Ambition and Identity: Chinese Merchant Elites in Colonial Manila, 1880–1916

Conclusion

Conclusion 219 The purpose of this book has been to offer a nuanced understanding of the Chinese in colonial Manila that is free from the biases of nationcentric historiography, be it Philippine or Chinese, and to see the Chinese merchant elite in colonial Manila as masters of a liminal place, a place whose history cannot be confined within a single national or local narrative. Because they lived on the boundaries between China and Southeast Asia, the story of the Nanyang Chinese is embedded in the nationalist scholarship of this region’s new nations. At the same time, huaqiao are celebrated as progenitors of the Chinese republic whose gaze is inevitably drawn to the Chinese motherland .1 The literature on the Chinese overseas has thus generally fallen into two camps: that attacking the Chinese and that praising them for their notable contributions to the cultures and economies of either modern China or Southeast Asia (but rarely both). Contemporary Philippine Chinese have often found themselves blamed for the economic underdevelopment of the Philippines, attacked for their parasitism, and accused of collaborating with colonial oppressors and corrupt regimes. A similar fate has befallen other Chinese enclaves throughout Southeast Asia. Contemporary conditions of the Philippine economy are an outgrowth of late Spanish era economic policy and the unique nature of American rule, specifically , bringing the Philippines under the umbrella of American tariffs . This created a dependency economy and favored labor-intensive over capital-intensive industry. The Chinese did not create this state of affairs, but they were present in the Philippines with the resources, strategies, and ambition to exploit these opportunities. 220 Conclusion A common pitfall, therefore, when researching and writing the history of the Chinese in Southeast Asia is that one will encourage negative stereotypes of the ethnic Chinese or become trapped within nationcentric narratives. An emphasis on opportunistic and manipulative activities, in particular, can too easily be appropriated by those who would portray the Chinese as colonial collaborators and economic parasites. Without a doubt, the Chinese elite discussed in this work were ambitious and opportunistic, and were willing to exploit their relations with external sources of authority to satisfy personal and group interests: this portrait is borne out by the available evidence . Moreover, one might be tempted to conclude from the preceding chapters that the Chinese community in colonial Manila was perpetually riven by conflicts between Chinese. Intracommunity con- flict is better documented and easier to analyze historically than the more common patterns of cooperation, because it divides the subjects into recognizable camps. The contest over the consulate and Uy Tongco’s deportation were both well-documented intracommunity conflicts that poured over into government and public spheres, and both demonstrated the efficacy of slander. The frequent recourse to slander, in turn, conditioned the contemporary portrayal of the local Chinese as litigious schemers and obscured many of these men’s true qualities. Periodic conflicts can also artificially polarize groups within a community and temporarily draw stark boundaries between Manichean categories that would otherwise be too simplistic. Unlike conflict, which is the historian’s bread and butter, cooperation tends to be more nebulous and generally less interesting. The result is an emphasis on the contentious qualities of our subjects. Yet in these conflicts we can glimpse community dynamics in their sharpest relief so that we might draw conclusions about patterns of behavior, especially cooperation, in more mundane and less contentious times. What becomes most clear from these cases is that competition for privileged access to colonial and consular authority maintained the relative cohesion and prosperity of the Chinese community. The great irony is that the intramural conflicts discussed in this book were an outgrowth of cooperative strategies. The matrices of trust—native-place associations, surname groups, gremios, sworn brotherhoods, migration networks, and chambers of commerce— which were the sinews of the community and had given the Chinese a commercial advantage in the colonial economy, required points of Conclusion 221 contact with the colonial government and with Chinese officialdom. The Spanish had provided numerous points of contact between the state and the Chinese community that satisfied the social and economic ambitions of the Chinese elite. When the possibility for new points of contact appeared, such as with the consulate general, competition for this point of contact was understandably fierce. Likewise, when the systematized links between the state and the Chinese community...