The Sojourners

The pattern was repeating itself throughout Southeast Asia. In Thailand, four Chinese businessmen were shot to death in public on suspicion that they had burned their shops to get the insurance. In Cambodia, Chinese residents were barred from 18 occupations, ranging from barbering to pawnbrokering to, curiously enough, espionage. In Indonesia, Chinese traders and their families--some 300,000 people--were ordered to get out of rural villages by year's end. Not since the Japanese swarmed into the South Pacific in World War II have Asia's Overseas Chinese felt their position so threatened.

Southward to Fortune. The 14 million Overseas Chinese living in the area they call Nanyang, the Southern Ocean, looked desperately for a way out of the rain of repressive laws. Some turned to Red China and some to the Nationalist stronghold on Formosa, but all felt that their existence was at stake. The matter was hotly argued last week in Manila's tiny sari-sari shops by the flickering light of kerosene lamps, in Bangkok's "thieves' market," where peddlers cautiously hawk rare Siamese antiques, in Singapore's Tanjong Rhu, the "millionaires' club," where wealthy Chinese dine on shark's fins and suckling pigs while outside stand row on row their parked Cadillacs and Daimlers.

The crisis is one that has been faced before by the Overseas Chinese, an unassimilated group that has lived for centuries among alien peoples. As early as 300 B.C., Chinese merchants in clumsy junks coasted along the shores of Viet Nam. When European adventurers and explorers first made their hesitant way into Southeast Asia, they found, as Britain's Sir Thomas Herbert wrote in 1634, that in every major seaport were the "infinitely industrious Chyneses."

The European imperialists regarded them as rivals. The Spanish in the Philippines were nearly wiped out before they rallied to slaughter 23,000 Chinese at Manila in 1603. At midcentury, a Chinese exile and pirate named Koxinga drove the Dutch from Formosa; later the Dutch retaliated by wholesale murders of Chinese on Java. But the colonial powers and the Overseas Chinese soon recognized that they were destined to be allies, not enemies. The one supplied technology and power, the other shrewdness and hard work; between them they reaped the fortune of the Indies.

The Hard Workers. Britain's entry into the Orient brought new swarms of Chinese to Nanyang as indentured coolies to work in tin mines and on plantations, to load ships and build roads and carry burdens. Each new trading city--Penang, Singapore, Malacca, Hong Kong--became heavily Chinese. As agents and middlemen, the ubiquitous Chinese followed the Dutch troops into Sumatra, Borneo and Celebes, the British into Burma, the French into Indo-China. Even in Thailand, which never became a European colony, the Chinese were advisers to the king, and controlled the nation's commerce.

Though largely ignorant and illiterate peasants from the most oppressed classes of southern China, the immigrants gained new skills with bewildering speed. By the beginning of the 20th century, they had a grip on mining and agriculture, shopkeeping and gardening. Soon they appeared in finance and banking, branched out into European-style export-import firms, light industry, the management of large estates. They were clever and adaptable; when Western steamships and railroads destroyed their monopoly of coastal and river shipping in unwieldy junks, the Chinese switched to trucking, and today dominate road transportation throughout Southeast Asia.

Thousands died in mines, fields and shipwrecks. Hundreds of thousands achieved little, but waited cannily and confidently for their luck to change, like good poker players faced with a bad run of cards. Hundreds of success stories came to life. An obscure Malaccan schoolteacher who tried his hand at rubber planting in 1908 became Sir Cheng-lock Tan, Knight Commander of the British Empire and possessor of a fortune whose size he could not estimate. Tan Kah-kee arrived in Singapore in the 1900s as an indentured coolie, constructed an empire that included shipping, plantations, newspapers, trucking lines, went bankrupt and emerged again wealthier than ever.

Business Instinct. While charming but less industrious Indonesians and Laotians and Thailanders sang songs, made love and worked just enough to eat, the Chinese pushed into jungles and up rivers and out to remote islands to build their palm-leaf huts and work from dawn till midnight. They peddled manufactured goods to farmers, collected harvests for market, mortgaged crops, manipulated the prices of raw materials, were moneylenders (at interest rates of up to 200%) to entire rural populations.

