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<body> <font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Introduction</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="one">The Third China</a></p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Ching Chong Chinaman, sitting on a fence,</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>The Overseas Chinese are spread throughout the nations of Southeast Asia, across the Pacific, and into the Americas. They represent a disparate set of communities and peoples who nevertheless share many distinctive traits and affinities that serve to distinguish them as a separate, somewhat heterogeneous, yet still coherent ethnocultural group. In this regard, as a distinctive ethnocultural orientation, they must be distinguished from the national cultures of either Mainland China or of Taiwan, though sub-elements of these populations share many affinities with the Overseas Chinese.</p> <p>Their heritage in the Southeast Asian region is very old, possibly as early as the Han dynasty, and, since their inception on the scene, they have been integral to the proto-historical and historical integration and development of the region.</p> <p>There are common false stereotypes and misconceptions about the Overseas Chinese that deserve to be corrected:</p> <p>1. They are one big family that extends from Mainland China across the world.</p> <p>2. They are naturally business-minded.</p> <p>3. They are cutthroat and unscrupulous in business.</p> <p>4. They are clannish and communally closed to the outside world.</p> <p>5. Their primary loyalties are to a foreign or native China.</p> <p>6. They are all involved in secret societies that perpetuate the vices of gambling, drugs and prostitution.</p> <p>7. They are a-political, only interested in making money.</p> <p>8. They are all immersed in an intricate web of "networks" and connections by which they achieve unfair advantages in business.</p> <p>9. Most Chinese achieve upward or downward mobility within a single generation.</p> <p>10. All Chinese are urban dwelling merchant-middlemen who tend to cluster in Chinatowns.</p> <p> </p> <p>Many of these negative stereotypes can frequently be found in implicit or blatant forms in extant literature that are themselves frequently and uncritically drawn upon as textual sources of understanding about the Overseas Chinese. Needless to say, promotion of such negative stereotypes serves to justify the continued discrimination against Overseas Chinese, the portrayal of the Overseas Chinese as somehow inhuman, immoral, alien, untrustworthy and disloyal. Thus there is a perpetuation of the myth of the "ugly Chinese."</p> <p>It is the intention of these essays drawn from research, experience and fieldwork among the overseas Chinese, to contradict all of these misconceptions about these people. It hopes to offer a revised and more realistic depiction of characteristics shared by most of the Overseas Chinese, and of their unique ethno-cultural and ethno-historical heritage that is intrinsic to the "Nanyang" and its furthest reaches abroad.</p> <p>First, the Overseas Chinese are not a single coherent group, but are to be characterized as a collection of a wide variety of different sub-ethnic cleavages that are a product of their complicated and variegated history. Chinese lineage structure is characterized not only by extensive fragmentation, or "segmentation," but also by "separation under one roof," such that whatever extended family ties exist, they are not as important or determinative of Chinese cultural patterns as they are often portrayed.</p> <p>Second, the nearly exclusive economic orientation of the Overseas Chinese does not necessarily mean that they are naturally business minded as a "race" or even that their shared culture somehow instills a business orientation from birth. The business pattern and economic orientation of the Overseas Chinese is both a wider cultural and social patterning of the Overseas Chinese communities. It is not necessarily of the people of these communities, and this economic pattern is principally the result of the cultural and social adaptation of these communities to different and often difficult circumstances in which they are often systematically, structurally and socially excluded from political decision-making and change-making processes. Many Chinese make poor, unsuitable and unsuccessful businessmen, and are often ill equipped to handle money wisely.</p> <p>Third, the Overseas Chinese are not unscrupulous or usurious creditors trying to take everything they can from native populations or host countries. While many Chinese businessmen will not think twice about price hiking to take advantage of shortages, and while almost no Chinese will give a cash return for products sold, most Chinese are reliable and dependable to give fair prices and good service on demand.</p> <p>They are not as a community competitive and unfair in practices in relations to other communities or in a common marketplace. They are frequently shrewd businessmen who are quick to take the greatest advantage of whatever opportunities they may have, and their great competitiveness in any endeavor is generated endogenously from within their own community. It is more a product of Chinese competing for survival against other Chinese, than by a corporate clan or community of Chinese competing against other outside communities or corporate groupings.</p> <p>Fourth, the Overseas Chinese, speaking strictly, are not for the most part organized by clans, but on the basis of patri-lineal descent groups, in which wider scale clan organization is not as vital to the ethos or success of the community as are other social factors of organization.</p> <p>The alleged "clannishness" of the Chinese is the product of other, relatively superficial characteristics about the Chinese that frequently antagonize non-Chinese. Not all Chinese "stick together" through thick and thin.</p> <p>The Overseas Chinese are not closed to the rest of the world, either as a community or individually, but are almost by definition of their inherently foreign predicament, more cosmopolitan and open in orientation that the predominant host cultures in which they are situated.</p> <p>Fifth, the Overseas Chinese can be blanketed as sharing a hyphenated and sometimes chameleon identity vis-a-vis their more "indigenous" hosts and also in relation with other Chinese. Their primary loyalty may be said to be to their family and wider circle of relations. Their wider sense of loyalty may be divided to some varying extent between their sense of duty to the host country in which they are born or live, and their sense of duty to the principle Chinese community of which they are members. This relation between host country and local community is often strained by government policies or social practices that lead to segregation or discrimination, and thus the wider sense of loyalty can as often as not be characterized by a sense of alienation and anomie as it can by disloyalty.</p> <p>If an image of a Mainland Chinese culture remains salient in the minds of most Overseas Chinese, it is usually as an anachronistic model of a world that existed in their youth or parent's youth as first or second generation immigrants. Or else it was of an archaic China remotely tied to 19th, 18th, 17th, even 16th century periods in China and which bear little direct relation to the actual China of the contemporaneous world.</p> <p>Older people may sometimes return to visit or live in the same villages from which they originally migrated, and successful businessmen may frequently travel to contemporary China to visit the world in which their people originated. But the Overseas Chinese as a whole, as a group or in any of its many parts, and most of its people, regard their local and wider Southeast Asian or other foreign context as the principle world and model.</p> <p>Sixth, while secret societies and their nefarious activities still exist to some extent throughout the overseas Chinese communities, this is not the same as the local gang activity that may occur in some communities. It is not as nearly as extensive or influential as they were under colonial regimes or in early era of mostly immigrant societies. Such organizations probably always involved a minority of the larger populations.</p> <p>Seventh, the image arises that the Overseas Chinese are fundamentally a-political in orientation, and that an almost exclusive focus is upon making money. While the Overseas Chinese can be said to be primarily economic in ethnocultural orientation, this does not mean that they do not have political motivations or interests or involvement, or that all their aspirations tend to be inherently a-political in orientation. A glimpse at the history and culture of Han China suggests that the traditional Chinese are so strongly politically oriented, that they never went anywhere, colonized or did anything that was not politically motivated in one way or another. The Overseas Chinese did not just lose culturally such a focal orientation of Chinese tradition. It is important to the understanding of the Overseas Chinese to recognize how the central political orientation of their ancestral culture was critically and radically transformed in its extension and subsequent development in the Nanyang--to turn itself into a form of economic orientation that was centrally motivated by political concerns.</p> <p>To further destroy this stereotype of the Chinese, about their primary "money-making" orientation, it is important to recognize that making money per se is not the end all or be all for most Chinese. The Chinese recognize the making of money as a principle means of securing other important things--opportunity and social advantage, greater mobility, status, and a better life for their family and progeny. It is especially a means of assuring security in a wider world of ever-shifting circumstances.</p> <p>Eighth, it is important to emphasize that not all Chinese either know or regularly deal with each other. Though extensive networks exist among the Overseas Chinese, most Chinese are not a part of these networks and many Chinese maintain few relations with other Chinese that can be said to characterize a network. Chinese as a community are often internally atomized by fierce competition and can be seen as disparate sub units of larger, inhomogeneous constituencies.</p> <p>Thus, the possibilities for business success within the Chinese community and by the Chinese, does not necessarily depend primarily upon success in cultivating or enlarging one's connections within such networks.</p> <p>Ninth, while there are frequent examples of a Chinese "Horatio Alger" rags to riches success story, or the reverse story of the fall to destitution within two generations, this is not necessarily the predominant pattern. The more usual and unspoken truth is that while the Overseas Chinese social structure is relatively open in many contexts and remains always fluid, it is almost everywhere also fairly fixed and stable. It is not completely open. Money begets more money, and poverty begets more poverty, and such that it is easier for a Chinese male born to a wealthy or prosperous family to succeed in life than it will be for his poorer Chinese cousins.</p> <p>Tenth, while a great proportion of Overseas Chinese are town dwelling merchants or craftsmen, there are many who live in rural settings or fishing villages and who farm and fish as the principle source of livelihood.</p> <p>Of course, these kinds of negative stereotypes often reinforce one another in different ways to form a kind of common sense rationale about the Overseas Chinese by which policies or practices of discrimination or segregation or persecution can be further justified. The notion that all Chinese are one big family that begins in Mainland China goes hand in hand with the notion of their intrinsic clannishness, community closure and unscrupulous practices, and the idea of the natural business-mindedness fits perfectly a Chinese world filled with elaborate and intricate business connections.</p> <p>To merely knock down such negative images of the Overseas Chinese without offering more positive images of them, or explanations for some of their apparent differences and "Chineseness," would be merely to make more room for other possibly negative representations of the Chinese. As with all prejudice, such stereotypes are founded on a lack of understanding or experience with the Chinese, and are motivated by a desire to maintain a boundary between the Chinese world that serves to effectively exclude their world as part of our own.</p> <p>To rehabilitate the image of the "Ugly Chinese," it can be asserted that a common, if very superficial, characteristic of many Chinese is a somewhat stolid, expressionless exterior countenance that hides all sense of inner feeling. This demeanor can be often easily misintrepreted in a wide-variety of situations as an expression of lack of empathy, or sympathy, or of unfriendliness, or coldness of the Chinese. Secondly, Overseas Chinese are often dealing in a different calculus of values and variables in social relations that they are reading in social situations. They are playing a different game on the same board with the same pieces. Many of the moves they are making are not so much for personal gain or profit as they are done out of familial considerations that often preclude other, potentially important, non-familial considerations. This can lead to a hidden familial a-moralism by Chinese, one frequently belied by a stolid or smiling face.</p> <p>To offer a more realistic depiction of "Overseas Chineseness," it can be said that most Overseas Chinese are extremely hardworking, industrious, frugal, likes to eat, spendthrift to the point of being "stingy," cheap, penny-wise and pound foolish, extremely practical and pragmatic, and religiously devout. They tend to think of family first and are strong on filial piety, very loyal and dedicated, social status conscious to the point of such status being an unconscious obsession, and frequently self-contradictory. They like food and cooking and eating is a focal ethnocultural orientation. The Overseas Chinese and their contemporaneous Mainland Chinese cousins share these basic traits. These facets are very fundamental implicit ethnocultural characteristics of Chinese, though many individuals may be different and deviate substantially from the norm. It is well known that children of wealthy or successful Chinese frequently lose many of these basic values, often to their consummate loss of grace in the Chinese world. </p> <p>  <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <b><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Chapter One</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Nanyang Civilization</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="two">And Chinese Heritage in Southeast Asia</a></p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>The Chinese presence in Southeast Asia, or what is known among the Chinese as the South Sea, or "Nanyang," dates back to before Christ. They have been so long present in the Southeast Asian setting as merchants, traders, miners, travelers, ex-patriots seeking refuge, that their presence has long been integral to the historical development of the entire region. The Chinese of the Nanyang have long been the classic sojourning entrepreneurs seeking their fortunes in foreign lands. Sojourning involved migration of men and the remittances of money back to the homeland. The Overseas Chinese, no matter how far they traveled or how long they remained away, never completely forgot or forsook their original ties back in their cultural homeland. Among the Nanyang Chinese it also involved local, overseas organization for the mobilization of men, resources, capital and money. "The sojourning pattern is found centuries back in Asia within China, between China and Southeast Asia, and within Southeast Asia..."</p> <p>Long present in Southeast Asia, perhaps as early as the first century A. D., and certainly by the fifth, the early Chinese communities were considered 'transient.' Many of these Chinese perhaps never left their boats for the sake of safety, thus partly explaining why so little direct archaeological evidence exists of their presence in the jungles of Southeast Asia.</p> <p>Early Nanyang contacts in Southeast Asia were primarily colonial, mercantile and maritime. Undoubtedly many of these first sojourners were 'fishermen-pirate-traders' issuing from the sea coasts of southeastern China, as well as being part of the regular southward bound excess of human population thrown off by perennial political turmoil in the great agrarian state of China. It is within the context of the proto-historical and historical periods of acculturative contact in the regional integration of Southeast Asian civilization, that we can take the example of the Chinese in the Nanyang as an important part of the civilizing process that occurred in Southeast Asia.