China's Silent Army
Page 6
For Fung Xi Mao, for example, leaving his native Canton in 1947 meant he would never see his father again. He was barely eighteen years old when he set off on the journey that would take him to the promised land—Venezuela—where he finally arrived after a week spent crossing the Pacific, from Hong Kong to Manila and Honolulu and then on to San Francisco, Managua and Caracas. To see him sitting in his office in Maracay, 110 kilometers west of the Venezuelan capital, nobody would ever guess that for the first few years after his arrival in the country he had to sleep in the coffee bar where he worked twelve-hour days in return for just 100 bolivars per month, the equivalent of around 15 euros. The walls of the company’s headquarters from which he and his sons manage his small empire are covered in prizes given in recognition of his business achievements. There are also rows of photos showing him shaking hands with old friends, such as the ex-presidents of Venezuela, Carlos Andrés Pérez and Rafael Caldera, among others. However, he tells us, back at the beginning of his difficult journey he never would have believed that he would one day be rubbing shoulders with the great and the good of Venezuela.
“I settled in Maracay in 1957. Back then there were only 3.5 million people living in Venezuela. It was a land of opportunities,” he recalls.24 He speaks slowly, in a South American Spanish under which can still be heard some of the phonetic traces which betray his true origin. Like Liu, the entrepreneur who runs the markets in Russian Siberia, Fung Xi Mao got ahead in business on the strength of his ambitious personality, his capacity to make sacrifices and his audacity in the face of risks. He was also helped by the financial support of his fellow countrymen, all of whom also came from his hometown, Enping. “A friend lent me 12,000 bolivars [nearly 2,000 euros by the current rate of exchange]. I used that money to set up an ironmonger’s and then later a wholesaler for Chinese merchandise. There was no competition. I imported a hundred containers each year from Hong Kong and my margin was 30 percent.” His earnings skyrocketed. He used them first to open a toy factory and then a chain of supermarkets. He was the director of a bank for ten years. He founded a television channel and a newspaper, and invested in the lucrative construction industry. In other words, the once poor immigrant is now a millionaire.
Many of his compatriots followed in his footsteps. The proof can be seen in the network of bustling streets in central Maracay which today has been literally taken over by Chinese businesses. There is no shop selling household products, hardware, electronic devices or any type of ironmongery that is not under the control of emigrants from Enping, as is shown by the name “Fung”—typical of that region—which hangs over the entrance of most of these businesses. Fung Xi Mao, the respected head of the clan, has played a decisive role in this expansion. Ever since he made his fortune, he has worked tirelessly to help his fellow countrymen to succeed in business. “Over the years many Chinese people have asked me to lend them money to help them start up their own businesses. They always return it—not a single one has let me down. They only have to give me their word. In China, giving your word is as good as signing a document,” he tells us.
It is estimated that between 3 and 7 million Chinese people like Fung Xi Mao left their country from the seventeenth century onwards, in search of new opportunities abroad.25 Others left to escape from repression or were caught up in the ideological struggles of the Cold War.26 This silent, gradual diaspora across the world has left a permanent mark on many countries, mainly in Southeast Asia but also in Africa.27 In fact, people of Chinese ethnicity make up the biggest ethnic group in countries such as Singapore (76.8 percent), and form a significant part of the social composition of Malaysia (25.6 percent), Thailand (11 percent) and Brunei (29.3 percent).28 The factor that makes these communities so important in their receiving societies is, without a doubt, their economic power. This is clear from the extent of the participation of these communities in the domestic economies, which ranges from 4.5 percent of the GDP in Vietnam to 80 percent in Singapore. Even in countries such as Indonesia, where people of Chinese descent make up just 3 percent of the total population, the group plays a significant role in the domestic economy. Some estimates even try to put a highly speculative figure on the fortune amassed by Chinese people living overseas across the centuries: an incredible $1.5 trillion.29
As we saw earlier, this immense wealth is largely down to the idiosyncratic personality of the Chinese people. Their capacity for hard work and saving money, as well as their sharp business sense, are passed down from generation to generation, as if embedded in their genes. However, this is not the only factor at work. The success of Chinese emigrants can also be explained by the network of connections created by the “great Chinese lodge”:30 wherever there is a Chinese person keen to set up a business, there will always be a compatriot ready to lend him or her money or provide help with getting a visa or a permit, whether out of family or racial ties. “This characteristic is particular to Chinese emigrants. While some other countries with a culture of Confucianism also demonstrate similar behavior, the sense of solidarity is much stronger in Chinese overseas communities,” explains the migration expert Zhuang Guotu. Zhuang emphasizes that as well as resulting from the “group feeling” typical of Eastern cultures (in comparison with “Western individualism”), this behavior is largely influenced by the fact that for centuries a large proportion of Chinese emigrants have come from the same coastal areas of China (e.g. Fujian and Canton). “The power of family cohesion and regionalism is very important to Chinese people living overseas.”
