ABSTRACT
At, or soon after, the end of World War II, most of the remaining countries of Southeast Asia joined Thailand as independent nation-states. Good news perhaps, except that their populations were predominantly rural and poor, were often socially divided – specifically by language, ethnic origin, political ideology and religion – and were largely powerless, both with respect to their new political masters and as ‘third world’ inhabitants in a bi-polar world dominated by the USA and the Soviet Union. In the 60-70 years between then and now much has changed. Yes, of course, to the shame of global corporate leaders, national economic planners and local political elites alike, poverty and powerlessness are still there in abundance, as are social conflict, ignorance and poor health, but living standards have risen enormously (along with inequality), social modernization and urbanization have proceeded apace, and, for very different reasons (such as growth in the size of the economy, the importance of commercial and financial services, major new resource developments, and the success of the manufacturing sector) several of the countries of Southeast Asia (notably Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia) now really matter in the global order of things. So what has brought about these changes and why should they affect inter-
national migration flows? The short answer is, of course, ‘globalization’. This is not a well-defined concept, but in its economic form it means the transformation of what were formally distant and isolated economic activities into close and connected ones. This happens at both the aggregate and individual levels: at the aggregate level, Southeast Asian low-wage economies, rich in agricultural and mineral resources and straddling key global trading routes, become beneficially connected to high-income economies in North America, Europe, Northeast Asia and Australasia. Mobile international corporate capital cooperates with local entrepreneurial resources and expertise to initiate new ‘circuits of capital’. They do this by (i) spending money investing in land/built form, machinery, etc., and recruiting labour (most of it locally); (ii) creating a production platform in the Southeast Asian country by bringing these means of production together in the production process often located in, or near, the
capital city-region or in a major port; and then (iii) making money by selling their goods and services locally, regionally and, above all, in the rich consumer markets of the high-income countries, thereby earning much more than they spent on (i) and (ii) together, and thus making a profit on their investment. These new circuits of capital enrich the giant (mostly foreign) corporations and their local ‘comprador’ friends (many of whom in Southeast Asia are ethnically Chinese), generate jobs for middle-class functionaries (technical, professional and managerial employees), and employ the poor. Unfortunately, there are so many poor people looking for work that the wages that the employer is forced to pay are very low. This means that while globalization can bring great wealth to some people, such as landowners, company owners and middlemen (rent seekers), it tends, up until the point at which the supply of poor people dries up, to ensure that the mass of poor people remain poor. At the individual level, globalization and its associated changes in the tech-
nologies of transport and communication (especially cheap air travel, new roads and bridges, radio, TV, internet computing and mobile phones) have the effect of much reducing the ‘friction of distance’. In practice, this means that people looking to earn money to support themselves and their families need no longer confine their search to the local area, to the wider region within which they live, or even to their country of birth and current residence. They can, albeit usually with practical and emotional difficulty (due especially to the obligations they feel towards their co-resident older or elderly parents), work abroad in male manual (for example, construction) jobs in the Persian Gulf, become global seafarers, or work as female domestic servants in Hong Kong. By extension, they can study in the UK, marry in South Korea, or be resettled in the USA. Evidence of this trend is provided by the growing number of people born in
Southeast Asia living in Australia: just 3,000 in 1947, it was 38,000 in 1971, and 487,000 in 2001 (of whom 155,000 were from Vietnam, 104,000 from the Philippines, and 79,000 from Malaysia). All told, it is estimated that around 20 million Southeast Asians worked outside their home countries in the late 2000s with around half of these in the Middle East. The net effect of these millions of individual decisions (each one typically the outcome of negotiations with the ‘left-behind’ at the household or family level) has been (i) to bring very significant remittance income into Southeast Asia, and (ii) to open up spatially Southeast Asian countries and their populations to the wider world. Much of what follows in this chapter represents the many varied ways in which international migration is both cause and consequence of this spatial opening-up process (that is, to globalization). Before that, however, there is one migration story that needs to be told that
