the 1990s is thought to be
worth something on the order of $200 billion a year in black money. Not all
Asian heroin is smuggled or brokered by the Teochiu—Hokkien and other
syndicates move large quantities of Golden Triangle drugs through Taiwan, for
instance—but Teochiu have the lion's share. People who do not benefit from
its activities consider the Teochiu Brotherhood to be the biggest criminal
organization in the world. Those who do benefit from it see the matter
differently.
Every dialect group contains any number of big and small triads, some
tracing their roots to Coxinga, who was a Hokkien. Because of their shared
interest in fighting the alien Manchu, many dialect groups on the coast were
temporarily allied with the Hokkien in backing Coxinga. Together they called
their anti-Manchu organization the Hung-Men (Hung League) after the first
Ming emperor, whose reign title was Hung Wu. Hung also means red, which
Chinese regard as the color of hope, so the Hung League is often referred to
in Western sources as the Red Gang. While this sounds colorful and
gangsterish, it is neither helpful nor accurate.
After the death of Coxinga, five militant monks associated with the Hung
League inspired fresh outbreaks of anti-Manchu conspiracy. They became heroes
to generations of Chinese, and their adventures have been dramatized by
puppet shows at village fairs, traveling acting troupes, movies, and
television, and inspired (if that's the word) the long-running American TV
series Kung Fu. Members of the Hung League spread down the coast and set up
branch organizations throughout Asia and the Pacific, using the ancient
symbolism of the triad, an equilateral triangle with sides representing Man,
Heaven, and Earth. Its three parent organizations were The Heaven and Earth
Society (T'ien-ti Hui), the Three Dots Society (San-tien Hui), and the Three
Harmonies Society (San-ho Hui). Native populations and Western colonials were
often terrified of the triads, attributing to them all manner of sinister
murders, extortion, kidnapping, gold hoarding, drug smuggling, protection
rackets, counterfeiting, and kidnapping of village girls for brothels. On the
positive side, they provided expatriate mem bers with the social services
usually denied them because they were Chinese. The Teochiu triads (distinct
from other Teochiu organizations) are considered by the Hong Kong police to
be the most secretive, exclusive, and dangerous. On the other hand, Teochiu
civic associations are among the most public-spirited social organizations in
Thailand. They lend their members seed money to start businesses, help to
arrange marriages and funerals, set up schools so that Chinese children
receive education along traditional lines, build hospitals, and back
charities.
Confucian hierarchy is tight. Each Chinese family and clan had its
elders, each guild its chief, each triad its boss, while umbrella
organizations in each country, such as the dialect group
associations—Hokkien, Teochiu, Hakka—were overseen by a grand patriarch. He
was usually the richest tycoon in that country, and was subservient to an
interna tional godfather, who might be based in the ancestral village, or
(since the communist takeover) in Taipei, Hong Kong, Bangkok, or Singapore.
For example, most Chinese in Paris today come from a small town in Chekiang
province, and settled in the Belleville ghetto after the French Jews who
lived there were deported and killed during the Nazi occupation. Other French
were not eager to move into the Jewish ghetto while the Nazi curse was still
upon it, but the Chinese had no such qualms. Many years later, when their
feuds in Paris upset the French government in 1993, their godfather was
imported from Chekiang to resolve the disputes and to calm his flock. It
worked like magic. Tradition, combined with economics, gives the
international godfather profound leverage. When the head of a dialect group
dies or retires, his designated successor becomes the overlord of subsidiary
groups all over the world.
Loyalty and discipline within a dialect group are maintained by shinyung,
or trust, the superglue used to guarantee repayment of unsecured, informal
loans and to guarantee silence and invisibility. This form of trust is an
absolute, and today is in increasingly short supply in the West, where
nuclear families routinely disintegrate. To survive and prosper under
tyrannical dynasties, or in permanent exile, Chinese family and clan elders
had to apply very strict rules of trust. Just because you spoke Teochiu or
Hokchiu did not automatically make you a mem ber of the in-group, or a fully
fledged member of the family enterprise, or entitle you to the real or
implicit benefits of the tontine.
To begin with, you had to be from the same native place—the same county
if not the same village, and either the inner or outer circles of the same
clan. Next, you had to demonstrate your trustworthiness, your shinyung.
Nobody was born with it. Not even family members had it automatically. Boys
or young men who wished to go into the family business had to serve a long
apprenticeship, during which their abili ties and their trustworthiness were
closely observed. Only those who repeatedly demonstrated absolute shinyung
were then permitted to join the business or to become part of a network. If
they were careless, they forfeited shinyung. Everything worked by trust. This
made shame a potent weapon, so loss of face could mean suicide. Forfeiting
your shinyung was like a death sentence. Westerners who ridicule loss of face
do not grasp what is being lost. Embarrassment may be momentary, but trust
involves a lifetime of effort. It is shinyung that allowed money lending
families inside China or anywhere around the Rim to lend money without
collateral and be certain of getting it back.
