World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability by Chua Amy

Author:Chua, Amy [Chua, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2004-01-05T16:00:00+00:00

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Nor are market-dominant minorities present today in most Eastern European countries; the terrible exception of the former Yugoslavia has already been discussed. While virtually all countries in Africa are marked by severe ethnic divisions, a few (for example, Botswana or Sudan) do not appear to have market-dominant minorities. The countries of the Middle East will be discussed in Part Three.

Thailand: An Exceptional Case?

A few years ago a graduate student named Kanchana came to my office to see if I would be willing to supervise a paper she wanted to write on legal protections for cultural artifacts taken from Thailand, her native country. After an interesting discussion about possible approaches to her paper, I asked Kanchana a question that, in retrospect, would probably be grounds for a lawsuit under today’s standards of political correctness—I asked whether she was an ethnic Chinese.

Kanchana’s reply: “But the Thai are Chinese.” She then instantly retreated: “Well—part Chinese. I have Chinese blood. Everyone in Thailand does. Well . . . almost everyone does.”

Thailand is a fascinating case. On the one hand, it shares with the other Southeast Asian countries the phenomenon of a wildly disproportionately wealthy, market-dominant Chinese minority. The Chinese in Thailand today, although just 10 percent of the population, control virtually all of the country’s largest banks and conglomerates. All of Thailand’s billionaires are ethnic Chinese. On the other hand, as Kanchana’s comments suggest, unlike elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the Chinese have assimilated quite successfully into Thailand, and there is relatively little anti-Chinese animus. In Thailand today, many Thai Chinese speak only Thai and consider themselves as Thai as their indigenous counterparts. Intermarriage rates between the Chinese and the indigenous majority (many of whom, at least in Bangkok, have some Chinese ancestry already) are much higher than elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Perhaps most strikingly, the country’s top political leaders, including a recent prime minister, are often of Chinese descent, although they usually have Thai-sounding surnames and speak little or no Chinese.

Although interethnic socializing and intermarriage may seem perfectly normal to Westerners, it bears emphasizing how markedly Thailand differs in this regard from her Southeast Asian neighbors. In Indonesia and Malaysia, for example, rates of intermarriage between the Chinese and the indigenous majority are close to zero. The Chinese in these countries remain a conspicuously insular minority, living, working, and socializing entirely separately from the indigenous majorities.

Many have speculated about the reasons for the starkly different rates of intermarriage and assimilation. According to one professor of law from Singapore, the main reason is the “pork factor.” “Indonesians and Malaysians are mostly Muslims,” he explains, “and they don’t eat pork. The Chinese love pork; they eat it all the time. And for Chinese, eating is a huge part of their lives. Thus, social interactions are impossible.” This professor was being facetious, but he is clearly right that religion has played an important role: Thailand is not Muslim but largely Buddhist, a cultural affinity that has made assimilation much easier for the Thai Chinese, many of whom adhere to a syncretic combination of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism.

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