Organization: Central Michigan University
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.seasia-l
Date:         Sun, 20 Dec 1992 16:43:11 EST
From:         Elliott Parker <3ZLUFUR@CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU>
Subject:      Asia: "China and the Chinese overseas;" book rev (fwd)

=======================  Forwarded  Message  ===========================
Date:         Sun, 20 Dec 1992 00:11:30 EST
Reply-To:     cnd-editor@sdsc.edu
From:         cnd-editor@sdsc.edu
Subject:      CND Books and Journals Review, December 20, 1992

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1. Far From the Mandarin Crowd --
   "China and the Chinese Overseas"  by Wang Gungwu ................... 101
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Forwarded by: XU Ming Yang
Source: F.E.E.R. 6/20/92
Review written by: Lynn Pan

"China and the Chinese Overseas"  by Wang Gungwu
Times Academic Press, Singapore  US$30.00

Like Chinese migration, Wang Gungwu's scholarship knows no boundaries,
straddling the conventional divide between China and Southeast Asia. This
collection of his lectures and writings has the unusual virtue of ranging
nimbly over both diaspora and homeland. It would be noteworthy enough even if
Wang were not vice-chancellor of Hongkong University.

While he is correctly mindful of the contrast between the emigrant and
stay-at-home (he notes, for example, that immigrants are "notoriously
restless," longing for "upward mobility" or at least for "the promise of
future upward mobility"), Wang also reminds us that the distinction is not
as hard and fast as one might think. Nowadays we distinguish migration from
foreign business trips or extended visits, but not so the 19th-century
seafaring Chinese who traded in the waters of the Straits of Malacca and
established footholds in Singapore or Sumatra. Until modern times, it was
hard to separate the settler from the commercial bird of passage.

Even today, it is not always easy to classify the Chinese outside China. A
Hongkong Chinese does not fit into the huaqiao (Overseas Chinese) category,
in popular usage, unlike a Malaysian of Chinese ancestry. Yet the label is
applicable to neither, since strictly speaking it refers to Chinese
nationals living abroad temporarily, people who may expect Chinese consular
protection and who owe their primary loyalty to China.

Many still understand huaqiao to mean all Chinese overseas, regardless of
nationality. But officials in China have learned to be circumspect with the
term, so redolent is it of Chinese nationalism, of the "once a Chinese,
always a Chinese" notion so sinister to Southeast Asian host governments.
China's hands-of stance on Chinese overseas is reflected in its Nationality
Law of 1980, which makes it clear enough that "any Chinese national who has
settled abroad and who has been naturalised there or has acquired foreign
nationality of his own free will automatically lose Chinese [PRC]
nationality."

What is less clear, though, is whether or not Hongkong is "abroad," and
whether any Chinese who acquires a foreign passport there without having put
in time in that foreign country may think himself safe from the claims of
the Chinese Government. One would think not, from the Chinese refusal to
recognise the validity of the passports Britain will bestow on several
hundred thousand Hongkongers under a scheme requiring no residence
qualifications.

Hongkong's equivocal state recalls that of the treaty ports - places like
Shanghai and Canton that were in China but not of it. To blur things
further, some now speak of a Greater Hongkong lapping over southern China.
Wang clearly knows whereof he speaks when, instead of dichotomising mother
country and overseas community, he identifies a partially or totally
"detached" periphery of areas with Chinese majorities which "(are) outside
central (Chinese) control." Hongkong, Taiwan and the former treaty ports all
fall within this periphery. Just as the treaty ports, part of the detached
periphery before the communists exerted central control, were re-attached in
1949, so will Hongkong be re-attached in 1997.

Wang also refers to "a cultural periphery inside China," ordinary people at
a certain remove from the mandarin Confucian centre. These were the traders,
the archetypical Chinese emigrant.

The key to these traders' commercial success lay in their being "merchants
without mandarins", Wang suggests, free of the mandarins' disdain and
meddling. At home a vigorous "merchant culture" could not have flowered, but
abroad, Chinese merchants found that "working to laws that encouraged and
protected trade, and answering to officials who abided by such laws, gave
them a freedom to develop their talents and expand their business empires in
ways unknown in Chinese history."

Since it paid to be on the right side of the mandarins, it suited the
merchants in China to sustain the myth that their business success derived
from hard work, thrift, trust, family-mindedness and so on - all ostensibly
virtues lauded by Confucians. In fact, Wang says, the merchants' value
system was eclectic, and comprised elements frowned upon by Confucians such
as profit-seeking and risk-taking.

Besides, putting the family at the centre of their business was not merely a
bending to Confucian tradition, but a commercial necessity. If the merchants
wanted to dress up a rational and practical arrangement for starting an
expanding a business with a bit of Confucian rhetoric, good luck to them.
But we should not imagine that they were being Confucian. In any event, Wang
reminds us, putting family first is the immemorial practice of agrarian
societies, whether Confucian or not.

So much for the theory, in vogue in some American academic circles, that
Confucianism predisposed a people to capitalism. But what about the appeal
of Confucian tradition to the Chinese overseas, those who thrive by being
relatively free of Confucian dictates, but who nonetheless jib at
attributing their success to "barbarian" openness and pluralism?

The Singaporean doctor-reformer-businessman Lim Boon Keng, the subject of a
piquant essay in this book, was one such person. Lim was invited back to
China in 1921 to head Amoy (Xiamen) University, where he showed himself to
be "obsessive" about Confucianism. All quite predictable for a foreign-born,
British-educated, transplanted Chinese straining to be more royalist than
the king. Typically, because his spoken Chinese was not up to it, he urged
Confucian ideas upon his students in English - by no means the last
Singaporean Confucian to do so.

The glorification of tradition is an immigrant susceptibility, part of the
struggle for identity. For the Chinese in Southeast Asian, that identity has
always evolved as a reaction to China, and to the adopted country's awe or
fear of China. This gives the Chinese minority a tragic quality, says Wang
in his final chapter, "because China is so much greater in everyone's eyes
than it will ever be."

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