Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe

9. A Specific Idiom of Chinese Captialism in Southeast Asia: Sino-Malaysian Captial Accumulation in the Face of State Hostility

9 I A Specific Idiom of Chinese Capitalism in Southeast Asia Sino-Malaysian Capital Accumulation in the Face ofState Hostility K. S. lOMO In recent years, much has been written about the economic boom in East Asia. Attention was focused first on Japan and the newly industrializing countries (NICs) ofSouth Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore . By the eady 1980s, culturalist explanations were touting Confucianism as the common element responsible for these economic miracles.' This is particularly ironic because as recently as the 1970s, Western culturalists, among others, were blaming Confucianism for the economic backwardness of the Chinese. In any case, many Chinese dismiss the term Confucianism as a Western reification of their mixed cultural heritage, which includes Daoism, Buddhism, and various other influences. And while acknowledging the profound impact of Chinese culture on their own, few Japanese or Koreans have ever reduced this culture to Confucianism. Nevertheless, because of the hegemonic influence of Western academia, a generation of culturalists has been rediscovering Confucianist influences throughout East Asia, often to the amusement of East Asians themselves. With the rapid growth ofmost economies in the Association ofSouth East Asian Nations (ASEAN) since the 1970S, including Vietnam since the late 1980s, there has been much talk about a second generation of Southeast Asian NICs and fresh speculation about the factors responsible for the East Asian economic miracles. With the dominant role ofethnic Chinese business minorities in most Southeast Asian economies and the sustained boom in China since the 19805, there has been increasing speculation about an emerging Chinese economic zone and renewed emphasis on Confucianist explanations , even though most first-generation immigrant Chinese businesspeople in Southeast Asia have modest (and hence unschooled and "uncultured") social backgrounds.> The increasingly blatant encouragement of "overseas Chinese" investments by China's authorities has resulted in increased investments from 237 K. S. IOMO Southeast Asian Chinese. This has led to increased official and renewed popular resentment-encouraged by ethnopopulist politicians-against Chinese economic dominance in Southeast Asia. Consequently, greater public attention has been focused on the apparently ethnically exclusive Chinese business networks that are believed to be responsible for Chinese business success in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.' In this essay I argue that a distinct idiom ofSino-Malaysian capitalism has developed in Malaysia in response to perceived anti-Chinese hostility from the colonial and, especially after it promulgated the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1971, the postcolonial state. The NEP was intended, among other things, to achieve economic parity between the politically dominant Malays and the commercially ubiquitous Chinese by "restructuring society to eliminate the identification of race with economic function." I also consider whether and to what extent the Malaysian experience may be generalizable to the rest ofSoutheast Asia. COLONIALISM AND ETHNICITY The demographic history of c010nial Malaya is reasonably well known. Except for the irrigated rice plains of Kedah and Kelantan and the colony of Malacca, most of the peninsula was relatively sparsely populated before the advent of British colonialism in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Although the population was composed primarily of Muslim Malays, there were also small colonies of other ethnic groups, including Chinese and Indians, that dated back at least to the fifteenth century, when the Malacca sultanate linked China to India and lands beyond.4 British imperialism's initial interest was to break Dutch and other mercantilist control of trade through the Straits of Malacca and in the Malay archipelago. This was done by establishing "free" ports in what became known as the Straits Settlements of Penang (1786), Singapore (1819), and Malacca (in the last case, twice: first during the French occupation of Holland during the Napoleonic wars, and again as part of the post-Napoleonic division of "Malay" Southeast Asia into English and Dutch "spheres of influence"). Commercial expansion through free trade attracted merchants from near and far, including southern Chinese-mainly Hokkiens from Fujian, as was the case in much of archipelagic Southeast Asia. Chinese commerce, as well as the settlement of Chinese and Malay agricultural workers, followed British imperialism and in some cases, such as earlynineteenth -century Kedah and Johore, even extended beyond the sphere of direct colonial control. CHI N ESE CAP IT A LIS M ! N SOU THE A ST AS! A 239 With a growing demand for tin, both the decline of tin mining in Cornwall and Dutch control oftin in Bangka and Billiton in the Dutch East Indies made the...