Introduction

Phnom-Penh, capital and principal city of Cambodia, has a population of half a million. Indirect rule over Chinese was not, of course, unique to Indochina, let alone Cambodia, for Tahiti, Madagascar and other French colonies practised similar systems. The Dutch East Indies and Spanish Philippines also exhibited formal systems of governing the Chinese through their own elected leaders. Political anthropology as yet includes few agreed or well-defined concepts, and it may be that the idea of 'political' is one of those concepts that Professor Firth has suggested must be defined only vaguely to permit people to communicate about other concepts. 'Administration consists in the authorized processes of organization and management of the affairs of a given unit', while politics refers to 'a competition for power over the policy-making process'. The Hakka in Cambodia originated primarily in the extreme northeastern regions of Kwangtung Province, migrating with the Teochiu in recent times.