Chinese Migration Business and Global Conquest
"Chinatown is not a place where the Chinese run to to take shelter from the locals; it is a place that they build up to keep the locals from getting to them. . . and I can say that it is very racist; they don’t like to inter-mix."
-From an interview that I did with Toney Leong, an overseas Chinese in India, on November 16, 2006.
Overseas Chinese in India
At the Four Tigers market in Budapest, my imagination was stricken by the stories of these Chinese immigrants whom, at least from those that I had spoken with, were right off the boat from their native land. They came to Hungary as a part of the mission that the Chinese have been practicing for hundreds of years: to be covertly at the forefront of every economic surge on the planet. A clever investor only has to look at the number of Chinese immigrants in a given city to know of its potential for economic success.
--------------
Wade from Vagabond Journey.com
in Budapest, Hungary- July 29, 2008
Travelogue -- Travel Photos
--------------
The foreign Chinese tend to not live in dead cities, and they jump upon the boom towns like ants on a befallen scoop of sidewalk ice cream. I would bet anything that a timeline of global capital and investment patterns would be nearly identical with that of Chinese migration.
I do not know how they do it, but if you look at early incidences of mass economic expansion - from the west coast of the USA, to the east of India, to southeast Asia, to Latin America, to the Silk Road, to the recent economic explosion that is taken place in their own country - Chinese traders and laborers have been present at nearly every modern investment boom.
Follow the Chinese and you will be OK.
But this new wave of Chinese immigration seems different than the ones that proceeded it. The Chinese who are now emigrating seem, at least from my conversations with the Chinese in Budapest, to be coming from the north of China. This is in stark contrast to the historic pattern in which Chinese immigrants came southeastern provinces. Perhaps this is because China has opened up, making it much easier for these groups to set up businesses in other countries? Maybe this is because many of the social factors that pushed the Hakka and Cantonese to travel are not as present in contemporary times? Or maybe it is because there is a huge pot of plastic and tupperware gold in China that can easily be sold all over the planet?
At first appearance, it seems as if the Chinese emigrated because China was a poor, feudal country that did not have the necessary resources to fend for its population. But on further insight, it seems to me that the Chinese have always been very opportunistic travelers. In an interview that I did in 2006 with overseas Chinese in India, I was told that " . . . the Chinese first began coming to India to fill the British military needs for high quality leather products. As most native Indian communities have a strong taboo against producing and using leather goods there was a vacant niche that the Chinese willingly filled." It seems as if Chinese migrants are still filling vacant niches all over the world, and are setting up shop in other countries because China is wealthy and is now replete with resources that can be shipped across the globe. These are resources that - in many cases - can be better tapped from abroad. In point, it seems as if the Chinese are emigrating not because they have to, but because they know that they can make more money abroad by continuously bringing the contemporary resources of China to new parts of the world. The Chinese have become masters at import/ export trade and have taken their grassroots small business network global.
It seems to me mildly ironic, but China is becoming monstrously wealthy off of simple, petty, insignificant, and cheap business in foreign lands. The goods are made in China, purchased from China, shipped through Chinese means, distributed by Chinese warehouses in foreign countries, and then sold in Chinese owned shops. All the while money is ever being filtered back to China.
Chinese goods are cheap, and people the world over like cheap. China is also a culture that works on the premises of Guanxi - connections - and, therefore, the flow of these goods are often kept within the bounds of Chinese communities. From Wikipedia: "Guānxi describes the basic dynamic in personalized networks of influence, and is a central concept in Chinese society." -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi
In point, China is now an economic beast with more than 40 million arms in over a hundred countries. The Chinatowns of old are now rekindling communication with the motherland, and are becoming exceedingly wealthy for the effort. China, in turn, now has sizeable social and economic settlements in nearly every city on planet earth.
"Name one city on earth that you have been to that did not have Chinese people?" a university professor once asked me in Costa Rica. I could not answer in the affirmative. In nine years of travel, I have seen the bobbing black heads of the Chinese everywhere.
In part, China's former desolation and emigration pressures has now amounted to a culture that has the potential to be the most powerful, influential, and widely dispersed that the world has ever known. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote a fictional story in which the Chinese took over the world by making themselves shrink to the size of microbes. When they first began the shrinking process, nobody really took much notice as they were small and mostly kept to themselves. But they then slowly infiltrated and took control of every political and economic sector on the planet. I am laughing at the sci-fi overtones of these words, but, in many parts of the world, the Chinese have spread their cheap junk like a microbic cloud.