</p> <p>Paul Wheatly notes that "even as early as the reign of Emperor Wu (141-87 B. C.) of the Former Han, Chinese imperial envoys with the help of men of Nan-yueh were exploring the South Seas in search of precious merchandise. The Chinese involvement in Southeast Asia probably stretches back time immemorial. "There was never any political barrier in the prehistoric and early historic days. The only incentive was to make a living, especially when people were unable to do so in their homeland. The search for such an opportunity took them to all the havens and lands that they knew, and they did not hesitate to exploit any possibilities which they happened to encounter abroad."</p> <p>The sojourning-middleman model of the Chinese springboard from the Southeast Coasts of China may have very deep roots--fishermen/pirates/traders may have from a very early time ventured forth anonymously upon the Nanyang to seek their fortunes and to hopefully return to their homelands.</p> <p>The ancient Sino-Viet culture of the Han Dynasty, so deep in time and so long ago that the correspondences are only suggestive ripples on the surface of the water, represented a period of Sino-Viet cultural amalgamation and local accommodation that was quite productive and creative of the people who were later to so ardently regard themselves as the Vietnamese. This was probably the earliest case known to resemble the kind of process of cultural amalgamation that later happened throughout Southeast Asia--in Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and to a lesser extent in Burma. It represents a case of continuous Chinese-indigenous amalgamation and creolization, that never fully became incorporated into the pan-Chinese, Han or Mandarin model of Imperial Civilization. Yet Imperial China's shadow was always cast indirectly, and except for the Chinese colonization of North Vietnam, and later, the Vietnamese "march South," it never had quite the same kind of acculturative or civilizing impact that Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism or even later Christianity, proved to have.</p> <p>Evidence supports the possible presence of Chinese upon the island of Borneo from as early as the 7th Century, and possibly even earlier, with archaeological evidence dating to 117 B. C., upon an old site in the region now occupied by Brunei and Sarawak. (Victor Purcell, 1966:11) Early Chinese Chronicles of the Liang (502-566) and Sui (589-618) Dynasties mention "P'oli," known since the Tang (618-907) Dynasty onwards as "P'oni" and thought to be the early name for Brunei. A description was given of its direction and of its inhabitants which fit well that of Borneo. Later chronicles mention the same kingdom comprising fourteen provinces extending along the northern Borneo coastline and as far as the Philippines. (John Chin;, The Sarawak Chinese 1981:1-2) It was a thriving and prosperous trade entrepot by the ninth century A. D.. Gifts of tribute to the Chinese court are recorded in 977 A. D. and again in 1082 A. D..</p> <p>It is worthwhile considering the larger economic/pioneering role of the Chinese in the regional integration of Southeast Asia. The 7th Century Indonesian Kingdom of Srivijaya developed into statehood in relation to its trade and sponsorship with China, as its trade with the west was controlled by Malays centered on the east coast of Sumatra. An even earlier kingdom of Kutai (500 A. D.) was situated at the lower reaches of the Mahakam River.</p> <p>Borneo has since the first centuries of the present millenium been the "heavily trafficked and well-trodden crossroads for many of the major civilizations of the East. Borneo and its peoples have played host to Indians, Arabs, Persians, and most notably, Chinese." (Hoffman, pg. 134)</p> <p>Robert Heine-Geldern cited evidence in Indonesia and in Borneo for a Chinese contact as least as early as the first century B. C.. "The ornamental designs of the Dayak tribes of Boreo and the Ngada of Flores are so clearly related to Chinese designs of the late Chou period that one can hardly avoid the inference that Chinese contacts started as early as the beginning of the third century B. C., and probably earlier." (1945: pg. 147)</p> <p>Chinese coins of the Chin and Han dynasty have been discovered at the mouth of the Sarawak River and coins dating from the Sung period have been unearthed throughout the island. (Runciman 1960:13)</p> <p>The traditions of Borneo and Sulu indicate that a Chinese province was established some centuries ago in the neighborhood of the Kinabatangan River, and the province had dominion over the Sulu River. It is mainly accepted, too, that a daughter of a Chinese 'prince,' who was in all probability the governor of the province referred to, came from the Kinabatangan River to marry the second sultan of Brunei, and from that couple originated the royal family of Brunei of the present day.</p> <p>But whatever the truth regarding the Chinese colonization of Borneo in remoter times, it is certain that by the early nineteenth century a considerable admixture of the ethnocultures was in progress. Intermarriage between Chinese men and Dayak women was common and St. John, at the request of the Raja, opened a school for the benefit of the offspring of such unions.</p> <p>"Truly speaking [St. John adds] the Chinese women up here are themselves the offspring of mixed marriages, but having been brought up in all the manners and customs of the Chinese, are looked upon as Chinese. The settled agricultural tribes between the Brunei and Murudu Rivers were considered good examples of Chinese and natives intermarrying." (Victor Purcell, The Chinese in Southeast Asia, 2nd ed. 1966:19-20)</p> <p>Excavations of Santubong in Sarawak attest to the existence of Chinese mining and smelting activity in that area during the T'ang and Sung periods (Cheng 1969:12-22.) Archaeological evidence of Chinese ploughs found in Borneo, similar to ones found in both the Philippines and in the Malayan Peninsula. Sepulchral pottery jars of the Han period, ceremonial "jars" of Chinese origin, were also found that were the principle item of trade of the Chinese, and the central part of a cult of some of the indigenous peoples of Borneo. This evidence corroborates early Chinese influence in the region. (ibid., pg. 20-1). Hoards of Chinese pottery, some dating to the T'ang and Sung periods (Runciman 1960:12-22) are kept by Dayak peoples as heirlooms throughout Borneo.</p> <p>"More impressive, aesthetically speaking, than the jars are the pottery and china revealed by the pick and spade in mineral exploration. Mr. Helms records that on one occasion his party found a number of paving tiles four inches thick, 'beautifully made of pebbles, concrete, quartz, etc. They had been polished, were clearly very old, and made by people of a higher civilization.' Were these, by any chance, relics of Chinese settlement?" (ibid. pg. 21-2)</p> <p>The presence of Chinese in Borneo is reflected in place-names such as "Kinabatangan" (Chinese River) and "Kinabalu" (Chinese Widow). Numerous legends and stories suggest the Chinese ancestry or intermixture of many Dayaks. (Hoffman, 1936-7)</p> <p>The presence of sacred Jars "played an important role not only in Borneo but among the Moi of southern Indochina, in the Philippines, in Formosa and in various other parts of the Indonesian region." (Purcell, 1951:27)</p> <p>They are found throughout the indigenous tribes of Borneo, especially among high ranking families, where they are displayed and highly regarded. A meter tall, smooth brown glaze, they were ornamented with a dragon design in relief below the rim. They are associated with brass gongs of different sizes, similar to those of gamelan. These heirlooms, besides having many practical functions, are symbols of rank and prestige and are often preferred goods for bride wealth and indemnity payments. They used to be resting places of the dead in many parts of the Island. These items were obtained from traders with outside peoples from down river. Salt, metal, cloth, and tobacco were also important in this trade.</p> <p>The Chinese have long figured in this "ulu" trade and resource exploitation of Borneo, as well as in its mining and agricultural pioneering. An early Kong Si system provided the organizational base for the mobilization of labor and resources in the development of trade and resource production in Borneo. Chinese sources of the twelfth century describe regular Chinese trading activity in Borneo (Purcell 1951:27-8) Chinese silks and porcelain, as well as native adoption of Chinese weights and money, were found by the Spanish traveling with Magellan in Brunei in 1521. Rattan, gutta-percha, beeswax, bird's nests, resin, aloe wood, incense, camphor, bezoar stones, Rhino horn, and illipe nuts were brought down river on bamboo rafts to a thriving Borneo market. Most of these trade items are found spread out over vast areas of primary forest tracts. The primary exploitation of these forests was mostly by the diverse peoples referred to as the "Orang Punan." Elaborate Trade networks with indigenous peoples, comprising coastal importers, itinerant merchant middlemen, sedentary garden villagers and Punan, have been in continuous existence through many centuries. Such networks brought Chinese into continuous contact and interaction with these people, as these people grew accustomed to their goods and their presence. Chinese now comprise a significant minority in Borneo, constituting most of the ethnic-dialect groups representing the Overseas Chinese. Intermarriage with local wives was frequent, especially in the earlier periods, in part because of the male-biased sex ratio among the Chinese, and because such conjugal unions facilitated economic relations with the indigenous peoples. More recently, such intermarriage is virtually nonexistent, in either urban or rural segments of Chinese society, and "Peranakans" of means are remarrying back into "pure" Chinese society. "When it does occur it reflects the low status of the individual involved and his difficulty in finding an acceptable mate within the bounds of his own ethnic group." (David Fortier, <u>The Chinese in North Borneo</u>, 1957:16-7)</p> <p>Besides the internal mechanics of rural trade, the successful pioneering trader in ulu Sarawak was likely to base his economic relations upon established social bonds. He was likely to be acculturated to the extent of having a local wife, learning to speak the local languages, and possibly adopting local dress and eating local food. Nevertheless, even though the traders were much influenced by the local way of life, they maintained, and were encouraged to retain, a Chinese ethnic identity because official constraints prohibited the development of mixed communities. No 'Sino-Dayaks' were officially recognized; one had either to be Chinese or a native, and for a Chinese to become a 'Dayak' was forbidden.</p> <p>Official colonial policies dictated that the Chinese traders and their mixed families had to retain their Chinese identity and to live in bazaars or on boats, but they did not strictly comply with such laws unless they were caught. Chinese acceptance of native culture among the Iban was part of an economic calculus tied to consanguineal relations of their native wive's kinfolk. "The situation in rural Sarawak was unlike that in the Philippines and Java in the early nineteenth century where metizo and peranakan communities, the products of marital unions of Chinese men and native women, had emerged, acculturated to the local native communities. While no such communities emerged in Sarawak similar to the metizo and peranakan because of official disapproval, a large totok group, culturally Chinese in every way, was to settle in the Lower Rejange by the turn of the century. (Daniel Chew, <u>Chinese Pioneers on the Sarawak Frontier, 1841-1941</u>, 1990:223)</p> <p>Political and social pressures beginning far to the North in China had long had a rippling effect that stimulated an ever southward movement of Chinese and their civilization. When their march south reached the South China Sea and they found land routes cut off to their advance, these same peoples took to the seas in expanding economic, versus territorial, frontiers. The closing of the southern borders with the newly won independence of Vietnam in the Ninth Century, and the gradual shift of commerce from Haiphong to the major port cities of Southeastern China, led to a growing maritime exodus and exchange of Chinese peoples over the whole of the Nanyang. Subsequent periods of migration of Nanyang Chinese are considered like 'waves' that fanned out from Southeastern China and swept across the entire Southeast Asian region and beyond.</p> <p>From the Tang and Sung Dynastic periods, circa the seventh through the tenth centuries, during which foreign trade in China became a more important source of revenue, there is an emergence of a somewhat separate and distinct merchant class. There arose a successful and wealthy bourgeoisie that did not fit into the traditional Chinese Mandarin system.</p> <p>The design and construction of more sea-worthy, deep-draft junks allowed the Chinese to venture further afield from the coastlines to which they previously clung so closely. This phase represented the early tribute-bearing/junk-trade missions that helped to establish Chinese political authority, as distant as it was, as well as to secure valuable exotic trade goods. This period was most notably climaxed with the voyages of imperial eunoch Cheng Ho. In command of a fleet of more than sixty large junks carrying more than thirty-thousand soldiers, he engaged in the "conquest" of many kingdoms, the establishment of Imperial Chinese influence and presence in the Nanyang, and in the founding of the trading port of Malacca in 1408.</p> <p>The next phase of Chinese activity in the Nanyang is linked to the political ascendancy of the Manchus over the Ming Dynasty. The "contact period" is marked by the introduction of European interests in the region, inaugurated by the capture of Malacca by the Portuguese only one hundred years after its founding, and cumulatively increasing competition for control over the region. Official Chinese interest in the Nanyang was withdrawn, and Chinese immigration to the Nanyang was even banned under penalty of execution. Thus, Chinese subsequently migrating to the Nanyang, from the mid-seventeenth until the early nineteenth centuries, were those who were politically oriented away from Manchu China, and who sought refuge in the Chinese communities of the Nanyang.</p> <p>Though European domination in Southeast Asia subordinated the role of the Chinese, it opened up new and lucrative niches for economic development in expanding colonial markets, and stimulated new waves of economic migration to the Nanyang that the Europeans hardly controlled, and in some cases even promoted.</p> <p>The Chinese, as a pariah merchant class, provided an important linkage in the articulation of the colonial system of resource exploitation. They became the inveterate merchant-middlemen and eventually the money lenders. They became agricultural pioneers of the tropical frontiers, miners, small planters, and overseers. They came to occupy the middle positions of the colonial administrative apparatus. They were also the source of a bottomless supply of cheap coolie labor, easily mobilized, transportable, extremely adaptable to adverse environments and difficult circumstances.</p> <p>Among the Chinese, a veritable Nanyang empire developed--a vast network through which the movement of labor, finance, capital and commerce was facilitated by a wide range of inter-linked exchange agencies and agents at every level and in every niche of the Southeast Asian setting. The relative mobility of "capital and labor increases Chinese responsiveness to market fluctuations, allowing them to bail out quickly from failures and capitalize fully on fleeting opportunities." (John T. Omohundro, 1977:117)</p> <p>The Nanyang of this period continued to prosper in the area of trade and finance to the point that it gained virtual monopolies over many sectors and areas of the Southeast Asian interregional economy--particularly rice and metal. Many of their practices were extremely exploitative, and their success at the hands of European colonists was often strongly resented by indigenous peoples.</p> <p>As Nanyang civilization; developed and grew more economically integrated, its agents grew increasingly situated by and entangled within local arrangements and became increasingly unable to uproot themselves in order to return to China. The line between sojournership and actual colonization was thus thin. As the ties to the homeland grew distant and were severed the Chinese who found themselves locally and regionally entangled within the Nanyang network, reoriented their outlook and attitude toward their local Southeast Asian context. The first thing they did was to send for their wives and children from China. First, brothers joined brothers, then "sisters" began increasingly to come and settle in Southeast Asia.