Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations

Gracia Liu-Farrer, Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Gracia Liu-Farrer, Brenda S.A. Yeoh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138325807
• eBook ISBN: 9781317337249
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Housing more than half of the global population, Asia is a region characterised by increasingly diverse forms of migration and mobility. Offering a wide-ranging overview of the field of Asian migrations, this new handbook therefore seeks to examine and evaluate the flows of movement within Asia, as well as into and out of the continent. Through in-depth analysis of both empirical and theoretical developments in the field, it includes key examples and trends such as British colonialism, Chinese diaspora, labour migration, the movement of women, and recent student migration.

Organised into thematic parts, the topics cover:

• The historical context to migration in Asia
• Modern Asian migration pathways and characteristics
• The reconceptualising of migration through Asian experiences
• Contemporary challenges and controversies in Asian migration practice and policy

Contributing to the retheorising of the subject area of international migration from non-western experience, the Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations will be useful to students and scholars of migration, Asian development and Asian Studies in general.

Part I

Asian migrations in the historical context

1

Colonial and postcolonial migrations

Sunil S. Amrith

Introduction

Asia has always been mobile. Even those agrarian landscapes that appear most settled – the fertile paddy fields of the Ganges or Irrawaddy river deltas, for instance – have been shaped by a centuries-long process of migration and land colonisation (Eaton 1993; Richards 2003; Lieberman 2013). Merchants’ and pilgrims’ voyages across the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, or journeys along the overland ‘Silk Road’, stimulated the exchange of ideas and material culture (Gordon 2007). Many routes intersected at the port cities of Southeast Asia, which were trade emporia at the end-point of the northeast and southwest monsoons (Reid 1993).

In the 19th century the pace and quantity of migration – within Asia, and Asia to other parts of the world – experienced a leap in scale. Mass migration met the needs of expanding empires. Capital investment in plantation agriculture created a need for labour, as industrialisation spurred demand for natural resources. Transportation and communication advances made long-distance migration faster and cheaper. After a period of interruption and reversal during the decades of decolonisation and the Cold War, transregional migration across Asia has grown again since the 1970s, alongside vast internal migrations.

The social and gender composition of contemporary Asian migration differs from the patterns of earlier movements of people, most notably in the much larger proportion of female migrants today. Many routes of migration – for instance, the vast migration of contract workers from South Asia to the Gulf States – are new. Nevertheless, the legacies of earlier colonial migrations continue to shape contemporary Asia; the resurgence of migration across Asia in an age of globalisation has reactivated social networks forged in an earlier imperial age of regional connectedness.

This chapter explains the causes and pathways of Asia’s first mobility revolution, which took place between 1850 and the 1930s. It examines the relationship between migration and Asian modernity, as migrant networks channelled new political ideas and new cultural practices across frontiers. It proceeds to examine the growing regulation of both immigration and emigration in Asia in the aftermath of the economic depression of the 1930s. Through the upheaval of war and decolonisation, a new legal and political regime emerged to govern Asian migration – and we still live with many of its institutions. The final section of the chapter considers the decline and then the reorientation of Asian migration in the post-independence era, culminating in the resurgence of Asian migration from the 1980s. As such, this chapter aims to provide the historical backdrop to the diverse strands of contemporary Asian migration considered in the rest of this handbook.

Asia’s first mobility revolution

The 19th century saw a global transformation in mobility. Between 1840 and 1940, three great migrations reshaped the demographic and cultural balance of the earth (McKeown 2004): the movement of Europeans across the Atlantic (and a smaller number of Asians across the Pacific) to North America; the movement of Indians and Chinese to Southeast Asia; and the movement of people from the interiors of China and Russia to the far northeast of Asia. Migrants travelled under varying degrees of freedom and constraint, ranging from voluntary movement using family networks, to the most restrictive forms of indentured labour not far removed from slavery. While received wisdom would put European transatlantic migrants on the side of freedom, and Asian migrant labour on the side of constraint, recent scholarship has painted a more complex picture. Forms of bondage and dependence continued to constrain Europe’s overseas migrants well into the 19th century (Zahra 2016); and Asian, especially Chinese, migration was very often organised by families and through village networks, with little state involvement (McKeown 2004; Kuhn 2008; Look Lai 2009; Amrith 2011).

Mass migration was both a cause and a result of global transformations. C.A. Bayly (2004: 11) observed that, from the middle of the 19th century, ‘contemporary changes were so rapid and interacted with each other so profoundly, that this period could reasonably be described as the “birth of the modern world”’. Imperial states grew in power and capacity, and made greater demands on their subjects; ideas travelled more rapidly and spread more widely than ever before; industrialisation connected markets around the world.