Their only steady loyalty seemed to be to themselves. When British troops stopped off in Singapore on the way to invade China during the opium wars, the city's Chinese merchants gave a magnificent fete for the British officers. During the bitter seven-year war between France and Communist Viet Minh, Chinese traders impartially sold smuggled goods to both sides. In South Viet Nam, which recognizes Nationalist China, the shops of Overseas Chinese display pictures of Chiang Kaishek; next door in Cambodia, which recognizes Red China, the shops show pictures of Mao Tse-tung; in Malaya, which recognizes neither, the canny Chinese hang pictures of Sun Yatsen, founder of the Chinese Republic. Asked why, any one of the merchants is sure to include one reason in his patriotic reply: "It's good for business."

Lacking the European sense of nationalism, the Overseas Chinese are united by bonds of social and cultural solidarity. No matter how many generations have lived and died in Southeast Asia, their hearts are in their homeland, and they still call themselves the hua-chiao, "sojourning Chinese." This racial mystique is inbred from infancy. At school, the child hears that the classical Mandarin he is about to learn is the greatest language in the world, with the greatest number of characters, spoken by the greatest number of people. Millions of hua-chiao schoolchildren in Southeast Asia chant: "Wo shih chung kuo jen. Wo chu tsai Nanyang. Wo ai chung kuo [I am Chinese. I live in the Southern Ocean. I love China]."

"The Foreigners." Hua-chiao society is based on the family, which includes not only blood relatives but also everyone with the same surname--provided that he comes originally from the same Chinese province. Next comes locality ties, and each child is enrolled in a Fukien, Hainan or Szechwan regional organization. Finally there is the staggering list of clubs, fraternities and brotherhoods, ranging from convivial societies to secret and shadier groups, like the Triads. For Chinese in Manila or Djakarta, the business organization means far more than it would in Dayton or Duluth; it is expected to protect the hua-chiao from local trouble by wining, dining and bribing local officials. Explains a Chinese businessman: "We like two kinds of government: one that is honest and orderly so you know what is coming, and the other that is entirely corrupt but keeps its word in gangster dealings."

Since the end of the war and the withdrawal of the colonial powers, the Overseas Chinese grumble that they have had to deal with too many governments that are neither honest nor honestly corrupt. But the governments also complain bitterly of the Chinese. Cried Indonesia's President Sukarno: "There are foreigners utilizing the people's difficulties to get as much profit as possible. Government regulations are violated, outsmarted, avoided and sabotaged. These foreigners have sown the seeds of race hatred."

Banning Bankers. In country after country, the Overseas Chinese minority has overwhelming economic power. In Malaya, where they are 40% of the nation's 6,500,000 people, the hua-chiao receive over 70% of the national income of $1.8 billion. Whatever the British do not own is in Chinese hands: 72% of the trucking, 80% of the buses, 40% of the tin mining, 35% of the rubber. In Thailand, where they are roughly 14% of the population, the hua-chiao own 90% of the retail shops, 70% of the rice and timber mills. Back in the 19203. Cambridge-educated King Vajiravudh railed against the Chinese as "the Jews of the Far East." By 1955, the Thais had reduced the number of Chinese schools from 430 to 152, forbidden Chinese to be barbers, set type in the Thai language or cast statues of Buddha.

In the Philippines, where Chinese number only 1% of the population, an official complains that they "dominate the domestic and foreign commerce and manipulate the law of supply and demand." The Philippines' copra trade, the largest in the world, is two-thirds controlled by Chinese.

In South Viet Nam, the hua-chiao, who number 8% of the population, have had to dodge nimbly through loopholes in the laws to remain middlemen in tea processing, coffee, rice, kapok and rubber. President Ngo Dinh Diem is determined, by fiat if necessary, to assimilate the Chinese. So far, few of them have registered for citizenship, but they are grudgingly changing their names, removing Chinese signs from their shops, and sending their children to Vietnamese schools.