The Chinese invade with population. It is my impression that Tibet cannot now be liberated, because the majority of its population is Han Chinese. "We are a minority in our own country," a Tibetan refugee once spoke to me through tears (Seekers of Refuge in a Land of No Return). Yes, bring democracy and self rule to Tibet, and you will just confirm and vindicate the rule of the Chinese. Tibet is now Chinese: to liberate it would necessitate action on par with ethnic cleansing. Xingjiang, Guangxi, and Yunnan do not seem to be that much different. I was told by a Chinese professor that every school child is still taught the old Maoist songs of how China aspires to take over the world. The lyrics to the song starts out with China claiming Tibet and Taiwan, and then moving across the world taking over each land sequentially until they finally claim the United States of America.
Once the USA is conquered the song ends with the Chinese being the victorious captors of planed earth.
I hesitate to say this, but I think that there is a certain amount of truth to this little song. I can remember many conversations that I have had with people in China in which they seemed to take if for granted that China and the USA will come to blows, and China will reign victorious. The matter of fact way that these conversations are spoken initially left me aghast. From my experiences, the notion of global warfare seems to be burnt into the cultural consciousness of the Chinese much like how people in the West take it for granted that a human induced apocalypse is inevitable.
China still believes in manifest destiny.
They are a proud culture.
By the mandate of heaven.
But if there is one population on the planet that I would approve of furthering its influence, it is the Chinese. The people learned how to work; they learned how to eat bitter; they know how to fend and provide for themselves and their communities; they know the value of retaining a strong cultural identity. Now, after a few twists and turns of history, the Chinese are collectively becoming the richest and most powerful people on planet earth.
A billion pennies adds up to ten million dollars.
Further reading:
Overseas Chinese in India
Chinese in India
Links to previous travelogue entries:
Travel Guitar
Hostel Life in Budapest
Bomb in Budapest
* Travel Blog Directory * Vagabond Journey.com * Travel Photos * Travel Questions and Answers
Labels: China, chinatown, europe, europe-eastern, hungary
posted by Wade Vagabond Journey.com at
8:08 AM
5 Comments:
Great article. I think that it is very insightful and that it points out many truths and potentialities.
It is very easy to see the flow of money into China, even outside of Chinatown, USA. I mean, just look at Walmart! I thought that it was ironic when the U.S. government gave out "Economic Stimulus" checks to people and then stores had ads for Chinese made flat screen TVs and other things. It seems like the U.S. did a good job of stimulating the Chinese economy at the same time.
This is an inspired piece of work. You could certainly expand it into an academic dissertation if you were of a mind to do so. You make many worthwhile points regarding a subject much on the minds of people. That said, I believe we often over reach on our assumptions regarding China's future. There is great potential, but there are also great challenges facing china. Like the US, china is facing a serious problem with runaway inflation. Lack of transparency and effective regulation also threaten their credit markets (which will be needed for continued expansion). This is to say nothing of China's model of governance, which may prove to be unsustainable. Assuming that China is able to address these concerns and succeeds in transitioning from a cheap manufacturing center (where they face competition from SE Asia & Africa) to a diversified, educated economy; the Chinese may represent opportunity as much as a threat to the rest of the world. They would be the largest market in the world. Already American farmers are counting on Chinese growth to support strong Ag exports (soy and corn). To state it simply, the problem isn't China's rise its the U.S.'s decline. If the US will refocus on the things it does best(high end manufacturing, research and development, and Agriculture then the China problem will take care of itself.
Hi there. I'm planning a trip to Belykuppe next month and Google led me to your site and I've been bouncing around it all morning. You give a person lots to think about. However, I'm not sure how I feel about this article. For one thing, you could probably strike out all references to China and Chinese people and replace it with the West and white people, or to be even more specific, America and Americans. In fact, I have been to plenty of places (certainly smaller places, although maybe some larger ones, too, in the Middle East and Africa) that have no Chinese people present, but there's always at least one American--me.
Our two countries are strangely parallel in a lot of ways--from our geographic size to a robust national identity that comes off to outsiders as jingoistic egotism, to lightening-quick periods of economic and political expansion--and as a result we tend to harbor nearly identical xenophobic anxieties about each other. Some issues, however, distinguish one side from the other and I feel like your article was a more rational (and backed-up) version of the old Yellow Plague panic that has been around pretty much since the days of Mongol hegemony. For the Chinese, the concern isn't so much focused on our population as it is on our culture and our weaponry.
