CỘNG ĐỒNG NGƯỜI HOA Ở ĐÔNG NAM Á tài liệu lưu trữ của OAC từ Hoa Kỳ oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb138nb08w;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=ss1.01&toc.id=ss1.02&brand=oac4 I. The Ethnic Chinese Communities in Southeast Asia In this section, we will briefly sketch the history of Chinese migrations into Southeast Asia, and discuss some of the general characteristics of the ethnic Chinese communities. As you will notice from the number of quotes, and from the number of entries in the bibliography on page 40, a great deal has been written about the Chinese in Southeast Asia, and much of it is readily available. This section is correspondingly intended as an introduction or an overview, and we urge you to look into further references. A. Chinese migrations into Southeast Asia There have been Chinese in Southeast Asia for centuries. As early as the second century B.C., Chinese soldiers, merchants, and craftsmen were moving overland into what are now North and Central Vietnam and Cambodia. As the Chinese developed in shipbuilding and navigation, they ventured farther and farther into the South China Sea, developing contacts and gradually establishing a commercial empire; by the time westerners arrived in the area in the early 1600s, the Chinese had small but strong settlements in each of the countries involved. Between then and the middle of the nineteenth century, these footholds grew in parallel with the developing economies of the countries, and with their contacts with western commercial powers. ― 3 ― Starting in the mid-1800s, colonization of Southeast Asia by western powers - i.e. France, in the case of Indochina - resulted in the development of a type of society in which the ethnic Chinese, by virtue of their already-established presence and their commercial abilities, more or less became the middlemen, forming an indispensible link between the western administrators and the indigenous populations. The economic opportunities afforded by European colonization, coupled with natural pressures to leave China (overpopulation, disasters like floods and famines and political pressures), produced a tremendous wave of Chinese immigration into Southeast Asia between 1860 and 1930. (This was the time of Chinese immigration to the West Coast of the United States, as well - at least until 1882, when the U.S. cut off immigration from China.) The Chinese population in South Vietnam, for example, went from an estimated 56,000 in 1860 to about four times that - an estimated 205,000 in 1931. (Purcell 1965) By all accounts, the Chinese who emigrated to Southeast Asia during the colonial period did so intending to make a fortune and go home to China. Many of them did go home (with or without the fortune), as is shown by arrival and departur figures. Residence in Southeast Asia was therefore a temporary matter; there was no reason to become involved in local concerns other than economic. Even the Chinese who wound up permanently resettling in Southeast Asia maintained their “Chineseness,” keeping a distance between themselves and the indigenous peoples. An important aspect of the temporary nature of the Chinese sojourn in Southeast Asia was that the Chinese immigrant almost always left his family at home in China: very few women and children emigrated, especially in the early days. As might be expected, this led to a great number of marriages - temporary or otherwise - between Chinese men and indigenous women. The children of these marraiges had natural ties both to China and to the country in which they were born. The question of the nationality of these children has been a source of contention between China and the Southeast Asian countries involved. Details have varied from country to country, but the basic question revolves around whether ones citizenship is determined by blood (i.e. you inherit your nationality from your father) or by place of birth (i.e. you belong to the country you were born in and whether the individual involved has any choice in the matter. As the flow of immigration dried up in the thirties, and as the children of the mixed marriages grew up and had children of their own, the composition of the Chinese communities shifted: the proportion of Chinese born in Southeast Asia ― 4 ― increased, and that of Chinese born in China decreased. Chinas official interest in its expatriate citizens also lessened - this was the time that the Peoples Republic of China was in its infancy. Sources agree that in the Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, there has been a loosening of ties to China, and a concomitant strengthening of ties to the host countries: the Chinese communities have become less like one another and China, and more like the cultures that surround them, especially in places like Cambodia where assimilation into the indigenous society has been encouraged by friendly relationships between it and its Chinese population. B. Who is Ethnic Chinese? One of the combined effects of assimilation to the host societies, and governmental difficulties over actual citizenship, has been to make it difficult to decide just who is ethnic Chinese and who isnt in Southeast Asia. Is a Chinese only a person born in China or at least a Chinese national? Is he someone whose mother tongue is Chinese or who meets an objective racial or cultural definition of `Chineseness? The `Chinese minorities in the Nanyang include many persons born outside China, holding citizenship papers of a Southeast Asian land, speaking little Chinese and reading less. Not a few so-called `Chinese adhere to family and religious practices which differ markedly from those on the mainland, both past and present, and some are visibly of mixed Chinese-Southeast Asian parentage. Yet, however inadequately they meet objective criteria of `Chineseness, these persons regard themselves to be Chinese and are so regarded by other residents of their host country. (Heidhues 1974, pp. 2-3) Ethnic “Chineseness,” then, seems to be mostly a matter of self-identification. Certainly, among the ethnic Chinese refugees there is a wide, wide range: some speak and read only Chinese, whereas others speak and read only Vietnamese, Lao or Khmer; some have recognizable Chinese names, whereas others names are indistinguishable from other refugee groups; some feel