</p> <p>By the late 19th Century, with new coolie labor immigration by the British, the sex ratios of the Chinese communities became stable. They had long been male biased. Increasing immigration of Chinese women tended to fix the Chinese identity of these communities and to stabilize the "transience" occurring within them. The increasing presence of Chinese women in the Nanyang reversed the trend toward intermarriage with local people and led to the formation of a Chinese community which maintained its separate biological and cultural identity--Nanyang civilization, as a typically "Overseas Chinese" cultural orientation, became more "complete." (Yen Ching-Hwang, 1986)</p> <p>The 20th Century, with its industrial modernization, and especially World War II, with the sudden and violent collapse of old colonial empires, brought a change in the position of the Nanyang in Southeast Asia, but not an end to its own economic empire. New Nationalisms throughout Southeast Asia supported structural policies of enforced assimilation, systematic discrimination, segregation and "ethnization," and even political persecution of the Chinese minorities of the Nanyang. In some aspects, the Nanyang empire has subsequently been slowly melting, or eroding under the gradual, long term impetus of these policies. But the Chinese, and their position in the Southeast Asian economy, has proven difficult to replace. Singapore as emerged as the Chinese owned capital of this empire, confering a stability and leverage to the otherwise insecure Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. The Nanyang has become the de facto Overseas Imperio im Imperium, or "Empire within an Empire," that extends southeastward from the southeast coastline of China, throughout Southeast Asia. It stretches across the Polynesian Pacific to eventually encompass the New World, the imperial pathways of the British Commonwealth, spreading its net even into the Caribbean and beyond to Europe. Newly emergent communities in Montreal, Seattle, Los Angeles and New York attest to the vitality and expansion of the Overseas Chinese economic empire.</p> <p>Alfred Kroeber's definition of "civilization" is the a floressence of culture characterized by an historically unique style pattern and by the rise and prevalence of capable "men of genius" working within the ethos of the civilization. It is fitting to describe the development of the Nanyang empire as a distinct form of Overseas Chinese civilization. Its predominant style patterning has been and remains the ethnocultural economic activities that allow the Overseas Chinese to virtually monopolize any Southeast Asian markets and to dominate all trade there. It has been complemented by a long line of Chinese Towkays and Big Men who stand in the annals of this civilization, whose unique style of genius was in making money and management of business</p> <p>The extensiveness of this economic empire is to be matched only by its subterranean character, the entrepreneurial efficacy and savvy of its agents, and the strength of social ties that have so effectively held it together through more than a century and a half of persecution, discrimination, hardship and struggle. A gigantic iceberg--it rears its tiny head above the surface of the Pacific only in Singapore and Hong Kong. Long a two-headed dragon, it has now become only a single entity--Singapore. Singapore is a strange feudalistic anachronism in a modern age of political capitalism and economic imperialism; a mercantile city-state; an island unto itself at the very tip of the Eurasian continent. But its influence is still strongly felt in almost every country bordering the Pacific, and in many countries beyond.</p> <p>The Nanyang can be seen as a vast network of criss-crossing pathways which allow labor, resources and capital to move in different, frequently shifting, directions. Against systematic discrimination or persecution, Chinese are faced with a range of alternative choices--they can either opt to assimilate completely into the local population, become enclaved and ghettoized, segregated and discriminated against, migrate 'back to china' or seek a new homeland in another part of the Nanyang. The flight of Capital from Hong Kong to the U.S., the Nanyang and the Commonwealth, is but one more example of this social historical movement of people, wealth, resources and culture.</p> <p>What directions Chinese take will depend partly upon the dialect group--Cantonese will take Cantonese pathways, and Hokkiens will follow Hokkien roads. Not all Chinese of the Nanyang hold Singaporean culture to be the model or primary orientation of their lives. The Singaporeans have, by and large, been cut from their roots to the Chinese homeland, but many Chinese throughout the Nanyang, Malaysia included, have maintained these ancestral ties for generations. Chinese may see Singapore symbolically as a success story, as a financial capital and trade center of the Nanyang.</p> <p>Perhaps the greatest illusion that a Westerner could entertain with regard to the Chinese is that they are all basically the same. The very basis of ethnic Chinese identity is its cross-cutting nesting of identities within a larger network of social distinctions on the basis of village, clan, kin-group, dialect, class, age, etc. Each Chinese has a place within the vast theater, and every Chinese is supposed to know this place. Indeed, ethnos, or ethnicity, for the ethnic Chinese, is the primary organizational principle of their society. Chinese typically make fine distinctions between other Chinese which are invisible to Non-Chinese eyes.</p> <p>Intra-ethnic Chinese distinctions have been referred to as "subethnic" identities based upon local, linguistic, and ethnic distinctions. It is highly ascriptive in character, being linked to the strong patrilineal reckoning of Chinese kinship.</p> <p>Chinese have successfully exploited this organizational "ethos of ethnos" in navigating and negotiating several different status-role identities within more than one organizational structure. They thrive on a fundamental status ambiguity, inter-positionality between structures, and in a kind of chameleoness of identity, in linguistic and cultural code-switching and mixing, that would befuddle others not of the same tradition.</p> <p>Chinese may well be one big family, but it is a family divided under one roof. The terminological distinctions made in kinship reckoning are fine and of massive detail. It is fitting that both Chinese Heaven and Hell are vast multi-tiered bureaucratic structures occupied by greater and lesser gods. Clan organization and a segmentary lineage structure facilitates mobilization as well as fine-tuning of internal differences. Trade associations, secret societies, Kong Si's, all cross-cut clan and lineage structures to weave Chinese into a closely knit, but open and flexible, social cloth.</p> <p>As an empire, the Nanyang is interregional, and incorporates a wide arc of humanity beneath its broad umbrella. Singapore has become the exclusive capital city of this empire, the central core of this civilization, and Singapore has also always been one of the principle places of the Straits Settlements.</p> <p>It is in regard to the background of Nanyang civilization and economic empire that we must understand the many pioneering achievements of the overseas Chinese in the integration of Southeast Asian civilization.</p> <p> </p> <p>  <hr> <b><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Chapter Two</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="three">The Political Economy of Nanyang Ethnicity</a></p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>The principle characteristic and enduring feature of the Nanyang has been predominant economic orientation--an orientation that has come to ethnoculturally characterize the Overseas Chinese, often negatively. It is argued that this most characteristic economic preoccupation of the Nanyang Chinese can be best understood in terms of their regional inter-positionality as an entrepreneurial pariah class of merchant-middlemen mediating the relations between the "dual economies" of the local native context and the larger regional/global market economy.</p> <p>The Nanyang of today are caught in the throes of a national identity crisis, or of a national double-identity. With the removal of colonial rule their social visibility became quite prominent as a pariah class. The modern era became the era for "competitive race relations" in a new pluralistic situation of complexity. Relations between ethnic groups are characteristically marked by ambivalence and ambiguity. The Chinese are faced with a problem of a "double identity" (Strauch, 1980) in which factors preserving their characteristic ethos of Chineseness came into conflict with factors related to their characteristic pragmatism in social relations and business. They were seen to come into direct competition, as an ethnic group, politically economically and socially with the indigenous peoples. They have faced an existential choice of redefining their ethnicity either in terms of cultural assimilation with the host society or in terms of systematic exclusion from its political, economic and social life. Despite growing competition, their roles and assets as merchant middlemen are not easily expendable and replaceable within the new retarded economics of the independent nations. "Economic interests are viewed in and ethnic framework come to be seen as structured by that ethnic framework. The shift is so subtle as to be easily overlooked, or ignored." (Judith Strauch "The Chinese Exodus from Vietnam: Implications for the Southeast Asian Chinese," 1980:11)</p> <p>  Ethnization, as a social process, is one of "diagonal stratification" and resource mobilization that cross-cuts vertical, political economic, and horizontal socio-economic and religious boundaries. It is a process critically tied to the economization and "marketization" or "commodization" of social relations, which is entirely impersonal and "knows nothing of honor", and which serves to redefine interpositional status-role identity within a larger developing framework. It was the very ubiquity of the Chinese middleman in the 'dual economies' of Southeast Asia that prompted J. S. Furnival to coin the term "plural society"--"to describe the pattern of specialization and division of labor along ethnic lines." (Janet T. Landa, 1983:86) Ethnic communities, emergent from such processes, define values as reward structures, "reinforcement priorities" or "resource systems," and come to compose networks of "opportunity structures".</p> <p>"Community closure" by the dominant groups against the weaker ones may be so effective as to render the latter unable to resort to their own "community formation" and "community closure" in order to improve their under-privileged position. In time, such groups may be driven to assume the position of a "negatively privileged status group". Its inability to effect its own community formation and closure, according to Weber, would result in two important consequences that can perpetuate the group's under-dog position. First, the denial of economic and political opportunities and, second, the consequent denial of social esteem which essentially rests upon the prior appropriation of economic and political powers. This means that individual's form a "negatively privileged status group" can be prevented from influencing the terms of their participation in the wider community on the basis of their social category. Furthermore, the representatives of the dominant groups through their "interest associations" can and will tend to regulate and control the negatively privileged, thus making the latter dependent on the former group. In time, a stereotype image about the relative position and social standing of the different groups within a community can be firmly entrenched, forcing the perpetuation of the status quo through the legitimization of social power by the privileged. (Lawrence Siaw, 1981:395-396)</p> <p>The basic features of plural societies include ethnic group boundaries, separate communities, ethnic differentiation of economic functions, roles, status and class, low rate of intermarriage and uneven distribution of wealth, power and opportunity, within a politically unified communal framework. Rulers and ruled are ethnically distinct, and there is an absence of shared communal values or consensus, either politically or culturally. Both economic competition and political conflict become cast in ethnic terms. There is between group "schismo-genesis" that generates potential for conflict. The marketplace is the only communal forum--an inter-ethnic "no-man's-land" in which different ethnic strategies and identities are played out against one another. Plural societies are complicated by the co-existence of overlapping and competing multiple political economic hierarchies of social stratification that become skewed by ethnization. Stratification in such contexts becomes "multidimensional" incorporating structural inconsistencies between individuals or even groups occupying different positions within several hierarchies. Relative inbetweenness constitutes a kind of status inconsistency which becomes viewed as a form of marginality which may "breed discontent and resentment." (Blumberg, 1972:pg. 22)</p> <p>The interpositionality of the Nanyang Chinese is that economically they are often in a superior relation, while politically they may be subordinate, and socially "extraneous" to the host societies in which they are operating.</p> <p>Max Weber distinguished three dimensions of social stratification--social class, political affiliation and status-groups. These three dimensions are usually inter-linked, though they may stand independently of one another. Status-groups are usually communities that may be amorphous in definition or composition, marked by a "status situation". It is every typical component of the life and fate of people that is determined by a specific, positive or negative, social estimation of honor. This may be part of a plurality and closely interwoven with "class situation" that is clearly linked to the decisive market "moment" in the realization of economic advantage and possession of property. "Like ethnic communities, status communities can also monopolize economic or occupational advantages. Implicit in this analogy is the close relationship between social status and ethnicity. Hence ethnic differentiation can be paralleled with social gradation. (Lawrence L. K. Siaw, 1981:395)</p> <p>In general, however, the status structure reaches such extreme consequences only where there are underlying differences that are held to be "ethnic". The "caste" is the normal form in which ethnic communities usually live side by side in a "societalized" manner. The ethnic communities believe in blood relationships and exclude exogamous marriage and social intercourse. Such a caste situation is part of the phenomenon of "pariah" peoples and is found all over the world. These people form communities, acquire specific occupational traditions of handicrafts or other arts, and cultivate a belief in their ethnic community. They live in a "diaspora" strictly segregated from all personal intercourse, except that of an unavoidable sort, and their situation is legally precarious. Yet, by virtue of their economic indispensability, they are tolerated, and indeed, frequently privileged, and they live in interspersed political communities. The Jews are the most impressive historical example. (Max Weber, "Class, Caste and Parties" 1946)</p> <p>Status-honor, like ethnic "pride," is normally linked to a particular "style of life" that is shared by members of the group--the expectation of which is linked to restrictions on "social intercourse." Such restrictions lead to stratification and closure between groups. Ethnic honor and status honor are closely linked, except that ethnic honor tends not to be as restrictive as status honor. This closure corroborates with Brown's hypothesis that ethnic diversity varies with closed hierarchies. Hierarchy begets cultural differentiation. Closed hierarchies can base such cultural differentiation upon ethnic distinctions between biologically "closed groups"--open hierarchies cannot be based upon such a presumption of ethno-cultural difference--such societies, like traditional Chinese society, have tremendous powers of universal incorporation. (D. E. Brown, 1976:95)</p> <p>Because the market place becomes the center of transaction and exchange between ethnic groups in a plural society, there is a "marketization" of inter-ethnic relations which become defined in terms of market-place and market-exchange transactions. While the voluntaristic and impersonal relations of market exchange tends intrinsically to reduce or ameliorate inter-ethnic conflict and difference, other factors serve to increase the possibility of such conflict. Political monopolization or intervention, the promotion of asymmetries of exchange and inequities of class, and competitive exclusion by common interest groups defined along ethnic lines, may all result in "exchange-generated conflict" which may include contests, competitions, disputes and tensions as well as socially expressed aggression. Such conflict becomes a form of negative solidarity or reciprocity. Trading specialists (i.e. Chinese merchant middlemen in Southeast Asian markets) become major foci of conflict relations. Such exchange conflict can be constrained by ritual or jural proscription, social distancing mechanisms or avoidance patterns that serve to define and delimit the range of possible interactions, or by displacement upon a third, neutral party. The inter-positioning of ethnically defined, "pariah" middlemen minority groups has the effect of creating social distance--economic spheres are the only zones of interethnic interaction, while marriage and kinship relations, social networks and religious affiliation, are kept structurally separate.