As such, intra-Chinese ties are reinforced among emigrants after leaving their country of origin: in Great China31 people keep it in the family. This strong attachment to Chinese customs, language and culture no doubt explains the initial lack of interest shown by these groups in integrating or even adapting to their receiving societies. Chinese emigrants tend to keep a low social profile and have very little contact with local people, other than business transactions.32 While this sense of belonging to a peer group is often diluted to some extent in the children and grandchildren of emigrants, the consciousness of carrying a legacy and certain values which must be passed down to future generations stays very much alive. Language and marriage within the community guarantee the survival of a cultural heritage which keeps these future generations anchored to their Chinese roots.
“During the time of my grandfather, things were very rigid in the sense that you had to marry people from your own village, not just your own race. Things aren’t as rigid now as they were in my grandfather’s time, but there’s still the feeling among the younger generation that they should marry their own kind,” explains Bonnie Pon, the grandson of a Cantonese emigrant who arrived in South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. Bonnie’s family still runs the business set up by his grandfather over a hundred years ago in the heart of Johannesburg’s so-called “First Chinatown.” He now forms part of a family tree which currently has fifty-six members spread throughout South Africa, and which has also branched out as far as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. “All except two of those fifty-six married people of Chinese descent,” he tells us. As well as the traditional mentality stemming from the “old Chinese society,” which caused Bonnie’s grandfather to reject mixed marriages, this trend was also affected by racial segregation in South Africa, where Chinese people were considered “not white,” and therefore effectively “black.” “Living in South Africa, we were constantly reminded of race. It was natural for us to marry our own kind.”
Long after the ending of apartheid, Bonnie’s son Erwin is continuing the family tradition: he is married to a Taiwanese woman who has recently given birth to a daughter who, Bonnie assures us, will learn the official languages at school—English and Afrikaans—and Cantonese and Mandarin at home. “We were fortunate that our parents insisted that we retain our mother tongue,” he adds. Bonnie, who was born in South Africa and recognizes that he is “Westernized in many ways,” gives great importance to his Chinese roots and herita
ge; at the same time he distances himself from the values emerging from modern-day China. “When I look in the mirror I see a Chinese face. However, we were born in South Africa and we have been here all our lives. I go to China once a year to buy goods, but I’m not used to the way of life in China. It’s not home to me, in the sense that I’m not comfortable with the way they do things. Our family is more traditional in some ways than the modern Communist youngsters,” he concludes. In a family that has lived for five generations in South Africa, the country with the most people of Chinese origin in Africa,33 Bonnie and his clan guard their Chinese DNA like a small treasure. For them, it is the code that tells them who they are and where they come from.
DESCENDANTS OF SUN YAT-SEN IN ECUADOR
With his slim figure, lightly almond-shaped eyes and fine mustache skimming his upper lip, it isn’t hard to see the Chinese ancestry in Harry Sun Soria. However, the tale of this former mayor of Guayaquil, the economic capital of Ecuador, differs from those of other Peruvians, Brazilians and Ecuadorians whose grandparents or great-grandparents arrived in South America to help build railways or to work on nineteenth-century sugar plantations. Harry Sun is a member of the family of Sun Yat-Sen, the first president of China who founded the Republic of China in 1911. The blood running through his veins comes from the same stock that helped put an end to millennia of Imperial rule in China.
