Southeast Asia’s Chinese Spur Growth

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam —  Twenty years ago, Vietnam’s Communist government set out to destroy free enterprise. Not surprisingly, its storm troopers headed straight for Cholon, the sprawling, prosperous Chinese district of Ho Chi Minh City.

Truckloads of soldiers and volunteers wearing red armbands descended on the maze of crowded, narrow streets to inventory personal property--everything from gold watches to factory machines--that was to be turned over to the state. Within days, the property had been confiscated and southern Vietnam’s currency abolished. Overnight, millionaires became paupers.

“They took everything, but who knows what happened to it?” asked one merchant, who asked to be identified only as Mr. Wang.

Ethnic Chinese fled Vietnam by the tens of thousands after the 1978 purge, and it took more than a decade for Cholon to regain its vibrancy.

But today, under Hanoi’s policy of encouraging limited capitalism, Cholon is booming once more. Its Chinese residents have rebuilt their fortunes and again are stoking the engine that drives southern Vietnam’s economy.

Like their counterparts throughout much of Southeast Asia, Vietnam’s 2.3 million ethnic Chinese have survived by keeping their heads down. They avoid politics and ask a visitor not to use their names. They smile sheepishly and remain silent if conversation turns to government policy.

Their role is making money--as investors, manufacturers, entrepreneurs--and in exchange for that status, most throughout the region are willing to accept a sort of second-class citizenship bestowed upon them by their adopted countries.

“In many ways, we are victims of our own success,” a manufacturer in Cholon said. “We are resented by non-Chinese because we have money, and we are treated with suspicion by governments because they wonder if our allegiance is to them or to China.”

The ethnic Chinese community in Southeast Asia numbers 40 million; their combined wealth has been estimated by financial institutions at more than $200 billion. They are, as a group, clannish, industrious, successful and protective of their Chinese culture. Some, like Mr. Wang, who was born in Vietnam, do not speak the local language fluently and converse mainly in Cantonese.

“There is often an identity crisis, wondering where you really belong,” said Tan Ai Trinh, 27, a Chinese Vietnamese who escaped Vietnam during the purge in 1978 and had lived in China, Australia, New York City, Houston and Hong Kong before returning to Vietnam recently to research a book.

Her parents, she said, had always looked to China as the motherland and ultimate protector.

But when she arrived in 1978 with her mother at the bridge spanning the border, she found that China had blocked their entry. Then Vietnam shut off its end of the bridge. Some ethnic Chinese refugees lived in cardboard shacks on the bridge for a year, unable either to enter China or return to Vietnam.

“We always called ourselves Chinese, and to discover the mother country doesn’t want you was like a slap in the face,” she said. “It was the biggest blow of my life. I don’t think my mother has ever fully recovered from that.”

Although most of the ethnic Chinese carry the passports of the countries where they live, many, like Trinh’s family, viewed China as a refuge of last resort.

But Beijing’s unwillingness to aid its overseas community in times of distress--despite the money that Chinese abroad send back to China--has forced the ethnic Chinese to forge links with power brokers in the countries where they live to protect their wealth and well-being.

In economically depressed Indonesia, President Suharto has appointed an ethnic Chinese, multimillionaire Mohammed “Bob” Hasan, to his Cabinet for the first time. The move helped calm jittery Chinese--who represent 4% of the population and control 70% of the economy--in the aftermath of attacks on their shops by rioters.

Chinese first came to Southeast Asia more than 10 centuries ago. They were traders in Angkor, seat of the Khmer (Cambodian) Empire, in the 13th century. By 1603, the Chinese were more numerous in Manila than the Spanish. They settled as merchants in Cholon in the late 1700s. They founded Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, in the 1800s and stayed on as entrepreneurs. They came in another wave as laborers, to build roads for the French in Vietnam, to work the plantations in Cambodia and the tin mines in Malaysia.

Seldom have they known a time without discrimination. They were massacred by the Spanish in the Philippines and by the Dutch in Indonesia. They were the victims of widespread killings in Indonesia in 1965, of race riots in Malaysia in 1969, of a Khmer Rouge pogrom that began in Cambodia in 1975 and of the purge in Vietnam during the late 1970s.

“Racial tensions can flow from economic crisis,” said Azmi Setapa, senior research fellow at the Malaysian Institute of Economic Research. “But I think in Malaysia, and most other places, the past could not be repeated today. People realize no one race can get everything. The pie has to be divided, and that requires sacrifice on everyone’s part.”

After the race riots in Malaysia, where the population is 35% Chinese, the government set up an affirmative action program for the majority--the Malays--to transfer wealth out of the hands of the Chinese. Indonesia has challenged the prominence of the Chinese by forbidding them to publicly celebrate the lunar new year or use Chinese writing on their shops. Only in Singapore (77% Chinese) are concerns about a Chinese minority irrelevant.