affects almost the whole of Southeast Asia, although once again in different ways and to different degrees. It is the legacy of those older, and late 19th-and early 20th-century migrations from south China into Southeast Asia (the region known to the Chinese as the Nanyang) discussed in the previous chapter. Over the generations, embeddedness (‘localization’), creolization, and assimilation
have occurred. The early migrants were ‘overseas Chinese’ (huaqiao), they then became ‘ethnic Chinese’ (huaren), and finally became people of ‘Chinese descent’ (huayi). Every country in Southeast Asia has a part of its population whose origins can be traced back to the region of southern China now largely occupied by the provinces of Guangdong, Hainan, Fujian and Zhejiang. In almost all cases, the ethnic Chinese, although occupying varied class locations (including manual labourers, especially in Malaysia) and reflecting contrasting sub-ethnic origins (Hokkien, Teochiu, Cantonese, Hakka and Hainanese), tend to be particularly strongly represented in occupations associated with trade, manufacturing and finance (for example, wholesale and retail commerce, shipping and road transport, the hospitality sector, personal services, finance, insurance and real estate) – although the role of culture in this occupational concentration is hotly contested. As a result, with many of the most successful companies owned and managed
by ethnic Chinese, the members of the Chinese community have had a significant influence on the performance of individual Southeast Asian national economies, have been instrumental in realizing globalization through their diaspora linkages, and have thereby sometimes been a target for nationalist resentment. However, that is where the similarities end. Yes, for some, it may be ‘chic’ to be Chinese in Southeast Asia today, with many members of the elite expressing pride in their Chinese ancestry (for example, Cory Aquino, former president of the Philippines), and popular culture is also turning towards a celebration of Chineseness as pluralist policies have replaced assimilationist ones (for example, the renewed attractiveness of Hakka identity). The truth, though, is that the nature of the relationship between ethnic
Chinese and their host communities varies greatly: in Singapore, the Chinese are the host community (at about 75% of the population in 2000). In Malaysia (26% of the population), despite the institutionalized advantages awarded to ethnic Malays (for example, in formal politics, business, religion, public-sector employment and university entrance) and despite living rather separate ‘parallel lives’, there is a largely peaceful ‘compromise’ relationship between the Chinese and the majority Malay population and with the other large minority, the South Asian population – something that did not seem likely in the conflictstricken early post-war period. In Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar (Burma), the relations between the majority population and the minority Chinese community (all less than 4%) tend to be more fraught (an example is the anti-Chinese violence in Myanmar/Burma in 1967). This is especially so in Indonesia where widespread racial violence directed at the Chinese has stained inter-community relations on several occasions, especially in 1965, but most recently in 1997-98. Finally, in the Philippines (1%), and above all, in Thailand (9%), the high levels of assimilation, reflected, for example, in high rates of intermarriage, have resulted in a much lower salience of Chinese minority-host country majority ethnic difference. Here other ethnic differences, such as those between ethnic Thais and Thailand’s ‘hill tribes’, and social class differences, such as those between the ‘red’ and ‘yellow’ factions in
Thailand, become centre stage. Furthermore, the representation of the Chinese in Southeast Asia has reflected major historical changes in China itself: in the late 19th and early 20th centuries they were seen as involuntary migrants with their main loyalty not to their country of immigration, but to their home towns and villages; in the mid-20th century they were seen by many as the potential carriers of socialist revolution (this view was soon to be undermined by the brutal treatment of families with overseas links during the Cultural Revolution); and all along, but perhaps especially today, they were, and are, seen as successful capitalist entrepreneurs. This final representation is being reinforced by recent migration: there are many new Chinese immigrants in Southeast Asia (xin yimin), mostly entrepreneurs, professionals and students, and, unlike their predecessors, they are increasingly not from the rural, poverty-stricken parts of China, but from its prosperous middle-class cities. Much of what has been written here about the Chinese communities in
Southeast Asia, especially relating to integration and assimilation, applies also to the Indian communities (including those from Tamil Nadu), and to the much smaller Arab minorities (such as the Hadramis from Yemen).