</p> <p>Maintaining social distance has two contradictory effects. On the one hand, as we have seen, by socially separating the traders it focuses the conflict on them and diminishes the possibilities of its being offset by crosscutting conflicts. On the other hand, it insulates most community social relations from an important source of conflict and, as with the spatial separation brought about by markets, helps relieve the trader from the expectations of fair dealing and generosity that the peasants have among one another. This change of expectations, as does the market place, constitutes a mechanism for displacement of the exchange-generated conflict by focusing some of the tension on inter-ethnic group relations rather than on parties to an individual transaction. Such displacement helps explain the remarkable hostility often encountered by minority trading groups. It helps explain why traders who are the object of such hostility are not readily replaced by traders from the majority group: the latter are destroyed by the conflict inherent in their commercial activities or by the uneconomic behavior required of them if they are to avoid conflict. (Brian Foster, 1978:14)</p> <p>In plural contexts, the maintenance of ethnic differences, particularly for an intermediary group, may have a function of facilitating commerce. John T. Omohundro, in reference to the Chinese merchant community of the Philippines, sees ethnic difference facilitating economic transactions in five ways:</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1. Enhancing decision-making that is more objective, less biased, impersonal and goal-oriented.</p> <p>2. Mutual expectations of negative reciprocity across ethnic boundaries promotes caution between group boundaries, i.e., distrust.</p> <p>3. Ethnic stereotypes, mutually entertained, may be exploited to reciprocal advantage. "In fact, one might find that each group purposely developed their own personae for complementary business dealings."</p> <p>4. Differential reward structures may emerge that are complementary rather than identical and therefore competitive.</p> <p>5. Mechanisms may be regularly employed to reduce tension--"fixed price transactions".</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>The complementary side of the political-economic coin of economic marketization of ethnicity is the political process of "co-option" and bureaucratic encapsulization of majority-minority relations. The Nanyang was never an independent state in terms of territorial sovereignty, except in Singapore. Its intermediate status was determined by situational geo-political contexts and circumstances and by its adaptability to political changes in such contexts. "Encapsulization" by divisive national interests and global market political economies tied the Nanyang economic empire to a set of crosscutting chains of political authority and dependency. A bureaucratic tendency has emerged that minimizes the interaction between local groups within wider fields of action. "Chinese middlemen at all levels serve as specialized middle-men linking their fellow Chinese further down the scale into the Malay-dominated political system. Rather than integration per se, an attenuated encapsulation prevails. "(Judith Strauch, 1981:12)</p> <p>In this setting, linkages, alliances, and coalitions at all levels of society combine what appears on the surface to be situational flexibility and fluidity with a certain degree of underlying rigidity based on the givens of ethnicity and power. Center-periphery relations ideally incorporate not only elements of dominance, demanding compliance and submission, but also elements of solidarity, promising consonance and unity of interests as a basis for legitimacy and trust. Such solidarity must be found in common ethnicity or level of power, however. The Malay-dominated center shares a bond of common ethnicity with the Malay periphery, and bonds of common interest with the Chinese elites who share some power at the center, but in relation to the Chinese periphery an operational commonality is lacking. The Malay center dominates the Chinese periphery, but it is able to offer little direct inducement to or assurance of solidarity; instead it seeks merely to minimize alienation and fall back on acceptable neutrality. It is left to the subordinate Chinese elements of the center, from its ambiguous position of uncertain proximity to real power, to act as mediator and convey an aura of solidarity and inclusion embracing the Chinese periphery. It is a task that is not always accomplished. (Judith Strauch, 1981:13)</p> <p>The Nanyang Chinese have been noted for their characteristic failure to achieve the "community closure," deemed prerequisite to their ethnic political-economic mobilization. This is only in part due to their intermediate status within a host society and their lack of political-geographic autonomy. It also seems to be in part due to their communal "openness" and their assimilative power for universal incorporation. In fact, no where that the Chinese are not politically-territorially in control, are they able to effect any degree of "pan-Chinese" solidarity. They have long been involved in divisive, 'sub-ethnic' identities and affiliations, crosscutting organizations that tend to undermine unity of action and purpose. Political parties, common interests groups are always limited, internally divided and never "whole-hearted". The Chinese have been typically unable to assert authoritatively their "ethnic honor." "Indeed, history has shown that the Chinese....have had great difficulty in uniting as an ethnic entity against non-Chinese threats." (Lawrence Siaw, 1981:397) Their lack of achieving pan-ethnic solidarity or community closure, is held in part to account for their resorting to many illegal avenues "to satisfy their basic social and psychological needs for reward and recognition even among themselves." (ibid. pg. 397) The larger the Chinese minority, the more divisive and complex its internal organization became, and the more problematic its potential for unity of action. Sub-ethnic distinctions between different Chinese communities undermined such possibilities and prevented the formation of a genuinely pan-ethnic "Chineseness"--a stereotype more apparent from the outside than the inside. "Indeed, the more they try to express their 'Chineseness,' the more divisive they become." (ibid., pg. 402)</p> <p>Variety characterized the Chinese ethnic "identity" in Southeast Asia. It was originally based on the South Chinese dialects that distinguished groups within the Chinese community. This basic linguistic differentiation became enhanced by differences in occupation, class, nation of residence, and various other factors of the Nanyang. Much of it was an extension and social elaboration of solidarity patterns in Mainland China, in which common origin or place of residence remains to this day important factors of affiliation and solidarity. Another element of diversity within the Chinese community was added by the varying degrees of acculturation and accommodation of the Chinese to indigenous cultures, culminating in some cases to complete assimilation, but more often marked by the creation of new groups of acculturated Chinese. Some acculturated Chinese developed a coherent "new" identity, such as the Baba in Malaysia, while others in scattered communities were marked by less well-defined intermediate acculturated identities. (L.A.P. Gosling, The Chinese in Southeast Asia, Vol. II, 1983:2)</p> <p>The cultural ethos of the Oversea Chinese reflected their inter-positional social status--seen from the inside, we have a basic shift from an etic "circumstantialist" perspective toward a more emic ".primordialist" account of common values, heritage, and tradition which makes for a theme of Chinese unity in diversity in the Nanyang. Promotion of common ethnicity is a means of one status grouping to achieve political-economic mobilization and social consolidation vis-a-vis' a counter-reference group. Marginal groups frequently develop an ethno-centric orientation, an ethnic "honor", of superiority reflecting internal cohesion and solidarity "born of the need for mutual protection and reassurance" in the face of structural ambiguity and insecurity and social subordination. This position of common marginality may favor achievement, and if the group has had past experience in market relationships, this achievement motivation is likely to become expressed economically--thus we have a common, core Chinese value orientation emphasizing achievement, pragmatism, entrepreneurial capacity, risk-taking behavior, social mobility and education. They came as a new immigrant group with previous expertise in money handling and in social organization for business--such values contributed to economic success which reinforced and validated such values.</p> <p>The Chinese community grew and evolved out of an environment that required two levels of value orientation. At the individual level, emphasis was on work, competition, frugality, achievement, success and accumulation of wealth. At the social level emphasis was on co-operation, mutual help and common endeavor within the family, the clan association, and the lineage whether in fact or in attribution. The Chinese community thus grew out of a response to the challenges of survival, growth and consolidation. Its ethos of work, achievement and success was consistently manifested through the social framework and was relatively unstructured."(Tham Seong Chee, 1977:320)</p> <p>Values promoting entrepreneurial and organizational success in a foreign, frequently hostile environment, were thus selected for at a culturally, and possibly even a genetic, level, and once acquired, these values were firmly impressed and transmitted to successive generations. Education in Chinese schools became a critically important mechanism for the transmission of such Chinese values. The Chinese class hierarchy prized economic achievement, as was thus completely open to upwardly mobile individuals. Success was not just individual, but concomitantly familial and organizational. If upward mobility was paramount, downward mobility was also highly devalued. For every successful Towkay, a thousand poor coolies wasted their lives by hard work, malnutrition, opium and gambling. Upward mobility was rapid, within a single generation in many cases, and was associated with a series of correct and lucrative business transactions. Exploitation of opportunities, often illicit, provided opportunities for quick gain and loss. Statistically incremental social mobility, slower but more stable, rewarded the combined efforts of trans-generational lineages and family and clan networks--one's ancestors laid the foundations for the success or future of future generations. These values were reinforced by the cult of ancestor worship and the ethos of parental authority and filial piety. A value emphasis on education as a legitimate and pragmatic mechanism of social mobility, also reinforced this ethos.</p> <p>Civilization has been defined in terms of its characteristic style patterns and by the incidence of great men, or cultural genius, that defines and elaborates these style patterns. (A. L. Kroeber, <u>Style and Civilization</u>, 1959) In the case of Nanyang civilization, what is clearly evident is a core cultural value orientation and an amazingly high and consistent frequency of a long list of successful Merchants or Towkays or "Kapitan's China" who defined their genius in organizational networking skills.</p> <p>The social networking of the overseas Chinese provided screens of support as well as screens of opportunity and platforms for mobility. In these networks, five categories of relative ethnic distance/trust are distinguishable--kinship being the closest, atomistic category, and extending outwardly until a line of solidarity is passed. Each of these categories occupies a special place within the overall communal structure, and individuals occupy multiple positions in relation to others within all these categories. "This implies that different patterns can be predicted for each category of members corresponding to their location in the social structure."(Janet Landa, 1983: pg. 98) This leads to a field of decreasing ethnic identity with increasing social distance, "there is a tendency for insider networks towards sub-ethnic homogeneity." "Generally, the strategy of successful merchants seemed to be to maintain large numbers of persons in the "known" category through minimal participation in a large number of association and social activities. If they subsequently needed to contact someone either for information or to initiate a business transaction, common group memberships and prior acquaintance smoothed the way." (Clifton Barton, 1983: pg. 60) Networking success among the Chinese has been found to be corelated to kinds and degree of network involvement in the course of an individual's career development. It is also related to the percentage of kin-related and personalistic ties, use of more "inside" kinsmen as coworkers rather than as "outside" benefactors, and the use of "fictive" kinsmen as "outside benefactors." "Almost all Chinese...have available to them a wide variety of social relationships with which to reinforce their commercial connections....To have connections with persons or businesses who offer favours, loans, emergency assistance or inside information, who can be trusted and by whom one will be trusted, is clearly to have a commercial advantage in an erratic, potentially hostile, highly competitive economy..." (John T. Omohundro, 1983:67-8)</p> <p>In the Philippine Chinese merchant community, according to Omohundro, there is a constant development through the cumulative effects of many individuals making decisions "to secure their security and livelihood.....change in the merchant community comes from the statistical trend of these small and constant network adjustments." Every merchant is active "in this statistical trend of minute changes over time...Individuals are ruined and rewarded and the resulting pool of cultural values and strategies, though based predominantly upon pre-existing cultural material, is altered in emphasis, in proportions." According to Omohundro, no single system of network relation or decision making will always assure success of an individual merchant, because the background of operations is in a state of continual flux. Success is a question of chance, but merchants hedge their bets by keeping track of the shifting web of relations within an insider's information loop. "And when successful Chinese merchants' patterns of social and business networks are imitated by or passed on to others, while failures either change their ways or leave the ethnic group, then the 'Chinese community' is a changed entity." (John T. Omohundro, 1983: 80)</p> <p>The marginal position of the Chinese community with host societies sometimes meant that normal avenues for status recognition were sometimes effectively closed to its members--encouraging them perhaps to seek and find alternative means of self-expression and empowerment, and to maintain a low profile visibility vis-a-vis the host society. One core characteristic of Chinese communities overseas has been the relative invisibility of a great deal of their socio-economic power. "One of the basic features of Chinese business enterprise is the extent to which success is kept hidden from outsiders." (Clifton Barton, 1983: 47-8) The use of front-men, or ghost-partners, and obscure business fronts, are typical strategies of businessmen who wish to obscure their activities from local officials and operate beyond the reach of tax collectors. "Often the basis of a multi-million-dollar enterprise turns out to be an inconspicuous shopkeeper, dressed in nothing but a pair of shorts, sitting in a small, dark and very old-looking business establishment which differs not at all from scores of similar firms on the same street. (ibid. pg. 48). Social order and cultural ethos reinforce one another.