First of all, I'd like to point out that by the PRC government's own statistics, approximately 80 mill. Chinese struggle to obtain minimum levels of subsistence. On a larger scale, China's economy is ranked at # 10 in a tie with Italy, which is neither one of the larger nor most successful Western European countries. So a country to which one out of every five people on Earth belongs is still economically dwarfed by the top three: Germany, Japan and the US, which alone has an economy that is as big as both Japan's and Germany's.
I agree that, yes, the world throngs with Chinatowns and the denizens of these places can seem quite cloistered to the outside world, but it also helps to keep in perspective the fact that Chinese have a very high rate of intermarriage with other ethnic groups. Even internally within China this has often been the case: while walls have been built to keep the barbarians at bay, a historically laissez-faire attitude towards trade has meant that Chinese borders have a long history of permeability and this is reflected in both the culture and bloodlines of the Chinese people today. Similarly, there are significant numbers of huaqiao--or overseas Chinese--in every nation in Asia. These people are almost completely integrated with the local population and Chinese in name only. Almost every Philipino friend I have claims some sort of Chinese ancestry. I also remember a couple of "Chinese" families in Darjeeling that are Nepali-speaking and rather Nepali-looking but who post duilian on their doorframes and maintain their Chinese surnames.
Worries about Chinese infiltration are exactly the reason why this recent wave of Chinese immigration to the US and other places seems so startling and abrupt: if people like Kearney and Roosevelt hadn't turned anti-Chinese sentiments into a political campaign,the ethnic make-up of the US would be very different today. Instead, the US opened her doors to the kinds of people we wanted to come here, namely White Europeans, and closed her doors on the millions of Chinese (and Japanese, too) who had already established a strong pattern of immigration to these shores by the early 20th century.
As for China's economic hegemony: without a doubt it has been aided and abetted by our own government as well as by private enterprises. Our two countries play very nicely together when it comes to creating economic policy--whether or not that results in a nice outcome for consumers and workers of both countries--yet we still rattle each other's political cages, but for most of the course of our short and admittedly shaky history of interaction, we've gotten along well enough. I suggest that you think about the things that chiense say to you--threatening to blow us up and all that--and think about whether or not you've heard similar thoughts expressed by your own countrymen. For my part, I'm sick of blind patriotism of all forms, but at least most Chinese do me the favor of not assuming that just because Bush is my president, that I approve of him--a sentiment that, in my experience, is missing from most of my conversations with, say, Europeans or Indians. This might be because many Chinese understand that the relationship between government and governed is rarely so straight forward as it seems to outsiders.
Ok. This was a really freakingly, obnoxiously long post. My apologies.
Good post Wade, I am here in Manila visiting Bag Factories, both factories are ran by Chinese people.
The one is brother and girl second generation Philippines. They are open and talk about the difficulty they have dealing with the Chinese people, even thought they are 100 percent Chinese blood.
I do see that loyalty disappers when they do not live inside of Chinatown.
The Vietnam war was to stop the Chinese from taking over all of Southeast Asia. This was called the Dominoe Theory.
I for sure believe they will take over the plant economically. I am not sure it is bad thing, but for sure they are on their way to Global economic conquest while it appears the USA will so be second string.
Thanks for all of the feedback. These were some of the best comments that I think Vagabond Journey.com ever received. I appreciate the time it took to share all of these thoughts. Each of these comments are worthy of their own post.
I would just like to say here that when I referred to overseas Chinese people I did not really mean all people of Chinese decent who live outside of China, but rather cohesive Chinese communities. These cultural settlements of Chinese people all over the globe is what I found interesting.
Yes, we do find people of all different nationalities spread in every country in the world, but it is the Chinese who migrate as communities and essentially form settlements abroad. I know that the initial settlement patterns of various nationalities have done this (and still do - like Indians, Pakistanis, the Romani, Nigerians etc . . .) but I am not aware of any who have done so to the shear global extent and of the Chinese. Overseas Chinese communities also have the tendency of being very cohesive social and ECONOMIC units as well and remaining as such for long durations of time. Yes, people in Chinatowns often become acculturated, this is normal and a natural process, but by the same token, they often - at least to me - seem very much Chinese and they also tend to have a closed economic structure (or at least more so), which is my main point.
Taken altogether, it is the widespread, global nature and cohesive unity of the overseas Chinese communities that leaves a big impression on me.
Thank you very much for these great comments!
Walk Slow,
Wade
Post a Comment
Feel free to comment on these posts, ask questions, or give any feedback that you would like. Walk Slow, Wade
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home