ABSTRACT
This chapter is situated at the intersection between the field of diaspora studies, with its heavy focus on questions of identity and ethnicity and its ‘culturalist’ orientation, and the field of commercial network studies which has been more preoccupied with situating trading networks in relation to the development of an international economy in Asia.1 Although few academic studies have tried to combine the two approaches, at a more popular or semi-academic level, it is a commonly held assumption that a strong correlation exists between the success in business of particular groups and their ethnicity. Western commentators trying to account for the surge in the growth of some of the East Asian and Southeast Asian economies in the 1980s and 1990s have often emphasised the crucial role played by overseas Chinese ethnic networks in that success story. They also gave great importance to the prevalence of a specific value system (which they sometimes characterised as ‘Asian’, whatever that means, or sometimes as ‘Confucian’, which of course is not the same thing), which they saw as partly opposed to the Western value system, but at the same time favourable to entrepreneurship. Although there were some reservations regarding the hierarchical and authoritarian nature of this so-called ‘Asian’ value system, it was on the whole praised as having contributed decisively to the spectacular economic development of some Asian countries.