a strong identification with Chinese communities in the United States, whereas others identify with their Vietnamese, Lao or Cambodian countrymen. However difficult it is to determine who is and who isnt ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, it is important to have a rough idea of their numbers. In the following table, taken from Heidhues 1974, we reproduce the 1970 estimates of ethnic Chinese in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (from which the ethnic Chinese refugees have fled), and also for the countries the refugee camps are in. ― 5 ― C. Origins of the Chinese Immigrants into Southeast Asia Virtually all emigration from China was from the three southeasternmost provinces of Kwangtung, Kwangsi and Fukien. People in these provinces and others in China speak one or another of the easily-identified dialects of Chinese. These dialects are often sufficiently different from one another to be in effect separate languages; the Chinese are often referred to as members of one or another speech-group, and these speech-groups are determined by the dialect the individual speaks at home. ― 6 ― The map on page 5 shows the geographical position of the provinces from which the Chinese immigrated into Southeast Asia, and also the distribution of the speech-groups from which the Chinese communities in Southeast Asia were drawn. Members of the different speech groups tended to gravitate towards different pursuits when they emigrated to Southeast Asia. The pepper-growers in Cambodia, for example, originated on Hainan, whereas the Chinese community in Phnom Penh was almost entirely Cantonese, and the rural Chinese shopkeepers and moneylenders were Teochiu. In South Vietnam, the economically crucial rice-processing concerns were largely in the hands of Hokkiens at one point. And so on. Of course, these speech-group specializations tended to disappear as immigration dried up, and as education and other factors opened up professions and other careers to young ethnic Chinese; even so, traces of the specializations can still be seen. In general, the ethnic Chinese excelled in trade, both small-scale and large-scale. One of the reasons they were - and still are - able to do so is that they have traditionally maintained close commercial, financial and familial ties with mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. D. Modern problems After the Second World War, feelings of nationalism and a drive to independence became dominant forces in the Southeast Asian countries. Along with these feelings came resentment of the economic power the Chinese communities enjoyed, and attempts to curtail this power in one way or another. These attempts centered mostly around two strategies: first, to hasten the naturalization of the ethnic Chinese (which was supposed to lead to assimilation), and second, to one way or another block Chinese participation in the economic activities from which they derived their power. Another source of resentment was the feeling that the ethnic Chinese political loyalties lay, not with the newly-developing countries, but with mainland China or Taiwan. Many of the movements to hasten or enforce citizenship of the ethnic Chinese can be traced to the notion that with citizenship-on-paper comes automatic loyalty. Movements along these lines varied from country to country. Laos never attracted enough Chinese for their numbers to make them a threat. In Cambodia, relations between the Cambodians and the resident Chinese had always been relatively friendly; the Chinese have never, seemingly, balked at the notion of assuming Cambodian citizenship. In Malaysia, on the other hand, the Chinese have been seen ― 7 ― as a real threat - and this is reflected in Malaysian policy towards the “boat people,” who were until July of 1979 mostly ethnic Chinese. And in Vietnam, as we will discuss in more detail in the next section, movements to curtail the Chinese ultimately resulted in their mass expulsion from the country. E. The Chinese language(s) The ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, as we mentioned before, speak one or the other of the Chinese dialects listed on page : Cantonese, Teochiu, Hokkien, Hakka or Hainanese. (We should warn you that the names of each of these dialects are spelled in any number of ways in the literature.) These dialects differ from one another mostly in pronunciation and vocabulary, and sometimes differ sufficiently to be mutually unintelligible. (Y. R. Chao, who is probably the best-known Chinese linguist, writing in English, estimates that some of the dialects of Chinese differ from other dialects as much as, say, French differs from Italian.) The dialects of Chinese mentioned in the previous paragraph are “home” languages used most often in informal social and business situations and, of course, around the house. In educated circles, and certainly in Chinese schools, the prestige dialect of Chinese - called Mandarin or, more modernly, kuo-yu is used. Mandarin is roughly the Chinese spoken in Peking; it has, for some time, been accepted as the standard language all over mainland China, on Taiwan, and in the Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. Besides being the accepted standard dialect, Mandarin also functions, in the overseas Chinese communities, as a means of communication - technically a lingua franca - among Chinese whose “home” dialects arent mutually understandable. All of this is reflected in the large numbers of ethnic Chinese refugees who speak Mandarin Chinese in addition to their native dialect, and use it in everyday situations. For many younger ethnic Chinese refugees who have had extensive education in Chinese schools, it is the dialect they are most comfortable using. As might be expected of a minority group, the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia speak the language of the country they are living in, depending on their contacts with native speakers and on the extent to which they have “assimilated.” There are ethnic Chinese from Vietnam, for example, whose Chinese is a little shaky, and whose Vietnamese is flawless; there are also ethnic Chinese from Vietnam who speak no Vietnamese at all (these tend to be the rural farmers, and fishermen).
Posted on: Fri, 01 Nov 2013 12:49:19 +0000
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