New technologies and new forms of energy brought long-distance travel within reach of a far greater number of people. The steamship made ocean crossings faster as well as safer, though it was not until the 1880s that steam triumphed over sail. New routes shaped patterns of trade. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 brought Asian producers closer to European markets. In the words of novelist Joseph Conrad, ‘The piercing of the Isthmus of Suez, like the breaking of a dam, let in upon the East a flood of new ships, new men, new methods of trade’ (Conrad 1902: 168). News of prices and pacts, products and places, travelled even faster. By 1870, the British India Submarine Telegraph Company connected Bombay with the Red Sea. A year later, telegraph connections spanned the Bay of Bengal. From Singapore, the line reached through Saigon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Nagasaki, and up to the Russian port of Vladivostok (Dick and Rimmer 2003).

The opening of new frontiers of cultivation produced an insistent demand for labour. Asia’s frontier regions – for the most part, the forest frontiers of mainland and island Southeast Asia – had low population densities. Local peasantries did not find wage labour on plantations attractive and many fought to preserve the freedom of smallholder cultivation or subsistence production. The prior existence across Southeast Asia of small settlements of Chinese and Indian merchants, together with communities of Chinese cultivators and miners in the interior, meant that the structures and precedents were in place to draw labour from the densely populated heartlands of coastal southern China and the eastern seaboard of the Indian subcontinent. Revolutions in transport made this prospect a reality. Recurrent and deep-seated agrarian, ecological, and political crises in China and India intensified the draw of migration as an avenue to family survival.

In China, the mid-19th century marked a period of unprecedented social and political change accompanied by violence on a massive scale. The millenarian Taiping Rebellion (1851–66) led to the deaths of up to 20 million people over 15 years. The imperial aggression of the Opium Wars culminated in the concession of treaty ports, which became the prime sites for the recruitment and shipment of Chinese labour overseas. The impact of political instability was intensified by a concurrent environmental crisis: a series of mega-droughts, linked to exceptionally severe El Niño events in the 1870s and 1890s.

In India, the consolidation of British political control over the subcontinent uprooted some social groups and immobilised others. Following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the 1830s, Indian workers moved under contracts of indenture to meet the labour demand from sugar-producing colonies of the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. The workers came from rural districts of Bihar and Madras. At the same time, deepening colonial control limited the options of groups that had previously been mobile. For weavers, artisans, professional soldiers, and many others, British conquest brought economic ruin. Many urban residents were pushed onto increasingly marginal lands. The acute vulnerability of large parts of South India to famine – India was as badly affected as China by the droughts of the 1870s and 1890s – was one result of this enforced decline (Parthasarathi 2009).

In neither India nor China was there an inevitable link between political or environmental catastrophe and long-distance migration. The mechanistic language of the early social science literature on migration, its picture of migration as subject to ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors, fails to capture the role of intermediaries and networks in making overseas migration a viable response to local distress. In the late-19th century the conduit between crisis and opportunity was provided by what today we would call the ‘migration industry’.

From the 1840s, tens of thousands of Indian labourers a year arrived in Ceylon to work on the coffee plantations. By the end of the 1850s, this had grown to nearly a hundred thousand arrivals annually. Between half and three-quarters of them returned to India each year. The longer journey to Malaya involved smaller numbers until the 1880s, but by the end of that decade, 22,000 people arrived at the ports of the Straits Settlements from India. From the 1880s, Burma was the third greatest destination for Indian labour, and would attract the most migrants of all. By 1911, over 100,000 people each year arrived from India in each of these three destinations across the Bay of Bengal (Amrith 2013; Peebles 2001; Adas 1974).

India’s migrants were recruited under a range of arrangements. The earliest migrants to Malaya travelled to sugar and coffee plantations under contracts of indenture, in which labour recruiters and brokers played the role of middlemen. Indentured workers on Malaya’s plantations faced brutal conditions and mortality rates were high. The archives are pervaded by instances of physical abuse and even torture. By the start of Malaya’s rubber boom, indenture gave way to more informal means of procuring labour. Across all three countries to which Indian labour travelled in large numbers, the most common mode of recruitment was the system known as the kangany system (in Ceylon and Malaya) or the maistry system (in Burma). The kangany was often an existing plantation worker who would return to his home village in India to recruit more men on commission. The kangany’s ability to advance money to the migrants’ families put him in a position to offer attractive terms to indebted agrarian families – and debt provided the bond that kept workers tied to their employers, even when they were not formally indentured (Amrith 2013; Sandhu 1969).

