The Chinese in Southeast Asia

TO Americans the great transatlantic migration of Europeans, which reached its climax in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a well known fact, fundamental to the history and culture of the Western Hemisphere. That a similar migration, if not as great, has emanated from China in the last hundred years is not generally realized. The ubiquitous restaurant owner or laundryman in the cities of the United States is rarely associated in our minds with a movement that has also sent thousands of emigrants to Cuba and other West Indian islands, Canada, Peru, Hawaii, and Asiatic regions of the Soviet Union and several millions to the mainland and island countries of Southeast Asia. Both Chinese and European emigrants went chiefly to countries less thickly populated and less well developed than their own. The Europeans, however, have almost always become the dominant group in their new homes, whereas the Chinese remain a minority in almost every land to which they have emigrated. Today, from four to fifteen million Chinese live outside China, the number varying according to definition (see below). Table I distributes over the world the Chinese emigrants or descendants of emigrants, covering, however, only countries with 5000 or more. Of the majority shown to be living in Southeast Asia, more than a million each live in Thailand, British Malaya, and the Netherlands Indies, but there are also significant numbers in French Indochina, the Philippine Islands, Burma, and British Borneo. Since I930 the number of Chinese abroad has decreased somewhat, but little accurate information on the decrease is available. For a long time the United States had little direct contact, except for the Philippines, with Southeast Asia, which was important to us chiefly as a source of tropical vegetable raw materials and a few rare metals. We depended on European powers to handle the internal problems of the region, and the presence there of a large number of Chinese was, if known, a matter of little interest to most of us. But today we are faced, first, with the problem of driving out the Japanese, and then with the making of wise political and economic arrangements to guide the future of Southeast Asia. For both these tasks, and especially for the second, a segment of the larger picture is the position of the Chinese in the region.