</p> <p>"To the Chinese, money and marriage is serious business." Family and marriage, seen from such an emic point of view, become important aspects of maintaining Chinese ethnic solidarity and enhancing social mobility. "Love will grow." Marriage frequently becomes a business merger--whether or not love is involved. "The consequence of this endogamy and residential stability is a thick web of kin and business interconnections that serve to reinforce partnerships, import-wholesale-retail distributor chains, credit arrangements, commercial apprenticeships and other business deals." (John T. Omohundro;, 1977:96)</p> <p>Thus, it is seen that ethnic boundaries and identities are policed from within as much as constrained from without. Ethnic consciousness becomes a paramount process in the formation and maintenance of such boundaries. It functions not just as cognitive models, symbolic systems, or shared values and conceptions and practices, but as an internally consistent and externally efficacious behavioral ethos of a common "way" or "style of life" that results in the formation of characteristic kinds of "authoritarian power structures" and corresponding "achievement motivations." This becomes part of the larger process of "ethnization" that involves the politicization of ethnic categories, labels, identities, markers, and boundaries, and the corresponding "economization" of ethnically defined and available "resources." "Ethnic groups maintain their boundaries in part by supporting a certain set of values, or reward structures, that individuals can use for self-ascription and self-evaluation. In the language of the social psychology of bargaining, (ethnic groups) may differ enough in their payoff matrices by virtue of membership in different ethnic groups that trade can be rewarding for both. These payoff matrices are composed of as many motivational factors as the researcher wishes to insert...."(John T. Omohundro, 1977:132)</p> <p>Ethnicity is an inherently multifaceted phenomenon--it has a variety of different aspects and dimensionalities. "Analyses have always been couched in terms of cultural definitions, of perceptual and cognitive categories, of social distance and solidarity of groups, of boundary definition and maintenance, of conflict and competition, of emergent versus conservative qualities of the phenomenon, and so forth--and all hold some validity...." (Judith Strauch, "Multiple Ethnicities in Malaysia: The Shifting Relevance of Alternative Chinese Categories" <u>Modern Asian Studies:</u> Vol. 15, no. 2, 1981:235) "Careful analytical distinctions must be drawn between different conceptual orders of 'ethnicity' as they apply to a wide range of self-conceptualizations and social behavior and experience."(ibid.: pg. 236)</p> <p>According to Strauch, ethnic groups, ethnic identity, and ethnic categories are separate but interdependent phenomena. Ethnic identity and categories may operate independently, but ethnic groups, with the connotation of some form of consensus or corporate, functional organization, must be built upon internalized identities and categories, and in turn reinforce these. Ethnic categories promote order and expectability in complex, heterogenous social situations--ethnic identities result from a labeling process relating to categorical expectations of social behavior. "The social meanings of ethnicity, therefore, depend directly on the wider social context of which it is only a part, once the meanings have social significance in that they enable behavior to be predicted." (Mitchell 1974:23) Ethnic groups are the behavioral, social reality that categories and constructions of ethnicity underlie and in turn from which they derive.</p> <p>In this regard, we can make a sociological distinction between a structural level of analysis of ethnic group and structure which is primarily articulated in terms of economic exchange, political organization and interest, class organization and religious orientation, and a social level involving interpersonal, face-to-face, interethnic and intra-ethnic interactions. Differences that arise from and primarily exist upon the structural level may not be apparent upon the social, interpersonal level. Individuals may readily cross ethnic-group boundaries, and individual ethnic classifications and identity may not completely coincide with these boundaries. Tension may exist as a "subsurface" phenomenon--as a latent potentiality of structural rift and schism. Structural discrimination may exist where social discrimination does not. "...although it is a locally salient subethnic category--e.g. Cantonese or Hokkien demographic ascendancy--that will determine the choice of language used in the street, it is the centralization of power with an ethnic group of a higher order--Malays--that determines the structuring of ethnic groups at the most inclusive level of ethnicity--Chinese as opposed to Malays." (Judith Strauch, 1981:245) There is a general need to maintain some form of alignment between the structural and social levels of interaction--social conflict may lead to structural breakdown and change, while structural contradictions may result in social conflict.</p> <p>Judith Strauch made the point that the Overseas Chinese social organization is based upon a form that incorporates ethnicity as a central principle--"the principle for segmentary opposition of subethnic cateogries." Ethnic identity for the Nanyang Chinese exists as a multi-tiered structure. The broadest level, defined from within, is a kind of pan-Chinese cultural chauvinism that is connected to sharing in an Imperial civilization several thousands of years old. "But in contrast to most of the rest of the world, China, while evidencing rich cultural variation at regional and local levels, maintained a striking degree of unity and integration at the higher level of empire for more than two millenia." (ibid, pg. 239) Part of this pan-Chineseness is a common script, a common religious orientation, and a common "Chinese" cultural orientation. This pan-Chineseness entails that whatever the sub-ethnic distinctions, which are many and elaborate, every Chinese is somehow, however distantly, related to every other Chinese within a large hierarchy of Chinese ethnicity. As one author remarked--the Chinese are one big family.</p> <p>Strauch recognized the similarity between the Chinese and African models of segmentary opposition, but noted that the Chinese model, because of Imperial integration in China, was characterized by its "vast inclusiveness." There is thus a common symbolic and cultural identity of Chineseness instilled through ideological, economic and political integration that endured for centuries. "Thus the emigrant Chinese could and did recognize common ties, in ascending order, with village mates, with members of the same standard marketing system (and both of these might also be lineage mates), with non-kin from the same intermediate marketing system or administrative unit of the lowest level, or from the same county, prefecture, province, region, and ultimately from the same empire." (.i.Judith Strauch;, 1981:239)</p> <p><br> At another level, are Chinese groups defined by nationality of residence--Thai, Singaporean, Indonesian, Malaysian, Burmese. This level is defined from without by contradistinction and competition with native populations and other minorities in plural societies. This level of ethnic differentiation has emerged as the most structurally salient to the Overseas Chinese. Sub-ethnic categories are based primarily upon the place of origination in China: province, county, city, even township. Regional variations of Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, Teochiu, etc., are distinctions that are reflected in linguistic variations and differences as well as in minor cultural variations. "Further segmentation is likely to occur within any given host locality according to smaller geographical units of origin..."(ibid., pg. 239). Distinctions also come to be made on the basis of lineage or clan identity as well as common surname. Though identity with ancestral homeland may have become quite attenuated, the Chinese never severed ties from the homeland or their identification with their ancestors' native place, but rather added more levels with each successive move. Distinctions are also sometimes made in reference to the current location of the Chinese at the local, state and national level. "At different times and places in history many of the various levels of Chinese ethnic and subethnic identities available have served in turn as the bases for group formation, while the others remained meaningful, for the time being, merely as categories." (ibid, pg. 240)</p> <p>According to Strauch, Chinese ethnic identity shifts and adjusts itself to changing political circumstances and historical contexts. "In each context, ethnicity has a specific meaning, and in each, a particular conceptual order of ethnicity underlies the sense of commonality of purpose that defines the ethnic 'group'." (Judith Strauch 1981:240)</p> <p>Within the colonial framework of a plural society, immigrant Chinese communities were divided along sub-ethnic lines in both cooperation and competition--sub-ethnic identity delimited the field of opportunities and actions open to the immigrant. Although internal class distinctions existed, these were of far less significance in daily life than ethnic solidarity. "In sum, cleavages and alliances within Chinese immigrant society were both complex and of daily significance, whereas for all but the elite, contacts between Malays and with Europeans were few and relatively unimportant."(ibid., pg. 242)</p> <p>Regional contrast lies in the fact that in Malaysia, unlike Thailand and the Philippines, for example, there exists no transitional ethnic category, halfway between Malay and Chinese and able to move in either direction at will. The Baba and Nonya of the colonial period are no longer possible in the post-colonial era. Islamic nationalism demands total adherence, allowing for no half-Muslims: Malays are, virtually by definition, Muslim, and Chinese are, almost without exception, non-Muslim. The Straits Chinese, like Indonesian Peranakan Chinese, are often thought of as semi-assimilated, speaking a home language that is a sinicized form of Malay, and adopting certain Malay food habits and clothing styles (Freeman 1965). But they cannot situationally opt for Malay or Chinese identity by choice, as some Thai Chinese might choose between Thai and Chinese labels. "Chinese do not take Malay names, and intermarriage is practically negligible, among urban educated classes as well as among more parochial rural segments of the population. Chinese female children (often infants) are sometimes adopted by Malay families, but they are then raised wholly as Malays, and often come strongly to deny any Chinese parentage despite their Chinese physical characteristics." (Judith Strauch, 1981:245)</p> <p>The Kong Si system developed throughout Southeast Asia as a form of social structural integration that depended upon establish trade and exchange relations and partnership based upon an ethnic Chinese ethos of reciprocal trust and the notion of "dependability." This system tied planters, middlemen and agriculturalists or miners and their laborers in the same overarching network that focused on the major Chinese settlements in Southeast Asia. Cross-cutting ties of dialect, lineage, village association, tended to reinforce these bonds, but even more importantly, kinship ties were the best available means of cementing a dependable network.</p> <p>According to Clifton Barton, success of Chinese in Vietnam depended almost entirely on the mechanisms of interpersonal relation and upon a calculus of trust and reliability of possible partnerships, "in the absence of a well functioning formal legal system." "The Chinese approach to business was based upon personal relationships and word-of-mouth agreements. And these verbal agreements relied solely on mutual trust--sun yung--backed by informal group sanctions. Under these rules, if a merchant was not trustworthy and reliable, that is, if he lacked sun yung, it would be impossible for him to do business. Once the fact that a merchant had failed to honour his word became known, other merchants would simply refuse to do business with him." (Clifton Barton, 1983:53)</p> <p>We can see Straits societies, as the pioneering forerunners of the later conglomerate Nanyang society, playing a pivotal role in the development of the Nanyang civilization in Southeast Asia. A Russian study of the Nanyang social structure by Simoniya reveals a vast financial- credit-market system which extends throughout Southeast Asia, with Chinese merchant-middlemen, within a colonial and neo-colonial framework, serving as the key articulators of the entire regional political economy. Within this system there emerges a resolute class structure in which plantation laborers and coolies are at the bottom, small petty merchants and planters range somewhere in the middle, and urban based professionals and financiers are at the apex. Economic stratification in Overseas Chinese society of Sarawak for instance is arranged like a pyramid of social relations with the base represented by laborers and agriculturalists of the rural zones, with an intermediary class of "rural bazaar shopkeepers in the middle" and an elite of big businessmen at the apex. Power and wealth is derived through unequal structural relations from the base through the middleman structure, and concentrates at the apex. The latter control the economy and become the de facto leaders of the community. "Whether in the pre-war or post-war period the economic strata in the Chinese community have stayed substantially unaltered. It is through this economic stratification that social power is channeled and leadership structure traditionally developed." (John Chin, 1981:pg. 76-7)</p> <p>Social stratification exists within, defines, and is defined by, a continuum of social interaction, enduring relations and interpersonal experience which exist throught time and across space. Social stratification is transmitted through the generations and between different groupings and sub-groupings--it delimits group boundaries and asymmetries of power, and, in the sense of transcending the lived experience of any single individual, must be considered to be corporate in structure.</p> <p>Social stratification can be seen to underlie ethnic stratification, boundaries, groups and identities. Just as social stratification varies through time and across space, so too do ethnic differences vary continuously in a corresponding way. Such continuous variation is the basis for speaking of an ethno-cultural continuum; of human experience. It sometimes happens, as in the cases of radically plural societies, that ethnic stratification becomes the defining principle of social stratification, with the resulting "ethos of ethnos." In such cases, ethnic differences and ethnic identities come to take on a social significance, and a real potency, which they might not otherwise have had. Also, defining social ethos in primarily in terms of ethnos tends to constrain and shape its patterning in ways that it might not have otherwise been shaped.</p> <p>Though perhaps inextricably interrelated, the two kinds of phenomena--social stratification; and ethnic stratification--are yet separable and potentially independent processes. Socio-cultural homogeneity within a society may preclude some of the organizational problems which heterogeneity causes, and ethno-cultural differences also entail its own kinds of dilemmas. Yet stratification occurs in either case, and in neither case does such homogeneity or heterogeneity preclude the potential for competition and conflict on the one hand, or cooperation and social integration on the other.</p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p>  <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <b><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Chapter Three</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="four">Overseas Chinese Society</a></p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>Few accounts of Overseas Chinese social structure exist. The received account puts the Cantonese amahs and rickshaw pullers at the bottom, followed by labourers and miners, then skilled craftsmen and small shopkeepers, then more weathy middlemen, factory owners and successful shopkeepers. At some point in this rise to fortune successful businessmen are able to send some of their sons to good universities through which there then arises a professional class of lawyers and doctors. Above this are the Towkays and owners of the big business, and at the top are the banking-credit Moguls There are some interesting facets of the pyramid of Chinese society. First, it is relatively open. It's openness is defined by lack of trade or craft specialization among any subgroups, hence the ability for new entrepreneurs to readily enter, compete in and succeed in different fields. It is also defined by the lack of restrictions of inter-lineal or hypergamous marriage pattern, except for the prohibition of surname endogamy, which is frequently violated or gotten around by some redefinition of one's surname or ancestry. Thus the hardworking son of a poor family may marry into the wealthy family of not so hardworking girls, or alternatively, a girl from a poor background may nevertheless be betrothed at an early age to a boy whose family achieved some success.