Chinese Migrants Abroad

Cultural, Educational, and Social Dimensions of the Chinese Diaspora

Michael W Charney, Brenda S A Yeoh;Tong Chee Kiong

• Publisher: WSPC/SUP
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9789814488310
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Demografia

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:Review:0

PART ONE

Chineseness and “Overseas” Chinese Identifications and Identities of a Migrant Community

CHAPTER 1

Five Southeast Asian Chinese Empire-Builders: Commonalities and Differences

Jamie Mackie

It is appropriate that a conference co-sponsored with the Tan Kah Kee Society should include a panel with the words ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘business empires’, and ‘education’ in its title, for they all have direct relevance to Tan Kah Kee and his remarkable career. But while the first two words could also be applied to many other Southeast Asian Chinese businessmen of the last century or more, the last could not. None have made such generous, sustained contributions to the creation of schools for their fellow-citizens, or attached such great significance to education, both modern and traditional, as he did. And this despite having had little more than rudimentary schooling in the Chinese classics in Xiamen, before he was set to work in his father’s business in Singapore at the age of sixteen.¹ Like many other self-made men who became captains of industry or commerce in other parts of the world (Carnegie, Ford, and Nuffield are striking examples) he was well aware of the advantages of a good education and the opportunities for advancement and wider freedoms missed by those who have not had access to it.

A good education of the right sort can prove highly beneficial for a modern entrepreneur (especially in today’s world of IT and fast-changing technologies) but it has clearly not been a necessary or sufficient condition for business success previously. Many of the foremost Southeast Asian Chinese tycoons of the 20th century, probably most, have had very little education, and almost none of them very much. A study of the Chinese in the Central Javanese city of Semarang in the 1950s found, in fact, that those who had been able to get some education were inclined to prefer professional or salaried jobs with security and higher status rather than an exhausting, sweaty life as a self-employed businessman in the marketplace, with all its risks and difficulties (Willmott 1960). The more entrepreneurial types tended to come from the poorly-educated, hard-driving, Chinese-speaking new arrivals, not the older-established peranakan families. But that too may now be changing as times and circumstances change. Of the five outstanding Chinese empire-builders to be discussed here, only Robert Kuok owed much to his good schooling (although the maverick Lucio Tan could claim higher formal qualifications), while Liem Sioe Liong, once the wealthiest tycoon by far in all Southeast Asia, and a very smart businessman, probably had the least schooling of them all.

These five men, each of whom could be regarded as among the foremost entrepreneurs in his country, intrigue me because their differences seem so much more striking than any commonalities we might discern. They differ in their personal characteristics, their career paths, and in the ways they have adapted to the very diverse socio-economic and political conditions each has encountered in the several countries of Southeast Asia. It is hard to find any one common factor or combination of factors that can be held to account for their extraordinary success, apart from their obvious entrepreneurial talents (of strikingly different types), their risk-tasking propensities and their ability to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances (Mackie 1992, 1998).

That quality of adaptability strikes me as one of the most interesting qualities of the Overseas Chinese, not just here but also in many other parts of the world (in Australia particularly). It is a characteristic of the poor as well as the rich, and one that deserves closer scrutiny than it has yet been given. It may owe something to the personal qualities and values deriving from their ancient Chinese cultural heritage, although that explanation needs to be investigated far more rigorously than it has been so far. But the adaptability of the Overseas Chinese has enabled them to fit amazingly well into a wide range of other countries, societies and cultures all over the world, not just the Thai, Malay, Indonesian, and Filipino but also Canadian, American, or Australian, as shown in the splendid set of country studies edited by Lynn Pan (1999). It is a feature they share with my ancestors, the Scots, one of the world’s other great diasporic peoples, but a much more stubborn, inflexible and ornery lot.

The differences among these five men must be stressed — and of the circumstances in which they achieved their success — rather than any common features, in order to guard against any temptation to slide towards the essentialist fallacy of assuming that all Overseas Chinese businessmen possess essentially the same characteristics (if only we could identify them properly) among which we might be able to find the key to their entrepreneurial drives and talents. The latter are often said to be derived from their Chinese cultural heritage or values. But without meaning to be disrespectful of that great heritage I would argue that it is only one element among many that go into the complex alchemy that produces strong entrepreneurial drives and talents in so many Overseas Chinese. We still have a very poor understanding of that alchemy.² Most of us can easily recognize a successful entrepreneur when we see one, but no one has succeeded in explaining why some succeed while so many others fail. Even if we can account for their strong propensity towards risk-taking, very common among people famous for their love of gambling, strongly inclined towards geomancy and often desperate to rise out of poverty, that alone does not give us the key to what makes so many of them highly entrepreneurial in character. In fact, according to Schumpeter’s famous definition, risk-taking is not the quality that distinguishes entrepreneurs, for in his view all capitalists are risk-takers to some degree, but very few are entrepreneurs. He regarded the true entrepreneur as something more, one who creates those ‘new combinations’ of factors of production (not just innovators, but far more than that) which entirely transform the business scene, generating the waves of ‘creative destruction’ of older enterprises which open up the way towards whole new industries (Casson 1990, pp. 114–34) . On that definition, however, very few Overseas Chinese would qualify. We do not have to accept Schumpeter’s theory as the canonical last word on the subject, of course — or Max Weber’s, for that matter — influential and fruitful though they have been by stimulating new thinking about the well-springs of entrepreneurship.

