Seattle; London: University of Washington Press, 2016. xiii, 296 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-295-99930-2.
The humanities and social sciences identify, study, and represent people, their behaviour, and their relationality. However, there has not been sufficient reflection in the literature on how a group or a category of people can be identified as a target group to be studied and represented in certain ways. This ontological puzzle can be partially resolved by declaring the limited scope of the study. However, this still does not shed light on how a group of people can be intuitively selected and labelled as belonging to or representing that group. Scholars usually simply accept the existence of a group or take for granted the self-designated belonging to a group of people. Today, however, even people who could once understand their own identities may have to rethink them as the expansion of capital as well as the transnational flow of physical bodies, desires, and ideas are transforming relationality.
In Chinese Encounters in Southeast Asia: How People, Money, and Ideas from China Are Changing a Region, Pál Nyíri and Danielle Tan present eleven chapters that address the ways in which these conceptually difficult dynamics are playing out across China’s national borders, primarily amongst the subaltern Southeast Asian populations. The book claims that a study “on the ground” yields “better understanding of the realities,” (21) “which are not always in line with China’s policy goals and the intentions of various Chinese actors” (22). In fact, even the seemingly simple question of “who is Chinese?” can challenge the most experienced anthropologists in interactions with different generations of Chinese migrant cohorts and those crossing “restless borders” (5) in different time periods. Strategically retrieving, reconstructing, and sometimes resisting a particular kind of Chinese identity or a particular Chinese network simultaneously reconstitutes the self-knowledge of those initially considered non-Chinese. Hence, in “the Chinese political economy of ethnicity” (16), Chineseness can be socially acquired.
In his foreword to the book, Wang Gungwu, a renowned expert on Chinese Southeast Asians, points out several implications of this book. Wang argues that although the reality that “land borders may be no less open than maritime borders” has been “true for centuries,” it has been “neglected in the scholarly literature” (viii). In light of this, the main implications of this book are that it addresses a gap in the literature and provides empirical proof of the fluidity of “Chineseness.” It also strongly suggests that Chineseness has been fluid for long before China’s current rise. Furthermore, Wang is curious at how seemingly “positive growth” in combination with “developments that are strikingly negative” may either “consolidate the control for the young states” or “reinforce their boundaries” (ix). This echoes the worry that the Chinese or China can still serve as scapegoat, turning the image of a strong and fearless China upside down. He concludes by stating that the book “provides a view of what has become possible,” and calls for empirical research “matching the overseas Chinese roles to the larger story of rising Asia” (x). Thus, in my opinion, he implies a wish to dissolve “Chinese” as an analytically useful category.
In chapter 1, Pál Nyíri explores the political economy of Chinese ethnicity to explain the different nature of contemporary retransnationalization of Chinese Cambodians. In chapter 2, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Weiqiang Lin record how new Chinese immigrants engender a sense of estrangement among Chinese Singaporeans. The story is different in chapter 3, where Hew Wai Weng depicts how pious Muslim Chinese become translocal via economic entrepreneurialism in Indonesia and Malaysia, thus transcending the traditional understanding of Chineseness in their cities of residence. Using the case study of Thai Chinese, Aranya Siriphon nonetheless reconfirms in chapter 4 that ethnicity is not sufficient for newcomers to establish guanxi, and thus benefit from the existing Chinese traders’ association. Caroline Grillot and Juan Zhang, in chapter 5, suggest that easy, though fragile, guanxi can emerge in the sex trade in Hekou. The chapter interprets how Chinese male businessmen enhance their masculinity in the face of Vietnamese partners by employing extremely submissive Vietnamese women who understand and skillfully meet their need for dominance.
Caroline S. Hau shows in chapter 6 that the story is equally, if not more, complex in the Philippines. Hau painstakingly moves between different levels of analysis to demonstrate the uneasy links between political-business alliances among elites and between nations, different generations of Chinese migrants, and the Chinese Mestizo, and Mestizo in general. Danielle Tan’s chapter 7 illustrates the capacity of the Lao government to discharge state functions to illicit “Chinese enclaves” in a peculiarly neo-liberal way through the inflow of Chinese private capital and public goods. In chapter 8, Kevin Woods reports a similar story in which Chinese investors enable the Burmese government to smooth the transition of ethnic strongmen to neo-liberal practitioners who, in cooperation with the government and crony companies, ironically impede global financial institutions.
Such ambiguously governed regions can result in the relaxing of environmental regulations, which, according to Oliver Hensengerth’s chapter 9 on water governance in the Mekong Basin, tempts the investing Chinese companies to disregard the higher international environmental standards. In chapter 10, Johanes Herlijanto presents the spread of a positive image of China in Indonesia that prompts the idea of learning from China. In chapter 11, Chris Lyttleton lists a number of affects that undergird Chinese influence everywhere in Southeast Asia that may by themselves generate desires for arguably myopic transformations.
The book’s provision of stories on the ground reminds the reader of the likely superficiality of most analyses that posit global and national parameters. However, readers may want to avoid over-romanticizing the agency of the subaltern actors introduced. Although larger forces cannot determine choices or prevent constant revising at the lower echelons, the strange alliance of neo-liberal and national discourses continues to overwhelm most of their alternatives.
Chih-yu Shih
National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
pp. 128-130