The number of scholarly books and articles on the Chinese in Southeast Asia has increased so rapidly during this century that it would be useful to examine some of the trends in writing and put the results into some historical perspective. For example, there have been the early writings by Chinese in China and by various colonial officials of the region; then came writings by Southeast Asian Chinese themselves, whether in Chinese or in some local or colonial language; and more recently, the work of specialist scholars trained in social science disciplines, including the work of local scholars whether of Chinese descent or not. There is scope for a full-scale study of the whole range of historical works and it is hoped that the study will be attempted soon. This essay is a preliminary outline and focuses on writings in Chinese, especially those which help to mark some important turning-points both in the history of the Chinese communities and in the writing of history itself.

It is of some interest for the scholar of Southeast Asian subjects to note the way in which the different interests and cultural biases of the former colonial powers in the region have eventuated in the production of quite distinct historical and sociological literatures relating to their respective territorial possessions. Nowhere better than in the literature on the overseas Chinese is this point illustrated. The literature in English on the Chinese in Southeast Asia (and especially that on what is now Malaysia) is extensive, and a significant number of well-known English-speaking scholars have made their reputations in this field — one thinks of V. Purcell and M. Freedman on Malaysia and Singapore, W.E. Willmott on Cambodia (Kampuchea), William G. Skinner on Thailand and Indonesia, D.E. Willmott on Indonesia, Edgar Wickberg on the Philippines, Jacques Amyot on the Philippines and Thailand, C.P. Fitzgerald, Wang Gungwu, and Lea E. Williams on the region as a whole, and a growing number of other and often younger scholars who have turned their attention to this perennially rich and stimulating field of study. But when one turns to the field of French scholarship, it is intriguing to find that the situation is considerably different — one searches in vain for a major Francophone scholar who has devoted his attention to the Chinese in the former French colonial possessions in Indochina — Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

Of all the non-indigenous groups resident in Indonesia, the Chinese have attracted the greatest attention in every respect. Their economic success has aroused both admiration and jealousy. Their clannishness has led to questions about their social organizations and, especially in the post–1945 period, their integration into the national matrix. Problems of assimilation have spawned numerous scholarly studies in the English language, while there have been no lack of studies on Chinese political movements in Indonesia and their relations with indigenous ones. In short, there is an exciting ongoing research on the Chinese in Indonesia that bodes well for the future and beckons greater participation from newcomers in the field.

Throughout the Nanyang and beyond, Chinese communities have been under attack of one sort or another at various times. The anti-Chinese riots in Batavia in 1740 and in Kuala Lumpur in 1969 are but the first and last major examples of violent attacks by indigenes on Chinese communities. More routinely, most countries in the region have resorted to legal restrictions that “nationalize” various occupations and professions. Some of these countries have also required their resident Chinese to clarify their citizenship, choosing between Chinese and local citizenship, some even forcing them to adopt the citizenship of their country of residence, as occurred in Vietnam in 1978.

Western accounts from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries abound with descriptions which portray the king of Siam and the Siamese nobility as the foremost merchants in their land. According to these accounts, rulers monopolized the foreign trade to and from their kingdom, much to the detriment of Western mèrchants attempting to gain an economic foothold. Captain Henry Burney, while negotiating a commercial treaty between Great Britain and Siam in the 1820s, noted that “the Siamese Government have no idea of what is called ‘a free and unrestricted trade’….” British commercial interests sought, moreover, the removal of all these restrictions, but found “the jealousy and mistrust which the Siamese entertain towards Europeans” a major stumbling block.

The Chinese have always been known to have elaborate family and clan systems. In traditional Chinese society, the family was a close-knit group with four or five generations under the same roof. It was a biological and economic unit, and was the nucleus of all important social activities. The clan, which comprised various kinship-bound families, also formed an important part of the social fabric of the traditional Chinese society.

The Japanese occupation (1941–45) in Malaya enabled the predominantly Chinese Malayan Communist Party (MCP) to increase its political influence during and after the war. As it was the only effective political organization actively engaged in anti-Japanese insurgency, it attracted widespread support among the Chinese who suffered greatly from the hostility of the Japanese. The MCP succeeded, therefore, in establishing a strong politico-military resistance movement led by the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MFAJA), in the midst of the Chinese community. There was, however, considerably less support for the MCP from the Malay and Indian communities because their cooperation with the Japanese was clearly better and greater than that of the Chinese. None the less, because of its sizeable guerrilla forces operating during the Japanese occupation, the MCP thus became a major political force in post-war Malaya.

The history of the Kuomintang (KMT) movement in both Malaya and Singapore during the pre-war years has remained largely under-explored since the appearance of Png Poh-seng's article on that topic twenty years ago. Its history deserves a deeper study as it would throw light not only on the China-oriented politics among the Chinese in these two territories but also on the causes and the rationale of the British authorities to contain and ban it. As the Colonial Office and Foreign Office records have now been made accessible to researchers, it is feasible and urgent that such a study be undertaken in a more systematic and analytical manner.