The success of Southeast Asian Chinese entrepreneurs is often attributed to one or more of the three well-known structural features of their business life — their family firms, both small-scale and large, which are still the most common form of business enterprise among them; their reliance on inter-personal trust (guanxi and xinyong) as the basis on which so many business transactions are conducted; and their legendary networks of personal connections which are an extension of guanxi, sometimes a pillar on which big business empires have been created. It is not enough just to point out how widespread these features have been, as if that alone will lead us towards the secrets of entrepreneurial success. In a perceptive introduction to the book he has edited on Chinese Business Networks, Chan Kwok Bun (2000, p. 5) has warned of the deceptiveness of ‘monolithic cultural labels’ and reminded us it is “fallacious to lump varied and varying Chinese experiences into a singular history and destiny”. We are likely to come closer to the truth by exploring the differences hidden behind such notions than we will by trying to discover common elements as the key to Chinese commercial success, which exponents of the essentialist fallacy often seem to be seeking. The strikingly diverse careers of these five great empire-builders show this very clearly.

Tan Kah Kee

Tan Kah Kee (1874–1961, b. Xiamen) became known as ‘the rubber king’ of Singapore-Malaya in the 1920s, and a multimillionaire, although his businesses collapsed in the Depression years. He was not a classic example of the rag-to-riches entrepreneur, for he came from a moderately wealthy family; yet he lived a very frugal, almost spartan life. It was his ability to adapt shrewdly and decisively to changing business conditions that was a key factor in his success.

His business career started in 1890 when he was summoned by his father from his home village in Xiamen to work in the family’s rice trading company in Singapore. He was soon appointed its manager, and the business flourished as Tan proved himself to be a “sound, dedicated and competent manager” (Yong 1987, p. 42). But for reasons beyond his control the company collapsed in 1905. Meanwhile he had launched his own pineapple-canning and rice importing enterprise, which soon profited greatly from rising European demand for canned pineapple. In 1906 he branched out into two new ventures, a rice mill producing cooked rice for the Indian market, which proved very profitable, and a small rubber plantation.

The timing of his move into rubber was lucky, for Malayan rubber was just starting to make a big impact in Britain and his trees began to come into production a few years later just as the crazy 1910 rubber boom in London led to sky-rocketing prices for both rubber and Malayan plantations. Tan sold his Singapore estate at a big profit and reinvested in two others in Johore that he put under rubber, interplanted with pineapples. In fact, pineapple canning remained his main source of income over the next few years and by 1914 he was already close to being a millionaire.

The outbreak of World War I brought an abrupt change in his fortunes, as shipping shortages made it impossible to export canned pineapples to Europe and difficult to send his cooked rice to India. So he began to lease ships to transport the rice and thus became briefly but heavily involved in the shipping business. Through several further strokes of luck he made huge windfall profits there with which he converted one of his pineapple factories into a rubber remilling plant that soon became a lucrative money-spinner during the post-war rubber boom.³ He then branched out in yet another new direction into a rubber manufacturing operation in Singapore, producing rubber-soled shoes, tyres for bicycles and horse carts (not yet for motor cars) and much else.⁴ This daring venture also proved very profitable for a few years, although it later proved to be a disastrous millstone around his neck

His businesses were doing so well by then that Tan returned to Xiamen for three years to attend to the schools and university he had established there, leaving his brother in charge in Singapore. Another phase of rapid expansion and big profits followed in the mid-1920s, when he established nine more rubber mills across Malaya and also founded the famous newspaper, Nanyang Siang Pau. But while those years were the pinnacle of his success, he made one fatal error of judgement. He had borrowed three million Singapore dollars from Singapore banks to finance both his rubber interests and his schools in Xiamen, which he could easily have repaid out of his cash reserves at that time, but chose not to do so. When rubber prices began to decline in 1926, however, he had to sell assets on a declining market and cut back on his ambitious plans.

By 1929, “his financial foundation had been shaken and he was left with serious liquidity problems", with debts to local banks of nearly ten million Singapore dollars (Yong 1987, p. 64). His plight worsened disastrously as the worldwide depression struck the entire Malayan rubber industry a devastating blow. He then made another strategic error by pouring more money into rubber manufacturing operations in the belief that the firm’s future could develop on that base, a bad misjudgment in the colonial economic context at a time of collapsing prices, shrinking world markets and rising tariff barriers. The financial position of his businesses deteriorated inexorably in the early 1930s despite efforts to restructure it as a limited liability company. Finally in 1933–34 his creditors took over and eventually wound up the enterprise.⁵ That was virtually the end of his career as an entrepreneur and business empire builder.