Harry Sun speaks in the measured, almost hypnotic tones typical of educated people blessed with the gift of talking to the masses. As well as his role as mayor, this ability helped him to become a national member of parliament in 2002. The architect and father of two daughters is now partially retired from business and spends his fortune and time running the Ecuadorian Sun Yat-Sen Foundation, of which he is president. Although four generations separate him from his great-grandfather, Sun Kun Sang, the sibling of the founder of modern China, he is still unshakeably loyal to his origins. “I feel Chinese,” he tells us in his office in an upmarket area of Guayaquil. “I love the Ecuadorian people and I respect them. They gave us an identity which we didn’t have before. But I feel Chinese.” Just looking at him is enough to believe what he says: he is wearing a traditional Chinese suit made of brown Cantonese silk with black embroidery which stands out a mile in this city built on the shores of the eastern Pacific Ocean.
Harry Sun’s great-grandfather arrived in Ecuador in 1881, fleeing from the chaos that was striking China at that time. “He came from a rural family. He started out as an agricultural laborer and then later set up his own businesses, such as exporting cocoa beans and coffee,” he recalls. “At the beginning of the century, the emperor issued a death sentence against him and his family because of the activities they had carried out to put an end to the empire. This is what led Sun Yat-Sen to visit Ecuador in 1907, for example.” His great-grandfather married an Ecuadorian woman, which led the Sun family to put down roots in the country without ever breaking their ties with the “motherland.” “I’ve been traveling to China for twenty-seven years. My daughter has been studying in Beijing for three years. She has a commitment: over a hundred years since our family fled China, we’re going back. It’s important to teach all descendants of Chinese people to love China,” he tells us.
“I can identify with the revolutions led by Sun Yat-Sen and Mao Zedong,” Harry Sun continues. “Why? Because before then we [referring to China] were nothing. All the world powers invaded us. They took control of China and used us as a political prize. They taught Chinese people to consume opium to make up the balance of business, because China was flooding their markets with porcelain, silk and inventions … They corrupted the Chinese people with that drug. France and England kept themselves rich at the cost of Chinese blood. Why wouldn’t I support a revolution?”34 Harry Sun looks us straight in the eyes as he repeats, almost word for word, the Communist Party of China’s official line regarding the scars left on China by the greedy West. This is the basis on which Harry Sun has built his philosophy of identity and the value of being Chinese.
In his own words, his foundation aims “to show Ecuador that we have a 5,000-year-old culture. To put an end to the myth that Chinese people are just shoe and textile salesmen,” he insists, always using the first-person plural. Apart from its didactic function, the foundation also offers support to Chinese people living in the city, a group which has grown exponentially as a result of illegal immigration and corruption among Ecuador’s immigration services. “We give refuge to Chinese people. If they need help with their businesses, either financially or spiritually, we give it to them. Whenever a Chinese person ends up in prison we make sure they have someone by their side.” Harry Sun personifies a characteristic typical of the Chinese overseas community, an attitude seen everywhere from Mozambique to Cuba and from South Africa to Ecuador: attachment to the motherland. While they are officially citizens of the receiving country, these communities maintain close ties with China despite the fact that their parents or grandparents were forced to flee from Maoist repression or from the hardship of the Imperial era.