</p> <p>But the stereotype of the pattern of upward and downward mobility within a couple of generations belies a more stable class system operating within Overseas Chinese Society which can be characterized by several facets:</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1. the appropriation and conspicuous consumption of status symbols and prestige by those who can afford them,</p> <p>2. the cultivation of a haute' value culture among the wealthy Chinese,</p> <p>3. the cultivation of attitudes and values of the innate and natural superiority of the wealthy over the poor,</p> <p>4. Attitudes of paternalism and condescension of the poor by the wealthy,</p> <p>5. The cultivation of connections in marriage and business between families of wealth that provides unusual screens of opportunity and support networks for the offspring,</p> <p>6. A system of giving or saving face that is socially asymmetrical according to perceived class differences based upon obvious or conspicuous markers of identity. Not giving face to poor people by rich people can be interpreted as both a statement of innate and social superiority of the rich over the poor, and also as a way of the rich "saving face" in relation to the poor, in which context "giving face" would represent a compromise and symmetry of status between rich and poor.</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>Another way of considering this phenomena is to realize that the rich will make the best efforts to provide the best opportunities for success and good fortune for their children through business connections and opportunities within the family business. The children of the rich are more likely to be taught those particular kinds of values, orientations, beliefs, and practices that lend themselves to wealth. At the same time, the children of the poor will neither have those opportunities, enrichments, nor learn the right styles of life associated most with wealth.</p> <p>Of course, as is well known, within the Chinese social system these practices or patterns do not always work out in the manner expected. Frequently the children of the rich manage to become quite poor, squandering away the fortunes of their parents, while the children of the poor frequently manage to become quite rich, learning to skimp and save and pinch and invest the hard way up.</p> <p>It can be said that the same factors that lead to the success of a Chinese, the open competition, the networking, risk-taking, can more than often as not lead to failure as well. It will not do to merely discuss the structure or models of Chinese society without also discussing particular patterns associated with Chinese mobility within the system--these include an ethnocultural emphasis upon early socio-economic independence, money-handling, familial interdependence, entrepreneurship, risk-taking, education and its practical payoffs, and the respect for authority.</p> <p>The aspects that drive the Chinese social structure are the fierce competition from below, the face-to-face system of interpersonal relations upon which class boundaries become defined and negotiated, and the shear verticalness of class asymmetries in which those who are more fortunate treat with uncharitable disdain those without, and those without are left pretty much to their own means to survive.</p> <p>While there are a few screens of support offered through charitable Chinese associations to the poor and the aged, these do little to actually ameliorate the condition of the poor and the wretched, and even less to provide opportunities that may be a means by which to escape their poverty. Otherwise, as one old Cantonese uncle told us, who worked in menial jobs his entire life, the rich Chinese have never done anything to help the poor Chinese.</p> <p>The lack of charity exhibited by most Chinese should be interpreted as a sign of the nakedness and asymmetry of class relations within Chinese society. Attitudes and values of charity within the Chinese community finds its expression indirectly through their religion and ritual ceremonies, in which giving of charity is symbolically structured as propitiation to the Gods.</p> <p>Examination of the Chinese class system requires that there be available to virtually all Chinese certain mechanisms for achieving mobility within Chinese society. The first mechanism available to the most poor is geographical mobility, and can be considered a risk taking strategy in which the long-term payoffs make the short-term costs of relocation and reentry into an alien social system potentially more lucrative. It was this strategy that most of the original immigrants of the Overseas Chinese were (and still are) following when they first arrived in the Nanyang, and it continues today in many ways, as in the exodus of labor and even skilled professional to more developed core areas, via the network of Chinatowns that are available.</p> <p>The second mechanism of social mobility, one which seems to be most evident among the second generation and the sons of the poor original immigrants, are the apprenticing to some other Chinese business man in order to acquire the skills, experience and knowledge to begin a business, working very hard and frugally to save money in order to have enough overhead. Eventually they "step out" to start their own business, in however a modest scale. Few Chinese men will thus remain very long in a menial or underling position whether in Government or some Towkays business, being poorly paid and without much hope of rapid advancement. They eventually strike out on their own in some kind of entrepreneurial activity, which, through hard work and intelligence, they turn into a successful business, gradually expand, and eventually prosper, to emerge at the twilight of their careers as respectable mechants of the middle or upper middle class.</p> <p>The third mechanism of social mobility, one that occurs more among the middle class merchants, is what, for want of a better term, can be called "familial mobility" in which the children or brothers and wives of an extended household, along with the resources of other non-familial residents or workers, pool resources and labor to make a competitive go of a business, and to make it prosper and yield profit. This strategy frequently entails some sacrifice of some members of the family in order that other members of the family may achieve greater mobility, and in turn, pay back something to the rest of the family.</p> <p>This form of social mobility should be regarded as an intermediate form between the entrepreneurial risk-taking of the children of the sinkehs, and the more formal means of achieving mobility through education, which in most circumstances in the Nanyang, are the prerogatives of the upper-middle class Chinese.</p> <p>Thus entire families, sons and fathers and sons wives, may work together to make a go of and extend a business, whether it is chicken selling at a couple of tables in a morning market, or photocopying in a shophouse, or making and selling biscuits, or a motorcycle repair shop, or selling hardware and tools at a booth at "Cheap-side." Several sons may continue working for the business, in order that one son who is the oldest or the most serious in his academic studies, may go abroad to further his education and hope of gaining a better job in the world.</p> <p>The pursuit of education as a legitimate means of achieving social mobility within a society has long been respected by the Overseas Chinese, and the Overseas Chinese families and communities, almost without exception, promote high standards of education and academic achievement in the world. The style and manner in which this is done may not always be the same, as a Mandarin and more Confucian style education is strongly promoted by the more "Chinese" of the Overseas Chinese, while more westernized and English speaking Chinese prefer a western style education. The limits of a traditional style education in achieving position in the wider world are recognized, in spite of its apparent strengths, especially in regard to numbers and arithmetic, and English or other mediums of education are actively sought out.</p> <p>Thus, at some point, there occurs a separation within the Chinese community between those who know only Chinese and work and prosper almost exclusively within a sinocentric and Chinese defined world, and those other Overseas Chinese who share in both worlds, or who at some point opt for opportunities in the wider society at some loss of their own traditional Chineseness. Not all rich Towkays of the typical Overseas Chinese style of education speak English or are highly educated in English or national medium schools.</p> <p>This separation of the Overseas Chinese communities is defined by a rift that occurs sooner or later within extended families, between those who have moved to the West or who have moved up and out of Chinatown proper, and those who remain caught within its intricate webs of relationship and obligation.</p> <p>Yet another option of social mobility for Chinese is via marriage, and this is an option open and exercised by all classes, especially in terms of the pre-arrangement of marriage partners by parents.</p> <p>It is expected that this is particularly an option of choice available to the upper classes, as the availability of prospective marriage choices, the "field" has much better prospects than it does for the lower classes.</p> <p>In general, it can be said that whichever spouse is the poorer, will move into the household and hence the sphere of influence of the wealthier family. The spouse in such situations will be at a definite disadvantage within the purview of his or her in-laws, and will be expected to submit to and work beneath the authority of the elder in-laws and their relations.</p> <p>It is most certain that marriages are still arranged for purposes of mutual advantage among the children of the wealthy, and represent as much the beginning of business partnerships and extensions of trade networks as it is a matter of arrangement in love.</p> <p>This pattern explains the phenomena of matri-local residence that is noteworthy for the Baba's and Nonyas and that has yet to be adquately explained, except by Maurice Freedman who noted that it was merely a minor modification of a long established pattern of an alternate and acceptable arrangement which sometimes occurs in a mostly patrilocal and patriarchal social order. To emphasize this point even further, it is to the advantage of a rich Towkay to wed his daughter to a poorer, but hard working young sinkeh, who can then be a good and dependable addition to the household, than to marry the daughter out and "loose" her to the possibly spoiled son of another Towkay, who may already have or eventually acquire other wives.</p> <p>A sixth mechanism of social mobility must be mentioned as characteristic of and important to the understanding of the "structure" of Overseas Chinese Society, and this is the systematic extension of a businessman's interests, either individually, or familially, or in partnership with other businessman, and a diversification of business involvement into more than one or two concerns. The resource base and profit margin is thereby extended, the risk of total loss reduced, and the chances increased of gaining a larger profit margin in any one or two areas.</p> <p>The options in this regard are the buying of shares in different business, or the farming out of shares in one's own business, in setting sons up in management of different businesses, and in playing the stock market and investing the money in different business ventures. It would come as a surprise to most people to realize the extent to which seemingly poor hawkers or coffee-shop owners may be shareholders in different business or watching the interest rates or values of their investments rise and fall on a daily basis.</p> <p>The final mechanism that deserves mention, if only in passing, is the use of paralegal or illegal means of gaining advantage or profit from the trafficking in illegal merchandise, dealing in numbers, or involvement in other types of activities. It cannot be known exactly how extensive this type of involvement is within the Overseas Chinese communities, or how well organized most of this activity may be from the standpoint of secret societies or illegal networks or associations. But it must almost certainly be like an iceberg in which the only visible tip of these activities are only a small part of a much larger "underground" pattern.</p> <p>It is not that all or even most Chinese are dishonest, but that many will take advantage of a wide variety of activities that promise high dividends, even if the risks are relatively great. The obstinate and hidden profile of the Chinese community to some extent protects and hides such activity, such that the perceived risks of such strategies may be less than the actual risks involved in their pursuit.</p> <p>But we are now talking about the fringes and interstices of Overseas Chinese social structure--interstices of a system that in many regards are anti-structural and in which poor tri-shaw drivers may be the equals of rich businessmen. But understanding this pattern provides critical insight into the nature of the fluidity and adaptability of Chinese society to a wide range of circumstances, and its ability to perpetuate itself more or less in tact regardless of the circumstances.</p> <p>Given these mechanisms of social mobility that causes the Chinese social structure to remain quite alterable and adaptable, it is important also take into account certain social distancing mechanisms which serve to hinder such upward mobility and which serve, in effect, to keep the rich wealthy and the poor in poverty.</p> <p>Within the Chinese community, though most families started out poor, certain negative stereotypes and patterns of social discrimination and avoidance accrete to those neighborhoods that are considered poor. Such Chinese are considered rough and crude, are considered to be dirty, have irregular spending and work habits, and perpetually caught up in gambling, playing and praying for numbers, and in gangs and drugs. Children who grow up in such neighborhoods frequently suffer low self and social esteem, a lack of confidence that may precludes a successful orientation in life. The attitude of the upper class Chinese toward the lower class Chinese are frequently somewhat paternalistic and condescending in this regard.</p> <p>On the other hand, wealthy families capitalize on their strategic economic advantage within the system to extend outward as much as possible their social networks and to maximize their opportunities. Since there is little that is charitable among the rich, they frequently appropriate unto themselves those aesthetic and social symbols of refinement--dress, manner, speech, decorations, automobiles--that serve to mark out and highlight their superior status.</p> <p>A noticeable difference between the poor and the rich are that the poor will extend, as a matter of politeness and courtesy, basic greetings and responses as a matter of course and as a matter of face. The rich will tend to deliberately withdraw, ignore and refuse such conventional platitudes or fail to give face to those whom they think are in a socially inferior position.</p> <p>Socio-economic asymmetries become embodied in attitudes of innate and physical superiority of the rich over the poor--rich people have better blood, are more naturally more attractive, healthier and taller, than the poor, while the poor become innately imperfect. These attitudes are expressed by the Chinese themselves, both poor and rich alike.</p> <p>But patterns alone are not enough to sustain an extremely asymmetrical social system. The quality and manner of the social networking and competence in networking and social skills acquired, along with the self-confidence and commanding sense of presence that is so cultivated and valued by the upper class Chinese, are to a great extent missing among the lower classes.</p> <p>The interesting aspect of the Chinese class system is that it is not just purely poor and rich people, though the relativity of class values reflects such a vision of their world. The poor people tend to look on anyone and everyone a little wealthier than themselves as rich and naturally "better" than themselves, and the rich tend to believe that everyone obviously less wealthy or with less immediate class advantage with themselves are automatically "poor."</p> <p>These attitudes do not do justice to the great bulk of overseas Chinese who can be said to be truly "middle class" as shopkeepers and petty merchants and businessmen whose families earn an income substantial enough to support a fairly affluent lifestyle. These shopkeepers define what can be said to be the transitional and intermediate rungs in the ladder of life--working and aspiring to climb that ladder.</p> <p>What makes the middle class interesting, as the stepping stone to a better life, is that the primary mechanism of mobility that seems to characterize this class is that of familial mobility. The family works together to successfully promote their socio-economic status and position within the social system. Familial mobility is indeed most salient among the middle classes, and among the shop houses one can find entire families self-enclosed within little shop-worlds, working six or seven days a week, pooling energies and resources under the direction of a single patriarch or matriarch.