ABSTRACT
The political organization of the Chinese community in Phnom-Penh today looks familiar to any student of overseas Chinese society. An important difference between Phnom-Penh and other overseas Chinese communities is the recency of this associational structure, for the vast majority of associations have grown up within the last decade. The simplest test of a demographic explanation for the rise of voluntary associations in Phnom-Penh would be found in studying the history of Chinese associations in Saigon-Cholon, for that double city had a population of over two hundred thousand Chinese for most of the twentieth century. Violence was unnecessary as a sanction in Phnom-Penh because the Chinese leaders had available to them the sanction of deportation. The Chinese community in Bangkok has been mentioned several times already as one exhibiting a similar structure to that in contemporary Phnom-Penh. The Chinese community in Vancouver, Canada, provides quite a different case.
