ABSTRACT
For several centuries, tens of millions of ethnic Chinese people in East and Southeast Asia have engaged in a distinctive form of economic organization through which an informal array of Chinese entrepreneurs, traders, financiers and their closely-knit networks of family members and friends came to dominate the economic sphere of the very host economies they later considered ‘home’.1 While deeply rooted in the cultural norms and social values of the traditional Chinese society in mainland China, this form of economic organization has evolved and adapted to dramatically different institutional contexts and political-economic conditions in the host Asian economies. In this book, I use the term ‘Chinese capitalism’ as a heuristic device to describe this historically and geographically specific form of economic organization that refers to the social organization and political economy of the so-called ‘overseas Chinese’2 living outside mainland China, particularly in East and Southeast Asia (i.e. Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam; see Figure 1.1).3 Chinese capitalism is a dominant mode of economic organization in East and Southeast Asia because of not only its economic significance in the host economies, but also its complex and yet intricate social organization and authority systems. The sheer diversity and prowess of economic activities controlled and coordinated by these ethnic Chinese have enabled some of them to become the very foundations of the Asian economies in which they primarily reside and operate. For example, Hong Kong-based Li Ka-shing, whose empire controlled about 16 per cent of Hong Kong’s stock exchange index in 1998 (up from 12.7 per cent in 1988 reported in Redding, 1990: Table 7.4), caused the index to fall by 1.6 per cent on 23 December 1998 with his remarks about the unfriendly business environment in Hong Kong (The Straits Times, 23 and 24 December 1998). In another example, Wee Cho Yaw, the second-generation banker from Singapore and his family-controlled United Overseas Bank succeeded in taking over the fourth-largest Singapore bank (Overseas Union Bank, OUB) on 26 October 2001. After the acquisition, the
Wee family held controlling stakes in at least 14 public companies listed on the Singapore Exchange (10 per cent of all listed Chinese family firms). UOB became the largest bank in Singapore, with an international network comprising 273 offices in 18 countries in the Asia-Pacific region, Western Europe and North America.