In the years following, Tan Kah Kee, who was still “by no means a pauper” (Yong 1987, p. 70), went on to achieve a new form of greatness as a community leader of the Singapore Chinese and as the Southeast Asia-wide leader of the anti-Japanese resistance movement after 1937. That is another story, however, too complex to go into here. Instead, I will offer three brief comments on his entrepreneurial characteristics.

First, he was undoubtedly extremely enterprising, a daring risk-taker, with a sharp eye for new business opportunities. He built up an unusually large and diverse business enterprise through his adaptability and capacity to maintain tight control over a large and varied group of companies. Second, his success during the expansion phase of his empire was due largely to his shrewd assessments of market trends, although he miscalculated badly when the rubber market started to contract after 1926, especially by clinging to his ambitious vision of a future based on rubber manufacturing, instead of consolidating on his strongest assets, rubber remilling and cultivation. Finally, he differed most from other successful towkays of his time (and later) in that his primary aim was not simply to make money but to contribute to the modernisation and emancipation of China (and, by extension, the Chinese community of Singapore) through education and the creation of new industries. In this he was indeed a remarkable visionary, quite unique in the recent history of Southeast Asia.

Robert Kuok

Robert Kuok Hock Nien (b. Oct. 1923, Johore), the most accomplished and cosmopolitan of all the 20th-century tycoons of Southeast Asia, is an utterly different kind of entrepreneur from Tan Kah Kee.⁶ He came from a wealthy family in Johore who owned a well-established commodities trading business that he took over on his father’s death in 1949 and rapidly transformed into a major sugar-trading empire. He had the benefit of a good education at Raffles College, where he established personal connections with Malaya’s later political leaders, and later built up a wide range of business associates and political contacts throughout the East Asian region while creating a vast, diversified business empire. He suffered no major setbacks except those resulting from the 1997 economic crisis which afflicted nearly all of the large enterprises in East Asia, but from which he has survived with fewer losses than most. He has never been as buccaneering or adventurous as Tan or the other entrepreneurs mentioned here, and may never have been the wealthiest of them. Yet of the five, he is the one best worth studying for clues to the secrets of success in the modern world of big business in Southeast Asia.

Consider the following remarks that have been made about him. He has “a solid reputation for reliability, honesty and skill” (Verchere 1977, p. 12) and is “the consummate deal-maker” (Hiscock 1997, pp. 207–209). He is “loyal to his business associates and employees, supportive of friends and discreet to the point of near invisibility ... [he has] a reputation for fairness ... and will always leave the other guy some meat on the bone” (Friedland 1991, pp. 46, 47). He has “superlative cross-cultural networking skills ... [being] equally at home in the hermetic world of Chinese sinkehs ... as he is in the cosmopolitan boardrooms of New York, London or Paris” (Heng 1997, p. 33).

Kuok has always been a trader and investor rather than an industrialist, although he was involved early on in shipbuilding and steel processing as well as sugar refining and flour milling in Malaya. He laid the foundations of his fortune in sugar trading (and flour) in the late 1950s, making a reputation as the “sugar king of Asia” before he was forty, reaping big profits from the steady rise in world sugar prices over the next twenty years. His career divides into two distinct phases: the first, until 1976, based mainly in Malaysia in sugar and related enterprises, the second based mainly in Hong Kong and China, with hotels (the Shangri-La chain) and property (Kerry Properties) at its core.

Kuok took over his family’s commodities trading business in 1949 and soon began to focus on sugar trading, but moved to London briefly when the firm came under suspicion from the colonial security services because his brother had joined the Malayan Communist Party. In 1954, he was back in Malaya and acquired a small British agency house with a shipping arm that he built into Pacific Carriers Ltd., later to be the largest dry-goods bulk shipping company in Southeast Asia. His first large-scale enterprise, Malayan Sugar Manufacturing, was established in 1959 as a joint venture with Japanese companies, importing raw sugar from Thailand and processing it for export as well as for local consumption. Over the next decade or so he built up a complex network of business contacts in Thailand, where a new, dynamic sugar industry was developing, and in Indonesia, in partnership with Liem Sioe Liong, buying and selling sugar, flour, veneer, plywood and other commodities throughout the region.⁷

By the early 1970s, Kuok was being described as “the sugar king” of Southeast Asia, said to control about ten percent of the world’s sugar trade. He had also started Malaysia’s first major sugar cultivation project, Perlis Plantations, in association with a government agency, still a very profitable and efficient part of his vast business empire, although now only a tiny part of it (Malaysia is one of the world’s most insignificant sugar producers, but had a lucrative protected domestic market that he dominated.) During that Malaysian phase of his career he also set up the Malaysian International Shipping Corporation and also Malaysia’s first shipbuilding operation, which later branched out into a wide range of other heavy engineering projects there. He thereby built up close personal connections with two Prime Ministers, Tun Razak and Hussein Onn, whom he had earlier known at Raffles College, as well as a wide range of senior government officials. They came to trust him and rely heavily on his financial and technical knowledge. He was a...