This paper is a summary of my recent studies on the Taoist creed and common Chinese religious beliefs, in particular the religious customs of poeh (the practice of seeking divination) and the worship of the local god of the soil. While a number of papers have been published by scholars from the Singapore-Malaysia region, their findings have been somewhat limited in scope because they were confined to the Southeast Asian context. My study will be broader in scope. It will cover the relationship between the Chinese culture of China itself and that of Southeast Asia. In other words, this paper will give (1) a comparison between the cultural styles of North China, South, and Central China, (2) a study of Chinese culture in Southeast Asia viewed as an extension of the culture of South China, especially the provinces of Fukien and Kwangtung, and (3) a summary of my research on the conflict between Chinese culture in China on the one hand and that of the Singapore-Malaysia region on the other.

This paper attempts to appraise just one facet of the Chinese community in Singapore — its demographic character and the degree to which this is distinctive within the broader setting of Singapore society at large. The information available as the basis for such an analysis is limited and more definitive statements on trends and differences will be possible as the statistics compiled from the 1980 census become available.

Important changes are occurring within the Chinese community which have considerable significance for the republic but for which there is no direct basis of comparison with other ethnic communities. These considerations have not been examined here but include the changing behaviour in matters of kinship, associations and societies, marriage, religion, and similar elements central to the Chinese community. Perhaps the most significant of these currently is the issue of language and the active promotion by government of Mandarin not only as the official Chinese language but as a substitute for dialects in circumstances where, until now, they have been dominant. Although surveys of language use have been carried out recently, these have been too small and too specialized to provide a basis for general conclusions, and again it is to be hoped that the 1980 census data will provide an updated benchmark for this parameter comparable to that of earlier censuses.

The rise and fall of a Chinese colonial town within Batavia was closely related to the transmutation in Batavia's function as a capital. In the early seventeenth century it was founded as the headquarters to a — mainly inter-Asian — maritime trading East Indies Company at war with the Iberian enemy. As the staple town to the Company, “het magazijn van derzelven producten”, it served both strategic and mercantile goals. From the late seventeenth century onwards a structural change took place. Wars with European rivals were over and trade with the motherland became emphasized at the expense of the Asian “country trade”. On Java, the Company gradually transformed itself into a territorial power, which derived its main income from a system of contingenten and verplichte leverantiën, or tributary payments. Consequently, Batavia lost most of its dynamic function as a headquarters to a maritime trade empire. The adaptation of the city into its new role, e.g., to function as a capital to a territorial hinterland, did not progress smoothly.

Singularly little scholarly work has been devoted to the religious life of the Chinese of Southeast Asia. This is particularly true of the Indonesian Chinese. The only major work on Chinese religion in Indonesia to appear in decades is Les Chinois de Jakarta: Temples et Vie Collective. The unique and astonishing transformation of Confucianism into an organized religion as practised today under the auspices of MATAKIN (Majelis Tinggi Agama Khonghucu Indonesia — the Supreme Council for the Confucian Religion in Indonesia) has so far only been discussed in two short essays.

This paper attempts to analyse Sino-Indonesian relations and the problems as perceived by Indonesian ruling and counter-elites, as well as the place of the Chinese minority in the issue of such a normalization. Pro- and anti-normalization groups are identified and two Presidential Decrees — one granting citizenship certificates and the other granting “mass naturalization” to ethnic Chinese — are analysed in the context of normalization. Possible outcomes will also be discussed.

On the night of 18 September 1931, there was an explosion on the Manchurian railway near Mukden. This incident triggered another series of anti-Japanese incidents among the Chinese in the Philippines as an expression of their patriotic feeling.

In southeastern China where most villages consisted of people with the same surname, lineage and clan became the foundation of the local community. As the village people moved to the cities of China or overseas, they organized clan associations to gather distant agnates and set up ancestral altars to strengthen kinship ties among clansmen. Clanship emerged in a new form to cope with changes encountered in different milieus and continued to serve its functions. The transformation, however, has never really changed the clan to a club as its membership has remained restricted even if the membership has remained restricted even if the. The clan associations retain enough kinship elements to function like a traditional clan.

Overseas Chinese played a special role in China's entry into the modern age. Volumes have appeared to discuss the competition between revolutionaries and reformers, and this author has written of the late Ch'ing regime's own efforts to enlist leading members of the Nanyang merchant class. But this essay intends to shy away from the historian's conventional concern for factional politics. Despite the long-standing conviction that 1911 constituted a watershed and the equally worn shibboleth which tells us that the contribution from abroad was largely a function of factional allegiance, the Southeast Asian Chinese who took part in changing China should also be remembered for the perspectives they shared. This is because all the groups are part of a movement greater than China. Not only should their legacy to China be viewed from a far broader perspective but, also, their place in Southeast Asian history.

A great deal has been written during the last three decades on the Chinese in Southeast Asia in Chinese and Japanese generally and in English particularly. The outstanding feature of the Western approach to studying this ethnic community has been that research methods of sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists have largely replaced those of historians.