Agriculture and Rural Connections in the Pacific by Lei Guang James Gerber

Author:Lei Guang, James Gerber [Lei Guang, James Gerber]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351960137
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

11

Chinese Settlements in Rural Southeast Asia: Unwritten Histories

Mary Somers Heidhues

Among historians, Southeast Asia’s Overseas Chinese have never enjoyed much popularity. They are in many respects a “People without a History”, having left behind no substantial deposit of experience and having failed to produce a school of historians to write their own history from an insider’s perspective.1

This quotation from Leonard Blussé’s collection of studies of mestizo women and Chinese settlers in seventeenth-century Batavia certainly overstates the case, if we think of Liem Thian Joe’s history of the Chinese in Semarang,2 of the huiguan (Chinese association) histories, and of the historical sections of most studies of urban communities of Chinese, some written by Southeast Asian Chinese themselves. Jennifer Cushman’s own work adds in various ways to our knowledge of the history of Chinese in Southeast Asia.

Blussé’s assertion is nevertheless partly justified. In China, history meant history of the achievements of the dynasty and of prominent and exemplary individuals. In Southeast Asia, traditional histories often had a strong legitimating function. In a similar way, much of recent research on ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia is biased toward community leaders, men of wealth and property or, more rarely, those distinguished in education, writing, or public service. As a consequence, historical studies have treated revenue farmers who dealt in opium, gambling and alcohol, Kapitan, and temple-builders, memorialized in tombs and ancestral tablets.3 For the moment, cukong, industrialists, and financiers, and above all. conglomerates, seem to dominate the field.

The many biographies and autobiographies that have appeared in the past years seem to be replacing the community studies of earlier decades. Most deal, not merely with individuals, but with urban ones. Even Yen Ching-hwang’s social history of the Chinese in Singapore and Malaya emphasizes urban organizations and urban leaders.4

This bias toward urban communities is as understandable as is that toward their leadership. Chinese in Southeast Asia as a rule are not a rural people. They are more urbanized than the indigenous populations; they live, typically, in cities and in towns, not on the land. Often, where they acquired agricultural land, as in the Philippines or southern Vietnam, they were landlords, not farmers. Other Chinese, who did reside in rural areas or small market centres, may have collected and traded in primary products, but as a rule they did not produce them.

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