This sense of belonging to China and pride in feeling Chinese despite being born in another country also explains the impressive quantity of donations given to China by its overseas community over the course of the twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, Chinese expats financed the construction of roads, bridges, universities and railways such as the Xinning Railway, which bridges the 138 kilometers between the Cantonese town of Enping and the Pearl River. This is a habit that continues to this day. The umpteenth example, which is also perhaps the most archetypal, was motivated by the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008. The voluntary donations of 350,000 Chinese people living in 102 countries across the world helped to pay a significant chunk of the 100 million euros needed to build the Olympic swimming pool known as the “Water Cube.” “We did it to send a message to the world: we are also part of China,” explains Sun, who contributed some of his fortune to help turn the emblematic building into a reality. Even so, these donations form just a small part of the fabulous contribution that the Chinese overseas community has made to the resurgence of the People’s Republic of China.
In fact, this community has provided the main source of financial support for Chinese industrial development since the beginning of the economic opening up and reform in 1979, when the “Little Helmsman” Deng Xiaoping successfully steered China out of the state of chaos in which Maoism had left it. It is estimated that 65 percent of the $500 billion accumulated in direct foreign investment (DFI) up until 2003 came from the Chinese overseas community, particularly in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia.35 Conscious of the value of having a culturally like-minded community with bountiful resources spread across the world, the Communist government—which treated its overseas citizens with particular contempt during the Cultural Revolution36—has been working hard since the 1980s to repair its ties with this group. While Beijing effectively disowned its overseas citizens for a good part of the twentieth century, the government has now turned to the Chinese diaspora to help rebuild the country, even passing laws granting them greater tax privileges than other foreign investors.37 As part of its “go out” and “bring back in” policies (), Beijing has sent thousands of representatives across the world to attract capital and court foreign investors of Chinese origin. In Fuqing alone, a city of around a million inhabitants situated in Fujian Province, it is estimated that the Chinese overseas community has donated over 140 million euros, invested in around 900 businesses and contributed over $4 billion in DFI.38
Today, a form of cross-border nationalism has evolved for millions of citizens who, despite living at opposite ends of the world, find a cohesive element in China’s homeland and culture, albeit to varying degrees. In the eyes of Westerners used to understanding the world from the perspective of the nation-state model, this characteristic behavior of the Chinese people can appear surprising or, in the worst case, frightening. For example, a Spanish, British or Italian national feels an attachment to his or her country t
hat is defined by measurable borders and characterized by a common language and culture. When he or she emigrates and puts down roots, for instance in Mexico, Australia or the United States, these ties gradually disappear from generation to generation as their children quickly identify with the receiving country and its customs. In other words, the son of a Spanish migrant is no longer “Spanish”; he is Mexican.
This is not usually the case with Chinese emigrants. The journalist and academic Martin Jacques argues that this is due to the very nature of China as a country: rather than a nation-state, China is a civilization-state. As such, the sense of belonging to a culture, a tradition and a history that officially date back over 5,000 years does not disappear after an individual emigrates, regardless of the fact that he or she is inhabiting another territory and living in a different social and cultural reality. Civilization is the cohesive element, the thread that holds together the string of pearls formed by the great Chinese community overseas. The Chinese national, whether inside or outside Chinese borders, is immersed in this great tide of civilization where traditions, beliefs, language, customs and culture are passed down from parent to child. In other words, you never stop being Chinese, however far you are from China.
Throughout the years, the Chinese state has always played the part of guarantor for this ancient civilization. First the empire, with its elite of mandarins and high-ranking officials, and later the Communist government took up the role of guardian and agent of this precious heritage, bringing together everything from the philosophy of Confucius to a sense of respect for one’s ancestors and family. In the modern era, this has led to a distinct sense of nationalism which has an important role to play. Particularly since the collapse of Maoism, which left the regime without an ideological anchor, Beijing has worked hard to promote a nationalist discourse based not only on trust in China’s own strengths, but also on subliminal anti-Western and openly anti-Japanese messages. When Mao was in power, nationalism was used to fight capitalism and bourgeois beliefs, a similar technique to the one used by North Korea today. However, throughout China’s economic opening up and during the present-day emergence of “red capitalism,” a type of nationalism which uses an ad hoc discourse to touch the hearts of the population is being used to diffuse any possibility of China adopting a Western-style liberal democracy.39