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Being Chinese and Being Political in Southeast Asia
Abstract
Recent studies of the Chinese in Southeast Asia have tended to deconstruct the hybrid, transnational, diasporic, and de-territorialized attributes of ‘Chinese-ness’, and theorize the politics thereof. In contrast, earlier scholarship on the politics of Southeast Asia's ethnic Chinese raised many questions over the positions, rights, and roles associated with being ‘overseas Chinese’. Hence, many analyses of Chinese politics, from suppressed quietude to militant contestation, tended to ask, ‘Why and how was that politics Chinese?’ This article asks, instead, ‘Why and how were the Chinese political?’ within the larger rubric of Southeast Asian politics. It argues that posing the first question helped officialdom, academia and media to determine who among the ‘overseas Chinese’ were friends or foes. Asking the second question, it is argued, involves a boundary-crossing shift that sees the immigrant Chinese engaged in a full spectrum of Southeast Asian politics under the impacts of colonialism and nationalism, and capitalism and anti-capitalism. After exploring the shift in perspective from ‘being Chinese’ to ‘being political’, the article suggests that politics beyond China-oriented positions, state-bound stances, or preoccupations of ethnic identity, particularly in Malaysia transformed Southeast Asia to the point of ‘creating’ a ‘largely Chinese’ state out of Singapore.
... 32. Case (2015), Daniels (2005), Gomez (2008), Husin (1985, Khoo (2013), Lopez (2015), and Ting (2009) are several who provide an extensive charting. ...
In August 2011, Malaysian television station 8TV’s three Ramadan public service announcements (PSA) garnered shocked responses from Malaysian Chinese viewers nationwide for their presumably ethno-condescending overtones. What may on the surface appear to be an issue of simple oversight by the broadcaster reveals upon closer examination to be indicative of two realities – the hierarchised interfaith and interethnic normative, and the increasing vocality of minority groups who seek to reconfigure this normativity. I posit that both realities are directly and tangentially productive of the very same racial-racist beliefs that were challenged. There are two facets to our inquiry – the purportedly "non-racist" intent of 8TV, and the racial lens through which the content was decoded. This paper discusses the paradox of Malaysian racial discourse through Žižek’s transposition of Lacan’s fantasy to the socio-political domain as ideological fantasy writ large on screen, where by alleging that 8TV’s intent was racist, viewers were in fact identifying the gap between the symbolic discourse of Malay supremacy and its material realities. Moreover, by identifying with or alleging that 8TV’s intent was racially-biased, it is argued that the viewers were necessarily racialist.
This historical critique outlines the relationship between identity management and political economy. History informs the rationale of proactive identity management in state efforts to establish Singapore’s strategic position within the global political economy. Starting with pre-independence historical events, the emergence of ethnic management and language schooling is examined in tandem with measures to develop a capitalist-industrial economy. The conclusions drawn from the historical management of Chineseness ground the framework of identity grafting, which underpins empirical examination of the concept at the individual level.
This chapter sets the context for an examination of how personal experiences are interlinked with global, regional, and national contexts of capitalist industrialization. Through the concept of identity grafting, policy and social constructions of Chineseness are analyzed for the impact of accelerated development and the emergence of dual hegemonic constructions of East and West within the postcolonial and late-capitalist region. The site located in Singapore, ECI (a pseudonym), is the Asia Pacific subsidiary of a French multinational corporation, with a keen regional commercial interest in China. The triangulation of the three locales provides the comparative thrust of this book.
Although Singapore currently makes it impossible in the male descent line, departing from Chineseness has been a common phenomenon in Southeast Asian history. In modern nationalist times the paucity of alternative terms in Southeast Asian and European language has made the overused Cina a problematic label, impossible to detach from a very large northern neighbour and from many cultural stereotypes. Naturally many local-born and culturally hybrid citizens have sought to escape from it. The best documented mass case is the nineteenth century Philippines. Peranakan Indonesians have not found it so easy to shed this inappropriate label even though it has occasionally been wielded as a death threat. ‘Outsider’ status also has its uses. This presentation will be chiefly concerned with the obstacles for Peranakan in departing from Chineseness. It will argue nevertheless that many Indonesians are quietly succeeding in taking this path.