In newly autonomous Singapore, 85% Chinese, Cambridge-educated Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, 36, himself a third-generation Chinese, talks of "actively cultivating a Malayan consciousness," and thinks that Chinese should no longer think of themselves as transients there.

In the neighboring Federation of Malaya (nearly 60% Malay, 40% Chinese), shrewd Prime Minister Abdul Rahman has created a successful racial coalition--the Alliance Party--of Malays, Chinese and Indians, and has won the support of responsible Chinese by fashioning a political movement as delicately balanced as a Calder mobile.

Generally, the Overseas Chinese have tried to stay out of the ideological battles of their homeland, or out of fear or self-interest have played both sides. Many, while insisting they are nonCommunist, are privately proud of how well Red China stood off the white man's armies in Korea. Though appalled by reports of conditions in Red China, they can be heard to say, in the words of a leading Singapore merchant: "For once, Overseas Chinese feel we have a strong mother country to whom we can turn if everything else fails."

The Endeared. The hua-chiao are often a headache not only to the countries they live in but to the rulers of Nationalist and Red China as well. Formosa, needing friends in the Far East, has friendly feelings for countries that continue to recognize it, such as the Philippines, Thailand and South Viet Nam, and it dares not recklessly rush to the support of the Overseas Chinese in every local squabble. Last week Formosa was engaged in a long, embittering dispute with Manila about the disposition of 2,700 Chinese who have overstayed their visas in the Philippines.

Red China has played it both ways. In the first flush of conquering the mainland, the Reds championed the Overseas Chinese and even allotted them 30 seats in the National People's Congress at Peking. The hua-chiao were called "the endeared children of the Chinese nation" and were told that their "proper rights and interests are now protected by their country." Thousands of hua-chiao students went to China to complete their education; Chinese schoolteachers throughout Southeast Asia displayed Peking's five-starred flag; delirious Singapore millionaires endowed academies and hospitals in China; and millions of dollars poured back to the homeland for hua-chiao relatives.

Then the love affair palled. Red China decided that the Southeast Asian governments were more important than the Overseas Chinese and. wooing the Afro-Asian nations at Bandung. China's Premier Chou En-lai urged that Chinese abroad "be loyal to the countries they live in." The disenchantment was mutual. Hua-chiao students returned from China complaining of hardships under the Reds. The relatives back home saw little of the money that had been sent them, and sneaked out bitter reports about the communes.

This year the Southeast Asian governments that Red China has been wooing began to grow nervous about Peking's brutal behavior. They were frightened by Tibet, worried by Laos, and depressed by Chinese belligerency on India's northern borders. In their fear of new Red aggression, they viewed the Overseas Chinese as a potential fifth column.

Indonesia is currently a fever spot. Though the Chinese comprise less than 3% of the 87 million Indonesians, the hua-chiao have a tight hold on the nation's economy. Now that President Sukarno has imposed exorbitant taxes on the Chinese, banned their newspapers and ordered 80,000 traders to move from the villages to the cities, some of the hua-chiao have given up, sold their local currency (thus further depressing Indonesia's unstable rupiah) and left for mainland China or Hong Kong.

Since they now have nothing to lose, the Reds swiftly and cynically switched tactics, went back to defending the beleaguered hua-chiao against all comers. Taking up the cudgels for the Overseas Chinese in Indonesia, Peking last week accused the Djakarta government of dis crimination, lying and slander. The Red ambassador handed Indonesia's Foreign Minister a vituperative note. Radio Peking cried that, by attacking the hua-chiao, Indonesia "fought only with cats because they are afraid to put up resistance against tigers," i.e., the big Western companies. At this particular moment the hot embrace of Red China is not likely to do the hua-chiao of Indonesia much good, but it makes its impression on the rest of the Overseas Chinese who have learned to place their bets unsentimentally, to thrive by their wits and their energy, and to suffer on occasion the inevitable persecution of those who will not or cannot belong where they live.

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