The Chinese Community in French Polynesia: Scholarly Sources of Understanding

Much of the extant literature dealing with the Chinese community in French Polynesia has appeared since the early 1990s. The work of scholars from across a range of academic disciplines, these publications testify to the growing interest in the history and contemporary composition of this little-known community. In contrast to the earlier, much sparser literature, these publications break free from assimilationist undercurrents and many interrogate the earlier works in terms of their particular cultural emphases and the overly dominant economic focus that characterized them—and which in some cases is still the predominant focus. These later works for the most part consider the local community as part of a vibrant southern Chinese diaspora, and there is much evidence of a need for a new language to conceptualize many of the complexities faced by scholars who endeavor to understand the community in all its richness and variety.

A major challenge is to understand the significance of the historical trajectories traversed by the Chinese populations in French Polynesia in light of a multiplicity of orientations rather than through the unilinear path from the Middle Kingdom to a far-flung periphery on what has been perceived as a very distant horizon. One key to unraveling some of these complexities is to keep in mind the alternative trajectories for transmitting knowledge that pertain to oral and written sources and means of transmission. Some of these works remain extremely close to textual sources, others are based to a larger degree on fieldwork and interviews. Yet again others combine an insider knowledge of the community with the scholarly techniques and strategies of documentary historical research.

Although the Chinese are mentioned indirectly in a number of publications dealing with French Polynesia in general, this review is restricted to those that focus specifically on the Chinese community, and in particular to those who write from within. Thus the writings of Francis Cheung and the late Rene Shan and a recent publication of the Wen Fa Association will be highlighted and compared with the equally compelling works of those scholars who have written from without, such as Sophie Vognin and W. E. Willmott.¹ In this way, the significant differences and similarities that mark these scholarly perspectives, where they exist, may be isolated and become a source for cultural reflection. Bridging these perspectives somewhat are the extracts from Richard Moench's dissertation on his anthropological fieldwork, undertaken in the 1960s, which were reprinted in 1992. All writers make abundant and significant references to the earlier work of Gérald Coppenrath, published in 1967, which might now be considered something of a classic.

Tahiti et des îles (1919-1945): Etude d'une société coloniale aux antipodes de sa métropole, by historian Francis Cheung and published by L'Harmattan in Paris in 1998, is devoted primarily to the inter-war period as well as to the war years themselves. Likewise the work of Rene Shan, published in a comprehensive article titled "Histoire et anecdotes des Chinois de Tahiti" in the journal Tahiti-Pacifique in 1992—the first part, "Les coolies sont devenus les entreprenueurs . . . malgré les Esprits. . . ," appearing in the February issue and the second, "Esprits fachés, orientation du Temple, tailleur possedé, etc. . . , etc. . . ," the following month. Moench's 1963 thesis "Economic Relations of the Chinese in the Society Isles," based on two years' fieldwork in Tahiti and Raiatea between 1959 and 1961, was "rediscovered" and an extract of it reprinted in the journal Tahiti-Pacifique in November 1992 under the title "L'Evolution des Chinois de Tahiti." The time lag here is interwoven with a "linguistic lag" in translation, and both index the intellectual distance between different streams of scholarship and different scholarly languages of transmission.

In 1994 Sophie Vognin contributed an interesting chapter titled "La population Chinoise de Tahiti au XIXe siècle" (The Chinese population of Tahiti in the nineteenth century) to the volume edited by Paul de Deckker, Le Peuplement du Pacifique et de la Nouvelle-Calédonie au XIXe siècle, which was published by Editions L'Harmattan for l'Université française du Pacifique...