This paper traces the evolving cultural-political regime based on the ethno-ideology of Thainess with which the Thai state controlled and contained the immigrant Chinese and their Thai-born descendants politically, and assimilated them culturally, while making use of their labour and entrepreneurship to develop Thai capitalism economically, through its absolutist, militarist and electocratic phases. It also sketches the challenges successively mounted to that regime by immigrant communists, radical democratic nationalists, and globalised capitalists, whose ethnic Chinese descent has yielded gradually over time to class and political identity in the context of successful cultural assimilation, changing international politics, growing wealth and economic crisis, coups, and political polarisation. Meanwhile, lurking in the background are the rural peasants and urban poor/marginalised population, whose majority vote and changing political loyalty may prove decisive in the outcome of the latest political contest.
Creation of a stable nation-state is an important goal for developing countries, because it contributes to political orderliness and economic growth. This article analyzes the ethnic Chinese as economic and regional factors in Thailand. Key elements in which governmental policy has its greatest effect are immigration, nationality, economic and social factors, education, and religion. Analysis of these elements reveals an encompassing strategy to influence the social and religious aspects of society in order to create a new Thai identity.
The author of this article argues that the paradox of postcolonial states pursuing internal and external policies remarkably similar to those of their colonial predecessors, despite the passage from colonialism to independence, is best resolved by focusing on the distinct, long-standing, institutional interests of the state-qua-state. It is these interests that make explicable the key policies of Suharto's New Order toward economic development, the Chinese minority, participatory organizations, and internal and external security. The author analyzes the nature and growth of the Dutch colonial state, its decline and near-collapse between 1942 (Japanese invasion) and 1965 (downfall of Sukarno's Guided Democracy), and its revival under ex-colonial sergeant Suharto.
During 2002 the Malaysian government announced that English would be the language of instruction used in all primary schools to teach science and math. This decision was called "The Final Solution" by Chinese educationalists. This article shows how these professionals have sought to safeguard the character of Chinese primary schools, important transmitters of identity from one generation to the next, by acting as a pressure group against this new policy. © 2006 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Approximately 10 million overseas Chinese reside in Southeast Asia where they have economic power and political significance out of all proportion to their numbers. Southeast Asian governments are determined to loosen the Chinese grip on their national economies, to achieve an unequivocal clarinca tion of the citizenship status of resident Chinese, to end foreign political activity among and to proceed with educational and political integration of their citizens of Chinese descent. Prior to 1954, Communist China strove with equal determination to protect the special interests of overseas Chinese; to win their loyalty; and to profit materially, politically, and strategically from their patriotism. The growing importance of Southeast Asian goodwill to China's foreign policy, however, prompted a new line whereby overseas Chinese are encouraged to acquiesce to Southeast Asian nationalist aims without appealing to Peking for protection. In accord with the new policy, China appears willing to relinquish claims to the allegiance of several million persons of Chinese descent and even to forgo much of the over seas Chinese contribution to China's economy. Meanwhile several Southeast Asian governments have taken advantage of Peking's policy and Taipei's weakness to proceed with stringent, nationalistic solutions to their overseas Chinese problems.
The debate within Indonesia's peranakan community around the question of integration or assimilation raged during the late 1950s and early 1960s, until it was abruptly ended by anti-Chinese violence in 1963 and anti-Communist purges in 1965-66. The platform of integration (integrasi) supported by Baperki, a Chinese organisation, included demands for the Chinese to be accepted as a suku (ethnic group) under the nationalist principles of 'Unity in Diversity' and cultural pluralism. At the time, such 'integrasi' leanings met serious opposition from other peranakan Chinese backed by the military, who were suspicious of Baperki's alleged links to the Indonesian Communist Party. Then, during Suharto's New Order, with Baperki closed down and its leaders imprisoned, pembauran (assimilation--the preferred 'New Order term') dominated official peranakan politics. Government policy promoted a solution to the 'Chinese Problem', which included banning Chinese cultural activities, names and language. In May 1998 the violence in Jakarta, Solo and other towns and cities made Chinese in Indonesia highly aware of their ethnicity and led to a reinvigorated interest in the debate about assimilation and integration. This article investigates these debates among various ethnic Chinese groups and intellectuals. There are those who have not shifted their position on assimilation, while others have been spurred to re-discover their ethnicity and fight for acceptance. In the past, the debate on asimilasi or integrasi was overrun by wider political agendas, both within the peranakan community itself and in the nation as a whole. In post-Suharto Indonesia, in a general political atmosphere committed to democracy, can this debate be resolved? A 'new' nationalism in which ethnic Chinese have rediscovered solidarity and faith in the Indonesian project, is a human rights-based vision that places issues of reconciliation and truth finding as high priorities. I argue that it is only within such a nationalist discourse that ethnic Chinese will have the opportunity to make uninhibited choices on asimilasi and integrasi , or indeed another alternative.
