Chinese Business Enterprise in Asia by Rajeswary Ampalavanar Brown

Author:Rajeswary Ampalavanar Brown [Brown, Rajeswary Ampalavanar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138367685
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2018-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

REMITTANCES AND EFFECTS ON INVESTMENT

Over the past century, investment capital, technical know-how and business connections were the primary targets of government policies towards Chinese entrepreneurs overseas. Also, looking at China’s place in an increasing East Asian economic integration, the use to which these resources were put is obviously of paramount importance. For these reasons it is understandable that present-day judgements, particularly by Chinese scientists and politicians, on the contributions of overseas Chinese entrepreneurship to China’s economic development over the past century are generally positive.

Considering the data on the first half of the present century, however, there is good reason to believe that China had little attraction for Chinese abroad as an investment area. Lin Jinzhi has estimated that productive investment was a very small percentage of total funds remitted by overseas Chinese; a mere 3 per cent on average.22 Moreover, investment in South East Asia by local ethnic Chinese was vast in comparison to the amounts invested back in China. During the 1930s the value of investments in South East Asia by ethnic Chinese comes only behind those by the Dutch and the British, amounting to 28 per cent of total foreign investment (see Table 7.3). In China, investment by overseas Chinese was far less in comparison to foreign investment. There is no estimate available of the value of total investments in China by overseas Chinese during the 1930s, so no precise comparison can be made with the situation in South East Asia. Lin Jinzhi’s data on pre-war overseas Chinese investment, however, make it improbable that total capitalisation amounted to much more than CH$500 million. This is vastly behind C.F. Remer’s estimated total capitalisation of foreign investment in China, which amounted to US$3-3.5 billion in 1931, about CH$6-7 billion.23

Table 7.3 Total foreign and overseas Chinese investments in South East Asia before the Second World War (CH$ million)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.