Whereas Indian migrants tended to stay within the boundaries of the British Empire, Chinese migrants travelled to a wider range of destinations across multiple empires. And while Indian migrants tended to travel on British steamships to work on European-owned plantations or in the urban economy, Chinese migrants to Southeast Asia worked primarily for Chinese employers and capitalists. The majority of Chinese emigrants departed from Hong Kong, Xiamen, Shantou and Hainan Island. Between 19 and 23 million Chinese migrants travelled to Southeast Asia between 1850 and 1940: 6–7 million to Singapore and Malaysia; 4–5 million to Java and the outer islands of Indonesia; up to 4 million to Thailand; and another 3 or 4 million to Indochina, the Philippines and other parts of the Pacific taken together. The regional concentration of Chinese migration sharpened over time. Whereas 40 per cent of Chinese emigrants in the 1850s travelled beyond Asia, between the 1880s and 1930 96 per cent of Chinese emigrants remained within Asia (McKeown 2010).

In the era of mass migration after 1870, Chinese travelled to Southeast Asia under a wide range of arrangements. What unites them is the importance of social networks and intermediary institutions in making migration possible. Some of these networks and institutions were rooted in the family and kinship. Other common forms included native-place and surname associations and, on a wider scale, dialect-group and regional associations. These institutions also hosted the religious and cultural rituals that made long-distance migration less traumatic, and rendered new destinations more familiar. The importance of social networks was such that where one village had intensive emigrant connections, its neighbours might have none (McKeown 1999).

The most fortunate of the emigrants financed their own passages with family resources. Since families viewed emigration as an investment, those with assets were willing to sell or mortgage them in the expectation that emigration would prove fruitful. Another common method was recruitment by an ‘old hand’, a system comparable with the kangany system used to recruit Indian labour: here the recruiter would advance the cost of the passage, and often a recruitment bonus, to the emigrants’ families; the emigrants were bound to work off these debts. More common still was migration through the ‘credit ticket’ system, wherein an intermediary took on the migrant’s debt of passage. Labour brokers in Singapore or Penang worked directly with boarding-house keepers in Chinese ports, based on the rapid transfer of information about job openings and labour demand. Either on embarkation or upon arrival, the migrant would contract himself to an employer, at least until he had worked off his debts. Labour brokers often worked directly for the Chinese brotherhoods that controlled migrant labour in Southeast Asia. The brotherhoods’ command of armed force ensured that the migrants did not escape their control (Sugihara 2005: 268).

Migrants under the credit ticket system suffered many kinds of abuse and exploitation, but the most unfortunate were those who had signed formal contracts of indenture directly with European employers. Chinese labour brokers, again, made these transactions possible. Labourers under indenture tended to come from the most disadvantaged backgrounds; they had least access to the social networks that made migration possible. In all, close to 750,000 Chinese signed contracts of indenture in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. This represents a small proportion of Chinese migrants overall. Around 250,000 of the indentured migrants went to the Caribbean and Latin America, where they suffered the most brutal conditions faced by Chinese migrants anywhere, in some cases conditions very close to enslavement. Within Asia, the plantations of Sumatra were the main destination for Chinese indentured workers: around 250,000 made the journey between 1880 and 1910. Up to a quarter of the Chinese migrant workers to Sumatra’s plantation belt died before working out their contracts. Malaria, malnutrition, frequent injuries, and a high rate of suicide made Sumatra lethal for plantation workers. Until the turn of the 20th century, it proved cheaper for planters to import new labourers from overseas than to care for the welfare of those already in Sumatra. In general, indentured labour recruitment only flourished for destinations which were particularly distant or unattractive, or where Chinese social networks were especially thin (Kuhn 2008; McKeown 2004).

The movement of Indians and Chinese to Southeast Asia represents one of the world’s great migrations of the modern era, but many others were on the move alongside them. Within Southeast Asia the same era witnessed the acceleration and expansion of mobility across the Indonesian archipelago and across the Straits of Malacca (Tagliacozzo 2005; Kahn 2006), together with a deepening of the centuries-old circuit o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgement
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: Asian migrations and mobilities: continuities, conceptualisations and controversies
• Part I Asian migrations in the historical context
• Part II Asian migration regimes and pathways
• Part III Reconceptualising migration through Asian experiences
• Part IV Challenges in Asian migration
• Index