Nowadays, as the 80-year-old former refugee watches thousands of new Chinese immigrants deluge his adopted homeland, he cannot hide his disgust at their arrogant flamboyance and aggressive criminality. “I came here because of war, and I wonder why Chinese come here now,” says Tang, who lives alone and earns about $1 a day selling Chinese bottled water at the market. “Some of them are involved in drug trafficking and killing. They’re very bad men. And they spoil the name of the Chinese people. I wish the Cambodian government would send them back to China.”
Tang is not the only ethnic Chinese merchant in the region who’s likely to tell you this. From Bangkok to Bogor, a new wave of Chinese immigrants unlike any seen before is flooding south with an aggressive spirit and a boldness born of China’s boom years. The antics of some of these brash, bulldozing mainlanders is a growing point of tension throughout the region. And their biggest critics, ironically, live in the long-established ethnic Chinese communities, where immigrants have spent generations quietly blending in and jealously cultivating a fragile status quo. “The last thing we need are newcomers from China to destroy what we have built and strived for for so long,” lamented Al Cai Dy, a prominent member of Manila’s Chinese community, in a recent open letter to the Chinese Embassy.
At the top of the list of complaints is a growing gangster population, pouring in from Macao, Hong Kong and mainland-based syndicates. But the Chinese diaspora’s grievances go beyond street thugs and local strongmen. In Indonesia, illegal street vendors and a wave of smuggled Chinese merchandise are flooding the local market, driving some longtime members of the local Chinese merchant class to the verge of bankruptcy. In Burma, so many new Chinese have arrived that in downtown Mandalay, Mandarin is the language of choice and the locals have been pushed into the suburbs. Gaudy architecture dots the skyline. Longtime ethnic Chinese residents there can’t help but fear a repeat of the deadly anti-Chinese riots of the 1960s.
At the heart of the tension is a fundamental shift in both what’s motivating immigrants to leave China and the opportunities that await them on the outside. Chinese merchants have been plying their wares to their southern neighbors since at least the 17th century. For more than a hundred years, mainland traders made fortunes delivering cheap Chinese laborers to service the plantations of rich colonialists in Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia. Well established overseas Chinese communities–sometimes called the “bamboo network”–were able to take in thousands of migrants seeking a new start or fleeing bloodshed during the first and second world wars. But the Cultural Revolution shuttered China’s borders, and the small enclaves in Southeast Asia had to make it on their own.
It was a dangerous existence, and many lived on edge. “People didn’t want to be labeled communists, and there was an underlying fear and rhetoric about a Chinese takeover,” says Prof. Min Zhou, a sociologist at UCLA and an expert on the Chinese diaspora. “People were scared. They tried to assimilate and keep a low profile.” Often they were singled out anyway. Both Thailand and Indonesia forced Chinese residents to take local names. In the late 1960s, Indonesia shipped tens of thousands back to their homeland, while rampaging mobs torched Chinese shops, raped women and slaughtered families. In communist Vietnam and Cambodia, many were persecuted because they were members of the bourgeoisie. And in Burma the anti-Chinese riots of 1967 filled the streets with blood.
Such incidents are ancient history to the boatloads of poor Chinese farmers, laborers and young dreamers looking for a new life. The bustling capitals of Guangdong and Fujian provinces have become magnets for the restless. They serve as regional jumping-off points where all you need is a passport and a ticket to depart on a package tour to a Southeast Asian destination. Since the late 1980s and 1990s, when the Chinese government dramatically eased its restrictions, it’s been easy to get both. Shen Long Hai made the trip from China to Cambodia eight years ago. “I flew four hours, landed in Phnom Penh, paid $20 and got a visa. Then I could stay here as long as I wanted and run my business.”
On a recent night at Bangkok’s Ratchada Cabaret, the upside of this major migration is on full display. The downtown club’s parking lot is jammed with luxury tour buses. Eager Chinese tourists disembark and enter the seedy club to watch a variety show featuring silicone-enhanced transvestites wildly dancing and gyrating onstage. Later, they pile out of the theater beaming like birthday boys, lining up for photos and handing over fistfuls of Thai baht to the scantily clad Thai dancers posing with them. All told, an estimated 700,000 Chinese tourists visited Thailand last year–up from just 61,000 in 1990. Mainlanders now boast nearly 10 percent of all arrivals into Thailand. Outside the Ratchada, Wang Xin, a 30-year-old Chinese tourist, explains why Chinese are coming in droves: “It’s impossible to run these shows in China. It’s illegal because the cabaret show is not acceptable. And that’s why we’re here!”
Thailand may be one of the few places in the region where China’s new open-door policies have led to good feelings. Certainly there are countless Chinese immigrants living within the letter of the law and quietly going about their business. But their stories are overshadowed by those seeking a less honest income. Unlike past generations, these new additions to the Chinese diaspora are arriving at a time when China seems ascendant, and fears of persecution, whether based on politics or ethnicity, are distant. The result is a burgeoning immigrant class whose behavior is often directly at odds with the cautious, carefully calibrated customs of the long–entrenched old-time mainland communities.
This culture clash was almost unavoidable. Approximately 10 percent of those taking the package tours south know they are never coming back. But not everyone can afford to make the journey in such comfort. So to service the spillover demand, a lucrative business in human smuggling has sprouted up across the region. Meanwhile, once in their new settings, many immigrants turn to prostitution, illegal labor or street vending in order to pay back their smugglers and support themselves. It’s fed a boom in Southeast Asian organized crime.
In the Philippines, things have gotten so bad that members of the local Chinese community have written to their embassy pleading for help. About 300 foreigners have been arrested in illegal drug activities in the past three years–70 percent of them Chinese nationals. The Bureau of Immigration also cracked down recently on Chinese immigrants violating laws restricting foreigners from engaging in unlicensed retail trades. “They resent us for separating ourselves from them. We resent them, too, because of their illegal activities,” says Teresita Ang See, a leading voice in the Chinese community, adding, “Our sense of belonging is already to the Philippines compared to these newcomers, whose loyalties are still to China.”
Similar complaints have been heard in Cambodia, Burma, Vietnam and parts of Thailand. In the end, however, the real threat to old-line Chinese merchants may come from the growing tide of mainland-based trade. In Indonesia, the government is so annoyed at the huge influx of illegal merchandise, it recently made a show of arresting and deporting petty street merchants selling Chinese-made binoculars, wristwatches and ballpoint pens on Java. But they’re just the tip of the Bic. Plastic-sandal makers, electrical-appliance producers, motorcycle-assembly factories and the local shoe and garment industries have all been undercut by a glut of smuggled Chinese goods. “It’s a door-to-door service,” complains Anton Supit, chairman of Indonesia’s footwear association and an ethnic Chinese. “For one [shipping] container from Singapore you pay 70 million rupiah [almost $8,000], and nobody cares what you put inside it.”
It’s a problem that’s only likely to get worse. Yet in many ways, the new arrivals aren’t so different from the ancestors of those who are now shunning them. The Philippines was once a way station for Chinese opium traders, gamblers and illegal merchants. Burma has long taken in refugees from its neighbor to the north. And the famed Spice Islands have lured Chinese merchants for centuries. It’s not unreasonable to expect that the grandchildren of this newest round of Chinese expats will be the diaspora’s community leaders of tomorrow. For the time being, as far as Tang So and others of his generation are concerned, the bamboo network will include some bent or broken reeds.