</p> <p>It would seem thus that for a lower working class household to achieve mobility into a middle class position, the family must at some point organize itself into a successful working unit, and pool resources together. Hawking is a major avenue for such mobility, and sons acquiring skills that enable them to begin a business of their own or education in order to achieve a better job in the wider market becomes a means for that family to work its way up the social success ladder.</p> <p>The break with the working class by the people rising to the middle class is signaled by geographical relocation and social separation and social distancing mechanisms that, especially among in-laws, may put on the appropriate airs to signal their social superiority. At some point, a family on the rise must relocate to a better neighborhood and away from the community in which it begun--this is a self-distancing mechanism that allows the necessary pooling of resources for capital investment.</p> <p>This being the case, it stands to reason that poorer working class families that fail to rise must be for some set of reasons unable to organize themselves as familially productive units. Or, even if they do become self-organized, they may fail to extend themselves appropriately in order to access the opportunities or resources of a wider market economy. Often mobility by a family is almost entirely dependent upon the success of a central bread winner of a single individual. Failure is signaled by the inability to geographically relocate, and to further the educational opportunities of their children.</p> <p>On the other end of the social spectrum, the subsequent generational downward mobility of families may be the product of the family, once organized for productivity, falling apart at the seams, so to speak, in which separation under one roof ends up in actual physical separation of the households of the sons and their families.</p> <p>The role of the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationship and the influence over the son is of primary importance in understanding how such organization of the household and subsequent separation and splitting of families can occur. It frequently occurs that the mother-in-law may continue to command from the son the greater affections, attentions and even resources of the son well into adulthood. As the daughter-in-law rears her own children, and as these children approach maturity and begin to become productive members of their household, there occurs a fission between the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law in which the loyalties and obligations of the son become split between the two. At this point the son may acquire a second-wife, and the split may be marked by separation of the son from his own natal offspring.</p> <p>Important in understanding the pattern of failure to achieve upward mobility within a system in which one's social identity and status is so completely tied to one's success within the system, is the pattern of spoiling of children into adulthood by parents who, apparently, use their own children as dependency objects for their own psychological insecurities and need for gratification in life. Parents live vicariously through their children, but in a way that becomes stifling and suffocating for the children. The well being and wealth of the children are the direct extensions of the parent's own need for status success--they are in a sense symbols of parental fortune.</p> <p>Children of poor parents who are also locked into this pattern are allowed a great deal of license and social freedom, are allowed to spend petty cash freely on a daily basis, to buy food, drinks, candy or little trinkets whenever they wish. For sometimes lazy parents, it is the most effective means they have of placating and controlling their children at least effort to themselves.</p> <p>Needless to say, these dependency patterns extend themselves into adolescence and adulthood, and result in an adult personality that is in some respects socially and emotionally underdeveloped and immature, and which ends up perpetuating the same patterns.</p> <p>In adolescence, the attitudes and behaviors of these children are characterized by laziness, early school leaving, sexual escapades and early heterosexual experiences, and an emulation of pop fashion in dress and styles of acting.</p> <p>The pattern of spoiling children by the rich is similar, except that it occurs with a basic lack of affection by the parents, who are effectively removed or alienated from the environment of their offspring by the interpositioning of a primary care-taker. It could be an amah, maid, servant, baby-sitter, an auntie or grandmother, or in more modern times, day-care teachers. The children are still spoiled by their own parents giving into them on demand, but this pattern of spoiling the child by giving into the child's every whim and demand becomes not the cheap and dirty practice it is with the poor, but one that is tied to a statement of status by the wealthy, in terms of dress, toys, recreational experiences, etc.</p> <p>The children grow up with distorted expectations. They learn from their parents the disdain of the poor that reflects their social position, but they also suffer a basic inability, especially during secondary socialization, to adaptively function in the world as independent and successful adults. Thus, such children grow up incapable of building or adding to the kinds of fortunes their fathers amassed, and instead end up squandering away these fortunes until they and their offspring end up back in poverty.</p> <p>In this regard, we must highlight the basic psycho-social isomorphism between the patterns and personality of the wealthy and of the poor, and distinguish this against the patterns most apparent in the middle classes. The basic dilemmas and patterns keeping the poor poor and resulting in downward generational mobility for the wealthy are basically the same. In this regard, we must point to the fundamental lack of education among so many Chinese, even those of means, and the existence of the Chinese social system outside of or independent of some formally defined state mechanism of education.</p> <p>The patterns characteristic of the upwardly mobile are the strong familial orientation that defines familial relations largely in terms of socio-economic productivity. Frugality, thrift, stinginess, withdrawal of love, and the conditionality of the parent's love to the correct behavior of the child, an early education in the work ethic of children, a command of filial piety and respect that is extended socially outward to encompass a wider range of social relations, these are basic characteristics of Chinese ethnoculture everywhere upon which success is built. The key characteristics of the successful Chinese businessman are friendly, face-to-face, interpersonal business relations, extreme thrift and frugality, willingness to work long hours at low returns, a flexibility and willingness to meet all demands, and a basic dependability to get the job done both in the correct way and on time.</p> <p>In short, the successful Chinese businessman is willing to exchange hard work for small profits, and will exchange short-term costs for long term gains. On the other hand, unsuccessful businesses are marked by the proclivity to make short term gains, but at the expense of long-term loss either because of a lack of reliability or loss of market opportunity to less expensive competition.</p> <p>In this regard, it must be emphasized that not all Chinese businesses are successful, and that for every success, there are multiple failures. At any one time, seventy percent of the businesses and business interactions may be characterized by the Chinese attempting to take immediate advantage for a small profit, in the process trading off the promise for future, long term gains.</p> <p> </p> <p>  <hr> <b><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Chapter Four</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="five">Filial Culture and the Spirits of Chinese Capitalism</a></p> </font></b> <p> </p> <p>A senior professor who was an authority on the Chinese once told our class that the Chinese had no religion and were not a very religious people. I pointed out to him that my experience taught me otherwise, that those Chinese whom I'd known are some of the most devoutly religious people I've ever known, and that their religion is central to understanding how their culture works.</p> <p>Religion, styled as "ancestor worship" and a conflation of the three teachings, confucian ethos of filial piety combined with the Buddhist call for nonattachment and self-abnegation of suffering, and kind of Taoist spiritism, is indeed central to practically everything the Chinese does. Religious worship and values are so ingrained as a part of their everyday life that it perhaps escapes unnoticed--the constant burning of money, joss, candles, and the constant sacrifices of food offerings.</p> <p>It is the intention of this essay to account directly in terms of the predominant pattern of Overseas Chinese ethno-culture and in terms of the effects this patterning has upon its social structure and patterning, the central importance and function Chinese style religion and religious practices and beliefs play.</p> <p>It may be said at the outset that the Overseas Chinese are extremely practical and worldly in orientation--many of their elders were, indeed, the salt of the earth. Their religion shares in the extreme practicality of their basic cultural orientation, as patterns of worship and ritual propitiation are incorporated into daily patterns of living, and explained in such basic ways, as to seem integral with everything else the Chinese does. When the Chinese prays for fortune--he is not praying for an abstract notion of fortune--but for money.</p> <p>What is also apparent is that there is indeed in the more traditional contexts of the practice of Chinese religion and its associated beliefs, little room for the kind of ambivalence or dichotomization of the status of symbolisms between the supernatural and the natural. The two realms are completely congruent with one another, and the latter is nothing but the imperfect extension of the former. So, unlike the Western literate mind, the traditional Chinese mind is not beset with all those confusing symbolic dualities of being and nonbeing. If one is burning money or paper objects to send to one's ancestors in heaven, it is not a make-believe fiction--but one's ancestors really will enjoy the shoes and the new VCR they received from their descendants on earth.</p> <p>Besides the eminent practicality of Chinese culture, it is also important to recognize that Chinese identity is not as egotistically self-centered or individualistic as it is in the West. It can be said to be a more thoroughly social, or socio-centric, orientation in which the sense of self can hardly be separated from the social contexts in which that self achieves its social status and identity in the world.</p> <p>Whereas a Westerner feels a need to be alone sometimes and can become quite lonely and uncomfortable in crowded social situation, the Chinese rarely if ever has the need to be by himself, which can be a frightening thing indeed, and hardly ever feels out of place in large, thick crowds. Indeed, the Chinese is almost drawn to crowds just for the sake of being and feeling immersed within the jostle and give and take.</p> <p>Finally, it can be said that without a doubt the Chinese achieve their success through shear hard work, extreme privations of life-style, and simple frugality. The strong work ethic among Chinese communities is an important facet in understanding how the culture works, and the inculcation of the ethos of work, reinforced within the community, becomes instilled in children at a very early age.</p> <p>Overseas Chinese ethno-cultural pattern can be described by the central importance placed upon the family and familial relations. The cosmological universe of the Chinese pantheon of spirits and deities are the direct symbolic extension of the core and extended possibilities of familial relationship. The deities and their unique personalities represent symbolically different aspects or facets of possibility of the Chinese personality, and hence serve as role models, or rather as guides, in defining appropriate or inappropriate behavior within the familial context. By extension we may also say that the Chinese personality and sense of self is also symbolically represented within a familial context, as a microcosm of possible familial relations in the battle of yen and yang elements.</p> <p>The filial ethnoculture of the Chinese is marked by an ethos filial piety, or of respect for parents that translates into a continuing sense of duty, obligation and attachment to the parents well into adulthood, that should in theory become extended to a respect for social authority in the larger society.</p> <p>Inherent to this familial model of the Chinese cultural universe is the inherently conflictual and ambivalent relationship between the mother and the father, that is itself cooperative-competitive, and the cooperative-competitive relationship between siblings.</p> <p>The family, therefore, forms the nucleus and foundational building block of Overseas Chinese society, with its intra-familial relations and extra-familial extensions in a wider social arena, and the processes of child enculturation and socialization, identification and development attendant upon life within the family, and one's position and relative status within a familial universe,.</p> <p>Though one's place within the family is fixed and stable, it is the familial context itself that changes and becomes negotiable. Thus the emphasis of the adult personality upon mobility for the achievement of superior social status is the natural extension of the competitive-cooperative jockeying of the child vis-a-vis other siblings, for status and attention from the parent figure, who either rewards with food or punishes.</p> <p>The constant and continuous propitiation of the Gods for good fortune and to dispell misfortune becomes the symbolic call and demand for attention from the parents.</p> <p>The choice of whether to give face or not in impersonal social relations becomes a statement of one's own advantage, hence superior status in relation to one's symbolic parents, over one's perceived competitor and potential usurper. Face will be given to those in which a cooperative, versus a competitive relationship, is sought, while face will be denied to those among with whom there might be a competitive relation.</p> <p>It is important in understanding how Chinese culture works to affect Chinese social patterning, to see that while one's position within the familial framework is relatively fixed by birth and hence inalterable, it is the familial framework itself that can be manipulated and managed and altered in different ways such that a change in the relative status of one's position may be affected. Thus it is clear and central to the conceptioning and worldview of the Chinese that while one's own place cannot be altered in life, the environment in which it exists can be actively changed for good or misfortune.</p> <p>A spouse who marries into another household is doing so with the intention of altering her/his context of social relations for the sake of achieving a better status-positionality than in the previous context of relations. On the other hand, bringing a new bride or husband into one's household does little to alter the status-positioning of the original context, but does entail that almost everyone within the household becomes pushed up at least one rung by the addition of a new individual, usually at the bottom.</p> <p>A cooperative relationship can be defined as one in which there is some kind of mutuality or symbiosis for mutual gain or advantage. A competitive social relation can be defined as one in which the gain or advantage of one party or person is, however indirectly, perceived or understood as being at the disadvantage or loss of the other. Both competitive and cooperative social relations are thus defined within a context that is also fairly vertical and hence of composed of multiple asymmetrical interrelationships.</p> <p>Needless to say, some kinds of rigid or fixed social interrelations may be inherently more competitive or cooperative than other kinds, and highly charged competitive relations will be the mostly likely one's to produce conflict, resulting in the characteristic fissures by which we recognize Chinese social organization. At the same time, some positions or positional relations may be more inherently ambivalent or "interpositionally marginal" than others. Second or third sons are more marginal than first sons, daughters are more marginal than sons, daughter's-in-law are more marginal than sons, etc., all resulting in an inherent and relative sense of insecurity/security associated with the position, along with other accompanying characteristics. While one can always count upon the position of one's self within the current context, what one cannot ever count upon is the position of other's in relation to oneself.</p> <p>  Understanding the central importance of filial relations and family in Chinese culture leads to a basic question about the cultural patterning that may result in a distinctive "Chinese spirit" of capitalism.