Later, after the Pacific War, as tradition began to unravel around the
Rim and a new generation of Overseas Chinese challenged the behavior of their
elders during the occupation, shinyung loosened up somewhat. In business it
continues to be vital, but collateral—especially offshore collateral—has
begun to take its place to guarantee loans. Traditionalists feel that things
have changed too much; too much interest in passing fashion, and
sophistication, distract new generations from their deeper commitrnents. But
compared to Westerners in general, and to Americans in particular, even the
most urbane and progressive Overseas Chinese is a long way from abandoning
his patrimony.
Confucians speak loftily about shinyung, but feuding between the
paramilitary syndicates of dialect groups has always been fierce, provoking
clan wars that could be murderous and end in open warfare. This ruthless and
bloody rivalry divided East and Southeast Asia into Chinese commercial
territories many centuries before Westerners arrived. The port of Chuan-chou
was China's busiest port for generations, during which the Henghua dialect
group was riding high. This was the group eventually taken over by the
Muslirn trader Abu, who betrayed Southern Sung to the Mongol invaders. After
Mongol rule collapsed and Chuan-chou silted up, the port of Amoy became
favored by the Ming AdmiraI Cheng Ho, and the Hokkien dialect group of Amoy
(and Coxinga) gained the upper hand till the 20th century. Since World War II
the Teochiu have taken the lead from their main bases in Swatow, Hong Kong,
and Bangkok.
Although they are no longer the richest, Hokkien continue to be the most
numerous and widespread of all Overseas Chinese, and are in the majority in
Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia Amoy, their home
base in Fukien province opposite Taiwan, is a superb harbor on the southwest
coast of an island called Mansion Gate (Hsiamen, or Xiamen), literally
guarding the approaches to the "mansion" of the Hokkien in the Chiu-lung
River valley. Since the 1300s, the Hokkien had become the most powerful
Overseas Chinese dialect group, but during World War II they were singled out
for victimization by the Japanese, particularly in Singapore and on the Malay
Peninsula, where they were slaughtered. Because Thailand sided with Japan,
its Teochiu population came out of the war virtually unscathed, and at least
in part because of the growth of the Golden Triangle drug trade, vastly
richer.
The majority of Chinese in Indochina are Cantonese-speakers from the
Pearl River delta, but since the Vietnam War they have been persecuted,
expelled, and reduced in numbers. The remainder of the Overseas Chinese,
scattered all over the world, are Hakka, Hokchiu, Henghua, and Hainanese,
plus a large number of Wu speakers from Chekiang province and urban Shanghai.
The Hakka people are distinctive because they are latecomers from far
inland. According to tradition, they originated to the north in arid, Shansi
Province, but to escape the Mongol invasion they fled soulh to the mountains
of Kiangsi. The Han River begins near the border of Kiangsi, so it was
natural for the Hakka to haul their mountain rice downriver to sell to the
Teochiu, who marketed it by boat along the coast. Gradually, Hakka formed a
subordinate relationship with the Teochiu and accompanied them to Hong Kong
and Hainan Island. When the Teochiu became the principal rice marketers in
Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaya, many Hakka went with them, becoming the
fourth-largest Overseas Chinese group, after the Hokkien, Teochiu, and
Cantonese. The Hakka have enjoyed a disproportionate amount of influence
because they have produced many gifted and aggressive lead ers, including the
republican revolutionary Dr. Sun Yat-sen, and Singapore statesman Lee Kuan
Yew.
On the bottom rung, the Hainanese are actually a mixture of dialect-group
refugees who fled over the centuries to Hainan Island, the smuggling center
on the edge of South China that thrived on illicit trade from the South Seas.
There they resumed life-as-usual, joining various synclicates in voyages of
piracy and trade during each monsoon season. Typically, their junks carried
cargoes of silk and porcelain south to exchange for food, medicinals, and
aphrodisiacs. Between ports, the junks stopped to barter with coastal
villages, anchoring close to shore while the crew beat gongs to alert
merchants and housewives. Along the Borneo coast, Chinese who settled among
the Dayaks collected swallow nests from giant caves to supply the Mainland
market in bird's nest soup. Many gathered plants, bark, reptiles, and mammal
parts thought to have properties as sexual stimulants or prolongers. For many
isolated South Seas islanders, the Chinese arrived like cosmic aliens, their
first contact with the outside world.
