Chinese Encounters in Southeast Asia
How People, Money, and Ideas from China Are Changing a Region
University of Washington Press, December 2016
Volume edited by PÁL NYÍRI & DANIELLE TAN
Foreword by WANG GUNGWU
This is the first book to focus explicitly on how China’s rise as a major economic and political actor has affected societies in Southeast Asia. It examines how Chinese investors, workers, tourists, bureaucrats, longtime residents, and adventurers interact throughout Southeast Asia. The contributors use case studies to show the scale of Chinese influence in the region and the ways in which various countries mitigate their unequal relationship with China by negotiating asymmetry, circumventing hegemony, and embracing, resisting, or manipulating the terms dictated by Chinese capital.
PÁL NYÍRI is professor of global history from an anthropological perspective at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. He is the author of Scenic Spots: Chinese Tourism, the State, and Cultural Authority; coauthor of Seeing Culture Everywhere: From Genocide to Consumer Habits; and coeditor of Chinese Encounters in Southeast Asia: How People, Money, and Ideas from China Are Changing a Region. DANIELLE TAN is research associate at the Research Institute on Contemporary Southeast Asia (IRASEC, Bangkok). The contributors are Aranya Siriphon, Caroline Grillot, Caroline S. Hau, Oliver Hensengerth, Johanes Herlijanto, Hew Wai Weng, Weiqiang Lin, Chris Lyttleton, Kevin Woods, Brenda S. A. Yeoh, and Juan Zhang.
« [These case studies] both demonstrate the scale of Chinese influence in the region as a whole and point out clearly that there is no such single thing as ‘Chinese influence,’ but rather disparate influences of different kinds of Chinese people and investors in a dynamic region. »
Stevan Harrell, series editor, Studies on Ethnic Groups in China« This edition sheds new light on how specific vectors of change are linking millions of Chinese individuals with their neighbors in Southeast Asia, creating opportunities, frictions, and resistance, while concurrently reshaping the region. Through ethnographically rich case studies, we gain important insights into the everyday connections, complex social relationships, and composite livelihoods that intertwine China and its neighbors. »
Sarah Turner, coauthor of Frontier Livelihoods: Hmong in the Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands« This important collection provides tantalizing accounts of how traders, entrepreneurs, workers, teachers, students, and tourists from the PRC are opening up borderlands and variously embedding themselves into nations to the south. The accelerating outflow of PRC people has made ‘Chinese’ identities-richly ambiguous and multivalent-a critical form of transnational social capital in the midst of local resistances, skepticism, and accommodation in Southeast Asia. »
Aihwa Ong, author of Fungible Life: Experiment in the Asian City of Life
Contents
Foreword by Wang Gungwu
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: China’s “Rise” in Southeast Asia from a Bottom-Up Perspective
Pál Nyíri and Danielle Tan
PART 1. IDENTITIES
1. Investors, Managers, Brokers, and Culture Workers: How Migrants from China Are Changing the Meaning of Chineseness in Cambodia
Pál Nyíri
2. Multiplying Diversities: How “New” Chinese Mobilities Are Changing Singapore
Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Weiqiang Lin
3. Translocal Pious Entrepreneurialism: Hui Business and Religious Activities in Malaysia and Indonesia
Hew Wai Weng
PART 2. LIVELIHOODS
4. Border Guanxi: Xinyimin and Transborder Trade in Northern Thailand
Aranya Siriphon
5. Ambivalent Encounters: Business and the Sex Markets at the China-Vietnam Borderland
Caroline Grillot and Juan Zhang
PART 3. NORMS
6. Entangling Alliances: Elite Cooperation and Competition in the Philippines and China
Caroline S. Hau
Danielle Tan
8. “China in Burma”: A Multiscalar Political Economy Analysis
Kevin Woods
9. Water Governance in the Mekong Basin: Scalar Trade-off, Transnational Norms, and Chinese Hydropower Investment
Oliver Hensengerth
PART 4. ASPIRATIONS
10. “Search for Knowledge as Far as China!” Indonesian Responses to the Rise of China
Johanes Herlijanto
11. Stimulating Circuits: Chinese Desires and Transnational Affective Economies in Southeast Asia
Chris Lyttleton
Glossary
References
Contributors
Index