Wen-Chin Chang

Chinese circulations : capital, commodities, and networks in Southeast Asia

Chinese merchants have traded with Southeast Asia for centuries, sojourning and sometimes settling, during their voyages. These ventures have taken place by land and by sea, over mountains and across deserts, linking China with vast stretches of Southeast Asia in a broad, mercantile embrace. Chinese Circulations provides an unprecedented overview of this trade, its scope, diversity, and complexity. This collection of twenty groundbreaking essays foregrounds the commodities that have linked China and Southeast Asia over the centuries, including fish, jade, metal, textiles, cotton, rice, opium, timber, books, and edible birds’ nests. Human labor, the Bible, and the coins used in regional trade are among the more unexpected commodities considered. In addition to focusing on a certain time period or geographic area, each of the essays explores a particular commodity or class of commodities, following its trajectory from production, through exchange and distribution, to consumption. The first four pieces put Chinese mercantile trade with Southeast Asia in broad historical perspective; the other essays appear in chronologically ordered sections covering the precolonial period to the present. Incorporating research conducted in Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, Malay, Indonesian, and several Western languages, Chinese Circulations is a major contribution not only to Sino-Southeast Asian studies but also to the analysis of globalization past and present. Contributors . Leonard Blusse, Wen-Chin Chang, Lucille Chia, Bien Chiang, Nola Cooke, Jean DeBernardi, C. Patterson Giersch, Takeshi Hamashita, Kwee Hui Kian, Li Tana, Lin Man-houng, Masuda Erika, Adam McKeown, Anthony Reid , Sun Laichen, Heather Sutherland, Eric Tagliacozzo, Carl A. Trocki, Wang Gungwu, Kevin Woods, Wu Xiao

From war refugees to immigrants: The case of the KMT Yunnanese Chinese in Northern Thailand

The KMT (Kuomintang) Yunnanese Chinese in Northern Thailand have a complex migration history spread over different generations and places. It not only reflects political entanglements involving different power entities, but also illustrates the dynamic reaction of the people to the complications. The article focuses on the interactions between the political powers and the people. The process highlights that the Yunnanese are not mere objects controlled by external policies or conditions. After a few decades of hard life, they have been transforming themselves from refugee warriors to immigrants.

Identification of Leadership among the KMT Yunnanese Chinese in Northern Thailand

In this paper I analyse the leader-follower relationship among the Kuomintang (KMT) Yunnanese Chinese in northern Thailand. While applying the theoretical framework derived from various studies of patron-client relations, I argue that the relations in this case have been embedded in a particular socio-cultural context which incorporates both Han Chinese culture and the native ethos of long-distance caravan trade. By exploring the context, we gain insight into the interactions between the KMT leaders and their followers that were characterised by both instrumental and emotional forms. The findings are distinct from those observed in most patron-client studies, which claim that the relations are essentially instrumental. Furthermore, the present study challenges the monolithic picture of Chinese immigrants in Thailand (and other places) portrayed in earlier studies, which have confined ethnic Chinese to the homogeneous framework of Han Chinese culture and overlooked regional differences with regard to local soc io-cultural contexts developed through history. Introduction The KMT Yunnanese Chinese in northern Thailand have long been regarded as a controversial group on account of their former military background and disreputable history of drug trafficking. During the time that the two so-called KMT armies, the Third and Fifth Armies, were still strong, access by outsiders to the KMT villages was not easily obtained. In the public mind the villages were covered with a veil of mystery. Since the disbandment of the troops in the late 1980s, however, these villages have slowly been casting off their former military legacy, and access has become easier. My intensive fieldwork in these communities was conducted from November 1994 through August 1996, with subsequent short-term fieldwork in February 1999 and September-December 2000. Participant observation was carried out in one major KMT village, Ban Mai, and complementary data were collected in another 24 Yunnanese villages and in Chiang Mai city. (1) My study focuses on these peoples migration and resettlement. In contrast to the earlier Chinese immigrants who came to Thailand by sea from the southeastern coastal provinces of China and mostly settled in urban areas, the KMT Yunnanese arrived by land and resided in individual villages along the northern border. The former group has been extensively studied by social scientists of various disciplines, and the prominence and contribution of these immigrants and their descendants in Thai society have been widely recognised. (2) However, owing to the inaccessibility of the KMT villages in the past, these Yunnanese communities have remained relatively unknown group to scholars. Other than F.W. Motes research in two villages in the mid-1960s, studies of Yunnanese migrants in northern Thailand are very few and have focused mainly on those residing in Chiang Mai. (3) Although these works have provided considerable insight into Yunnanese overland transnational migration, with particular reference to the condition s of early settlement, trading activities and ethnic identity, they have overlooked the existence of the KMT Yunnanese (who constitute a comparatively large group), misinterpreted certain aspects of their organisation, or ignored their connections (direct or indirect) with other urban Yunnanese communities. Some authors specialising in Burmese politics or drug trafficking have studied the KMT Yunnanese, but their research has mostly centered on the 1950s, when the group was still in Burma. (4) In addition, several non-academic books about their combat history have been published in Taiwan. (5) A French journalist, Catherine Lamour, has also written a book based on interviews. (6) This and other books published in Taiwan are more sensational in that they stress the hardships experienced by the Yunnanese, especially in their numerous bouts of fighting against the Chinese Communists and the Burmese army, and there is often an underlying ideology of anti-Communism. …

Venturing into "Barbarous" Regions: Transborder Trade among Migrant Yunnanese between Thailand and Burma, 1960s-1980s

This essay examines the cross-border trade among the migrant Yunnanese between Burma and Thailand during the era of the Burmese socialist regime. It was a period when the Burmese government implemented a nationalized economic system and strictly forbade free movement and private trade. Taking a transborder perspective, the essay looks beyond government institutions and probes the mercantile agency of the migrant Yunnanese traders, which contrib uted to the formation of their socioeconomic mechanisms. The findings suggest that the economic practices of the Yunnanese traders in effect constituted a transnational popular realm that formed an informal oppositional power against the Thai and Burmese national bureaucracies on the one hand, and incorporated varied state agencies on the other hand.

Introduction: The Arc of Historical Commercial Relations between China and Southeast Asia

Chinese merchants have been trading down to Southeast Asia for centuries, sojourning—and sometimes settling—during the course of their voyages. These ventures have taken place by land and by sea, linking the wider orbit of the Chinese homeland with vast stretches of Southeast Asia in a broad, mercantile embrace. The present volume aims to examine these contacts, transactions, and transmissions over what the great French historian Fernand Braudel called the longue durée. Despite the presence of several foundational volumes by Wang Gungwu and others, which have charted the directions of this field of study over the past several decades, the field of Chinese trade in Southeast Asia has become so large and so complex that a syncretic book on its parameters seems long overdue.1 We hope to build on past achievements and outline the scope, diversity, and complexity of Chinese trade interactions over a vast geography and an equally broad temporal spectrum. Because the languages, archives, and sources needed to master a task such as this are beyond the grasp of any one person, we hope that this book will make a signal contribution to the field, in summarizing where our knowledge now stands and where future directions of research may wish to go. The idea of networks as being crucial to the linking of human societies has received much attention in the past several decades. Philip Curtin was among the first to point this out in his broad and wide-ranging study CrossCultural Trade in World History.2 In that book, he linked the Phoenicians of Mediterranean antiquity, the Hanseatic merchants of the early-modern Baltic, and Bugis traders of modern Indonesia in a single, coherent narrative, showing how merchant diasporas could be analyzed with theoretical rigor