Goods the Chinese purchased in the islands came from the trading
monopolies of petty rulers. Each tuan, dato or rajah had men collect and
stockpile goods they knew the Chinese wanted. Often there were local Chinese
residents who made a living as the intermediaries for this trade. In bigger
ports, Muslims and Indians controlled retail so Chinese concentrated on
wholesale. Although there might be fewer Chinese than Muslims in the harbors
of Java and Sumatra, their syndicates had thousands of Junks plying the seas
between Ceylon and the Yangtze. Teochiu smuggling junks were in continual
motion around the is]ands like mosquitaes over a stagnant pond. It served
their commercial interests to remain clandestine, and to do things at night,
not only because they were outlaws in the eyes of imperial China, but because
they were in continual warfare with their own Overseas Chinese rivals.
This is why their networks were like a giant gossamer spiderweb when the
first European armed traders arrived on the scene, and why centuries were to
pass before Westerners recognized that some local Chinese shopkeepers were
actually representatives of great multinational trading houses, as powerful
in their way as their own East India companies, and far older.
Against this background, the arrival of Europeans was a mixed blessing. On
the one hand, they introduced positive Western attitudes toward commerce and
provided stable colonial regimes where trade could go on in broad daylight.
Excited by the opportunities, many Chinese left Kwangtung and Fukien to join
their relatives in the new colonial settlements. On the other hand, racism
and commercial envy provoked a great deal of friction, and bloodshed.
Sir James Brooke, the White Rajah of Sarawak, spoke for many when he
said: "I know not whether most to admire the Chinese for their many virtues
or to despise them for their glaring defects . . . their industry exceeds
that of any other people on the face of the earth, they are laborious,
patient and cheerful; but on the other hand they are corrupt, supple and
exacting, yielding to their superiors and tyrannical to those who fall into
their power."
Though the Overseas Chinese provided wholesale access to a wide range of
Chinese products, including tea, silk, dyes, ink, and paper, their syndicates
also competed with Westerners in buying up Southeast Asian commodities such
as spices, sugar, tobacco, tin, rubber, and forest products. Colonial
authorities tried to restrict them to trading in Chinese ptoducts, and to
confine them in their ghettos These ghettos of 10,000 people or more were
completely self-governing under the leading merchant, whom the Westerners
commonly called "Captain China."
Native elites, afraid that they would lose their own patrimony, blocked
Overseas Chinese from buying land. The constant danger of persecution
persuaded the Chinese to keep their wealth in gold, gems, and hard currency,
rolling it over by short-term investment, money lending and, later, modern
banking. Much of their lending went to spendthrift locals, who used the money
to buy property, then forfeited the land to the Chinese when they were unable
to repay. Thus, by roundabout means, Chinese prohibited from directly buying
land ended up acquiring great estates. In this way, Fukienese immigrants in
the Philippines became the biggest landowners after the Catholic Church.
The vitality Rajah Brooke spoke of was not easy to repress; their
dexterity in moneylending gave the Chinese abnormal influence and led to
reprisals and massacres. A few years after a Hakka gold-mining kongsi tried
to murder him, Brooke himself led a pogrom that killed 2,000 of the 5,000
Chinese in Sarawak.
Officers of the Dutch East India Company also were angered by Chinese
smuggling, and obliged them to pay extortionate fines in compensation. In
1740 the Dutch decided that any Chinese in Indonesia who could not prove he
was making an honest living would be sent to Sri Lanka as a slave. When the
Chinese objected and rose in rebellion, the Dutch became enraged and
slaughtered thousands in a dark episode known as the Batavian Fury.
Indonesians enthusiastically joined in the massacre. More than 10,000 Chinese
were murdered. The sugar industry, dependent on the old Chinese
infrastructure, collapsed. To restock the islands with laborers, the Dutch
governor-general of the Indies sent ships to make slave raids on the coast of
Fukien and Kwangtung provinces. The Spanish in the Philippines also kidnapped
thousands of Chinese to work as slaves on the estates of the Catholic Church.
By the 19th century, millions of Chinese were being imported to all the
colonies to work as coolies in mines and plantations. Native popula tions of
Southeast Asia were unwilling to work for wages away from their home
villages. Westerners themselves were reluctant to put their hands to physical
labor Chinese filled the gap, while carefully demonstrating humility.
Everywhere, colonial administtators also found that they needed the
Chinese as middlemen, or compradors. So long as they remained submissive and
inconspicuous, there was no serious trouble. But racial hatreds lay just
beneath the surface.
In Borneo, Chinese working in various mining kongsi became one third of
the population. Some of their leaders grew so rich that they rivaled the
sultans who had sold them their mining concessions. In 1823, when the sultans
"resold" these concessions to the Dutch, the Chinese kongsi resisted, only to
be massacred. By 1880 their numbers in Borneo had dropped by 100,000 Many
Chinese industries in Southeast Asia were taken over by Western colonials in
this way.
pps113-123
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
All My Relations.
Omnia Bona Bonis,
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
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