</p> <p>In relation to one's parents, and, by extension, to the God's of heaven, and, by social extension, to one's social context, Chinese social relations are always defined by two basic elements. Love and security are never unconditional, but always relative to the quality of one's own behavior; and presentation or withdrawal of support, love and affection is fundamentally unpredictable.</p> <p>Just as one can never be sure enough of the continued love and devotion of the spirits of Heaven, who are fundamentally fickle and unpredictable within the stereotypical molds set down for them, just as one can never be guaranteed of the continuing love or withdrawal of support of one's parents, while the primary indication of one's favor with one's parents will be found vis-a-vis one's status relation with other siblings. At some point the sibling relationship becomes no longer cooperative, but competitive--just as extended family households fission after the third generation, and just as wider community groupings organize themselves and split along the lines of surname, clan, etc.</p> <p>Thus, in keeping with Weber's depiction of the Protestant work ethic, as best expressed in the aphorisms of Benjamin Franklin, as congruent to the spirit of capitalism, we can describe a similar kind of "Confucian-Taoist" ethic that may be at work among the Overseas Chinese that has in turn promoted a form of Capitalistic spirit unique and distinctive to this community.</p> <p>Thus the Chinese faces an inherent sense of existential ambiguity, one that is not only structurally defined within an alien, and therefore inherently conflictual context, but one that is also culturally instilled from a very early age. Symbolically and ethnoculturally, an Overseas Chinese person can never be absolutely sure of the love and rewards of his/her parent-gods, but can continuously manipulate his/her contexts in ways that will best result in good fortune. The Chinese can continue to work as if he had the favor and good fortune of his/her ancestors, and success in this life vis-a-vis one's competitors, becomes the only sure sign of such success and good fortune.</p> <p>This cognitive dissonance argument behind the motivation of the Chinese to excel and succeed in business can be stretched a little further. If we take into account the possibility that the very positionality of the Chinese within a family, that is supposedly by definition fixed and stable, is by reference to its context and to alternate positions, inherently unstable and "interpositional" and thus never stable. Thus, there is an inherent ambivalence and ambiguity about one's identity within one's world that can result in one attempting to compensate and overcome this anxiety, or else in one succumbing to the anxieties and being overcome by one's context.</p> <p>This is directly tied to one having command over one's environmental relations--a sense of command presence that is most outwardly evident among the upper classes. The successful Chinese is one who is able to exercise control over his/her environment, while the unsuccessful Chinese is one who becomes the victim of his/her context. Chinese are driven to achieve success within their social contexts by the symbolic promise of their' parents positive reinforcement, which through secondary socialization becomes effectively transferred upon the entire community. This aspect of Chinese culture may help to explain another facet of Chinese culture, and that is there strong focal orality expressed with a preoccupation with food and eating. The principle forms of a parent's showing affection to the child are by touching and feeding the child. The child learns to associate the giving and getting of love with oral gratification. Withdrawal of support is associated with hunger, and is attendant upon punishment that can be physically harsh.</p> <p>The sense of nurturance that this pattern of the parent giving food and feeding the child indicates a traditional peasant orientation, one in which the food, its abundance and famine, were fundamental problems of survival within a feudal context. We must therefore wonder how much this strong oral orientation of Chinese culture did not have its origin in the feast/famine cycles of Chinese peasants in the Great Agrarian State.</p> <p>Emphasis upon acheivement as the principle means of gaining status can go awry--over achievement or under achievement can result in deviant patterns of compulsive risk-taking or gambling, not just by individuals, but by entire communities, while the fear of failure attendant with the lack of achievement motivation can result in a withdrawal from or avoidance of risk-taking situations altogether. It can be considered that typical Chinese identity is somehow defined in relation to the status boundaries that are set up in society. Those who are not within one's sphere of cooperation are those who by definition are potential competitors and enemies. These sphere's of cooperation extend outward in ever wider and ever more rarefied circles of interaction, and at some ethnic boundary cross-over to define out-groups as potential threats to Chinese culture and help to provide the foundation of a strong Sino-centric orientation in life.</p> <p>In this sense, the form that one's ethnic prejudices and culturally based preferences take are indirectly related to and reflected by the characterization which one's own personality and relative status identity acquired. Thus, the rugged individualism of the American way of life, complete with its violence and creativity, is linked to an inordinate ego-centricity of orientation, and to a kind of neurotic, obsessive-compulsive need to be in the spotlight. Similarly, we may link the sociality of the Chinese personality--social but not necessary sociable, to the closed and exclusive Sino-centrism of Chinese preference for their own culture and disdain of others.</p> <p>Chinese-style capitalism can be considered unique in history and distinctive to the Overseas Chinese who developed a merchant-middleman culture and community. It is characterized by its familial-based organization; by the rise of a middle-class of merchant middlemen/sojourning entrepreneurs who, driven by shear poverty, were keen to make the most of whatever they go; by the pattern of credit, money-lending, investment and share-holding characteristic of Chinese businessmen; by labor intensive handicraft and cottage industries; and by the premiums paid to achievement and risk-taking in all areas of business, from primary production or resource exploitation, processing or manufacturing, to distribution and wholesaling, to retailing and repair.</p> <p>This style of capitalism can be said to have formed in Southern China among prosperous merchant families as early as the 9th Century A.D., and gradually emerged in subsequent centuries as the principle mechanism of proto-historical development for much of Southeast Asia. Such merchant middlemen came to monopolize various aspects of the local economies of many regions where they settled, interposed as they were in traditionally feudal societies lacking an indigenous merchant middle-man class.</p> <p>The striking aspects of Overseas Chinese religion are that it is still strongly polytheistic in an age dominated by state-organized, monotheistic religions, that it is extremely synthetic and syncretic, that it's ideological-intellectual orientation is basically open and nonexclusive, and that it is actually a conflation of teachings from three major, very different religious orientations, and that it still combines actively important aspects of animistic worship--trancing and shamanic performances, derived from indigenous religions. It is amazing the extent to which ancestor worship has been combined with spirit-propitiation, evil animatistic agents, Dato kongs, and deities of Heaven and Hell to create a religion that is not only culturally coherent, but very practical in its orientation.</p> <p>The extent to which money and numbers are at the center of this cycle of worship is also no less than amazing. The folding, piling and burning of paper money and things only money can buy has become a basic and automatic part of almost every ritual performance of this religion.</p> <p> </p> <p>  <hr> <b><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Chapter Five</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="six">The "Money-Faced" Chinese: Stereotypes and R</a>evisions</p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>Chinese have coined an especially appropriate appellation for fellow Chinese whom they do not like because of their miserly, stingy and money-grubbing qualities. They refer to them as "money-faced" and this refers to a kind of orientation in life in which one defines one's principle relations with other's in the world primarily, or even almost exclusive, in terms of money to be made or lost. The money-faced Chinese is one whose only real worship is that of money itself, in which the paper money burnt into smoke sent heavenward is indirectly a request for real money to be sent back to earth from heaven.</p> <p>For the money-faced Chinese, there is only one religion and only one God--the religion of making money and the money-God. To such people nothing else than money seems to be important, even to the point of allowing money matters to dictate familial relationships and to ruin friendships.</p> <p>The money-face has stern eye's, a cold, emotionless, and somewhat smug countenance, and whose body language is deliberately designed to inform others that they do not count even enough to be politely acknowledge or even perceptually recognized. But the money face may also be a smiling confidence trickster--a con-man or cad who is trying to gain access to the privacy of one's heart and one's bank account. Behind the money-face is a person who implicitly is not to be trusted, who is somehow hypocritical, ingenuine, insincere, even deceitful in relation with others, and who, while ignoring utterly a poor-looking person who walks in off the street, bends over backwards and dotes over a rich-looking Dragon lady who rolls up in a chaffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz.</p> <p>A great many Chinese I've met or seen or known, seem, to some lesser or greater extent, to fit this negative stereotype fairly well, and it occurs enough that it gives force to some non-Chinese perceptions of the Chinese. So preoccupied do many of these people and their families seem to be with the purpose of maximizing their profits and cutting their losses, that they know almost no other social life or non-business way of interacting with people.</p> <p>To what extent is being money-faced an appropriate aphorism of Overseas Chinese, such that other Chinese characterize one another as money-faced and stingy, and to what extent is this only a false myth?</p> <p>Without a doubt many of the characteristics that contribute to the portrayal of the money-faced Chinese are those same characteristics that have over the years contributed to the stereotypes and prejudices other non-Chinese have held or formulated against the Chinese. Without a doubt, also, being money-faced or not is an ascriptive term that is emically derivative and endogenous to Overseas Chinese ethnoculture. Certainly, dealing with money-faced Chinese, whether one is Chinese or someone else, is a very difficult and sometimes trying experience that can serve only to aggravate interethnic tensions and the potential for conflict between Chinese and Non Chinese.</p> <p>While being "money-faced" is a common occurrence among the Chinese, it is an orientation that is more readily visible in Chinese evaluations of each other and by other non-Chinese than it is by a Chinese evaluation of oneself. Chinese will honestly admit to you they are only interested in making money, but in their minds this does not seem to equate well with the more negative connotations of being money-faced.</p> <p>It does point up an important facet of Chinese culture that is more visible from without than within. When Chinese become so preoccupied with making money as a focal part of their culture and when money becomes the principle medium and sign of their status and security in life, it nearly precludes every other possible relationship they might have with the world. Thus the Chinese pursue the making of money like their religion, because, in a very practical and symbolic way, it is their religion. Chinese culture therefore strongly reinforces, primarily through patterns of childhood socialization and enculturation, and secondarily through interpersonal social relations and social manipulation of status, an orientation that is centered the achievement of status principally by making of money.</p> <p>The central importance of money to Overseas Chinese ethnoculture may in part be understood in terms of the inherent political insecurities of these communities as alien resident enclaves in a foreign host environment. Thus, whereas land can be confiscated and often has been, money is more fluid and can be exchanged and hidden and transferred.</p> <p>It would be wrong to consider either that the "money-faced" orientation is characteristic of all Chinese, or that it is necessarily a completely negative orientation, or that there are not other equally important facets of Chinese ethnoculture which deserve mention. Many Chinese are not only poor money-handlers, but do not value money as the end-all of life. Being "money-faced" in a less extreme form is actually quite an adaptive and achievement oriented expression which demands respect. The stylization of Nanyang civilization can be characterized by its business and economic orientation and achievements, as well as by the rise of a number of Chinese Towkays who were one-dollar millionaires and geniuses in the handling of money matters.</p> <p>It is difficult to separate out whether the pursuit of money is an end in itself or merely the means to other ends. It is better to consider that money is significantly both a means to other ends and an end in itself at the same time, and that the symbolic dimensions of money are multi-focal and inherently ambivalent in ways that readily combine with the more practical aspects of making and having money.</p> <p>It is apparent that, culturally speaking, having money and those status-symbols which only money can buy, fancy jewelry, clothes, a nice car, a big, luxurious home, etc., more often than not serves as a principle indicator of one's status and a sure sign of good fortune from Heaven.</p> <p>  We are left to resurrect and rehabilitate our stereotypes of the Overseas Chinese with a set of terms that more accurately depicts the emic and etic realities of their culture and ways of life. Central aspects of Overseas Chinese ethnoculture can be claimed to be a value of hard work; a practical orientation, even in religion; a strong focal orality; a preoccupation with status-identity expressed in terms of socio-economic achievement; money-facedness; the central importance of family and filiality in relationships; the symbolic and behavioral extension of the familial model of a filial culture to encompass the cosmos of the heavens and earth and all relationships within; the nonromantic, or repressed closet romantic, and cooperative/competitive nature of interpersonal relationships; and the basic, nonsociable sociality of the Chinese.</p> <p>Of course, these are still only just stereotypes that deserve to be yet criticized and at some point, amended in favor of more realistic appellations. Not all Chinese succeed in fitting the rather rigid model that this focal cultural orientation implies, and this model has probably been reshaped and reconditioned in many different ways under many different circumstances to render it more meaningful to those who must bear it. Not all Chinese are happy or achieve meaning within it, and many are probably inherently predisposed not to succeed within the limits of its ethos. It is an ethnocultural model built into the background of social relations and shared attitudes and behaviors of the Overseas Chinese--it is one that can be followed by the individual or not.</p> <p> </p> <p><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/OverseasChineseSociety.htm">back</a></p> <p> </p> <p align="center"> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> s="na";c="na";j="na";f=""+escape(document.referrer) </script> <script language="javascript1.2" type="text/javascript"> s=screen.width;v=navigator.appName if (v != "Netscape") {c=screen.colorDepth} else {c=screen.pixelDepth} j=navigator.javaEnabled() </script> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> function pr(n) {document.write(n,"\n");} NS2Ch=0 if (navigator.appName == "Netscape" && navigator.appVersion.charAt(0) == "2") {NS2Ch=1} if (NS2Ch == 0) { r="&size="+s+"&colors="+c+"&referer="+f+"&java="+j+"" pr("<A HREF=\"http://www.TheCounter.com\" TARGET=\"_top\"><IMG"+ " BORDER=0 SRC=\"http://c1.thecounter.com/id=515383"+r+"\"><\/A>")} </script> <NOSCRIPT> <a HREF="http://www.TheCounter.com" TARGET="_top"><img SRC="http://c1.thecounter.com/id=515383" ALT="TC" BORDER="0" width="88" height="31"></a> </NOSCRIPT>  </body>