Adam McKeown advocates the applicability and utility of "diaspora" as a theoretical construct for understanding Chinese migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and for revising earlier nation-centered narratives of migration and overseas Chinese. This theoretical framework enables him to differentiate the Chinese diaspora into five analytic categories-labor, network, national, ethnic, and cultural-and to recast Chinese migration in terms of "transnational institutions, flows and connections" and in relation to local and global processes.
At the time of independence, there were three visible racial groups among its newly constituted citizenry: an overwhelming majority of ethnic Chinese; regionally indigenous Malays and a small percentage of South Asians. The Cold War conditions precluded the island-state from being a Chinese majority state; constitutionally the new state was declared a multiracial nation. The three groups were reconstituted as Huaren, Malays and Indians. Multiracialism as official policy has become a means of governance of the People's Action Party single-party dominant government. Racial harmony as the public good provides the political and administrative space for the policing of racial boundaries, suppressing open discussion of racial issues. Meanwhile, Huaren culture has been progressively reduced to emphasis on filial piety as Confucianism writ small and an emergent Singaporean identity distances the local born Huaren from the ‘foreign workers’ that arrive daily from the People's Republic of China.
During the past 20 years, the politics of the Chinese in Malaya has been a subject of international interest.The Malayan Communist Party has been predominantly Chinese; it was Chinese politics in Singapore (briefly part of Malaysia) which produced the phenomenon of Lee Kuan Yew; and the Kuala Lumpur riots of May 1969 are widely thought to have been efforts to stem a Chinese challenge to Malay supremacy. The Chinese in West Malaysia, especially when taken together with those in Singapore, have earned the attention of governments, journalists and scholars alike. They form the largest concentration of Chinese outside of Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong; their economic life is among the most sophisticated in Asia; their social and cultural life probably the most complex that Chinese anywhere have ever known; and, above all, their political life has been more open and exposed than that of any other kind of Chinese. This last, their political life, has been difficult to evaluate for a number of reasons. The main reason is that two contradictory views about them have long prevailed: that the Chinese are non-political and that the Chinese are political in a secretive and inscrutable way. These views are based on a concept of politics in the democratic tradition and are either anachronistic or misleading. Chinese, Malay and colonial political systems have been, in varying degrees, authoritarian, and Chinese political life must be seen in that context except in the period 1957–69.
What value remains in the concept of economic nationalism? As Michael Heilperin defined it in 1960, economic nationalism referred to "the desire to plan the economic life of the country as independently as possible of the condition of the world economy" (19£0:20). Heilperin's analysis echoes back to old battles between mercantilists and the liberal economists, whose arguments over trade and tariffs Eric Hobsbawm has summarized (1990:24-31). The concept of economic nationalism reached a particular florescence after World War I, sufficient to warrant its own volume in publisher H. W. Wilson's 1933 series of "timely topics" called The Reference Shelf (Hodgson 1933). Through the depths of the 1930s depression and the return of substantial tariff barriers, to the import substitution policies followed by many of the postcolonial new nations, the considerable literature concerned with "economic nationalism" describes the shifting alignments of economic and political borders (Burnell 1986; Johnson 1967; Simonds and Emeny 1935). Tracing these debates outlines an international history of the possibilities for social affiliation during the age of nation-states . Economic nationalism takes on a particular importance in a society like
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Malaya, July, 1985. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 476-511). Photocopy.
Barrington Moore, Jr., argued that a vigorous and independent bourgeoisie is a necessary, if insufficient, condition for democracy. This article addresses this thesis through a comparative analysis of class formation in Southeast Asia. Colonial era state policies towards immigrant Chinese merchant minorities shaped the diverging capacities and inclinations of capitalist classes in the region to assert themselves in political life and to assume control over state power. The variegated identities and strengths of the capitalist classes of Southeast Asia have prefigured enduring authoritarian rule in most countries in the region over the past several decades, while enabling democratic rule in the Philippines, Thailand, and, in recent years, Indonesia.
Murder and progress in modern Siam
- Anderson
Cultural politics of “Chineseness”
- Hau
Operation Cold Store”: a key event in the creation of Malaysia and in the origins of modern Singapore. Paper presented at the “21st Conference of the International Association of Historians of Asia (IAHA)
- Wade Geoff