Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in th ...

Nanyang Chinese and “Chineseness”

Even though there are fragments of evidence in official reports and notes on the travels of Chinese merchants to the South Sea (南洋) as early as during the Tang Dynasty, the major wave of Chinese immigrants began flowing into Southeast Asia during the nineteenth century as both trade migrants and coolies.⁴ To develop the areas into important trading posts for the European colonial powers, the Europeans eagerly engaged with the Chinese in the region and further encouraged the Chinese from southern China to migrate in order to play a role in developing areas, such as Malaya. Whereas the Europeans established their colonial influence in Southeast Asia by investing wealth in the region, Chinese merchants supplied the labor force by organizing and shipping coolies from China to participate in the growing trade activities. The relationship between the Europeans and the Chinese was interdependent. The Chinese relied on European capital and protection of their trade in Southeast Asia, and the Europeans needed the Chinese to bolster local infrastructure, such as labor (coolies), that would support their development in the region. Though the Europeans also faced constant threats from the Chinese owing to their monopoly of the labor force and their ties with local authorities, the relationship between the two parties remained mutually beneficial for more than a century.⁵

In the case of Singapore, the Chinese appropriated and incorporated the European laws and means of communication almost immediately, resulting in the rapid growth of the island into an entrepôt. Sir Stamford Raffles,⁶ the British colonial administrator of the area at the time, was the one who facilitated this initial transformation of Singapore. Even though the Chinese trade diasporas benefited from the colonial powers and gained privileges to the land of their new residency, they were never loyal to the colonial powers because they were not fully sponsored by the Europeans, nor did they feel at home in their host land in Southeast Asia.⁷

This particular history is responsible for the inseparable ties between the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia and the motherland, China. Even