Chinese Business in Southeast Asia: Contesting Cultural Explanations, Researching Entrepreneurship (review)

Chinese Business in Southeast Asia: Contesting Cultural Explanations, Researching Entrepreneurship is the result of a workshop on Chinese businesses in Southeast Asia hosted by the Program for Southeast Asian Area Studies (PROSEA), Academia Sinica, Taibei, in 1997. Edited by Edmund Terence Gomez and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, this volume consists of an introduction and six papers, each written as country reports featuring Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Taiwan (Taiwanese businesses in Southeast Asia). Each paper contains a brief history of Chinese businesses in each of these countries and the sectors of their respective economies that Chinese businesses specialize in or have dominated up to the present, followed by an evaluation of the state of Chinese businesses in each of these countries with specific reference to developments in politics and governmental policies pertaining to the economy since the attaining of independence by each of these countries. There is also a fairly detailed bibliography on Chinese businesses in Southeast Asia, which is again divided according to the countries represented in the volume.

The general thrust of the papers challenges the cultural approach to understanding the functions and successes of Chinese businesses in each of these Southeast Asian countries in the post-independence period. There is a conscious effort to move away from a more conceptual approach to understanding the success and limitations faced by the Chinese business communities in the respective countries since these countries became independent from their colonial masters after the Second World War, to a more pragmatic approach to the issue of Chinese capital and the establishment of niches in the respective economies. While there is an acknowledgment that emotive factors centered on ethnicity have been and continue to remain important to the Chinese business communities in Southeast Asia, the governments that these communities have been subject to have been more important in determining, in real terms, the viability of Chinese enterprise.

The papers also question the thesis that the Chinese business communities in Southeast Asia are linked together by a series of networks that have made available large pools of capital, information, and knowledge that have opened up business opportunities in both domestic and regional markets. The existence and perpetuation of transnational Chinese business networks, based on the mutual recognition of a shared historical and ethnic background and with China as the common point of reference, otherwise known as the huaqiao (Overseas Chinese) or bamboo networks, is refuted. Instead, the papers suggest that since independence was attained by these countries in the mid-twentieth century, the Chinese business communities in Southeast Asia have been confined largely to the respective countries in which they have been located, resulting in a process of localization over the last fifty years.

Localization of the various Chinese business communities in Southeast Asia took place as a result of the establishment of national identities in each of the Southeast Asian countries in the post-independence phase of Southeast Asian history, despite the position of the Chinese community in each of the Southeast Asian countries being at times ambiguous. At the same time, the isolation of China by the West during the 1950s to 1970s, and China's closed-door policy up until the late 1970s, had effectively led to the diminishing of the role and importance of the China connection that had, up until the 1950s, been a vital aspect of the Chinese communities in Southeast Asia.

The papers maintain a consensus that in such a context the political framework within which Chinese business existed, such as the nature of the political elite of the respective countries and the policies of the respective governments, had a more fundamental impact on the opportunities accorded to the Chinese business community for the establishment and enlargement of economic niches than do long-standing sociocultural traits and practices, such...