Sojourners and settlers

Only recently has the role of Chinese and Sino-Southeast Asian minorities in leading Southeast Asia's rapid economic growth attracted world attention. Yet the interaction of Chinese and Southeast Asians reaches back a thousand years, at a level of intensity which makes it difficult, if not specious, to attempt to disentangle what is chinese and what is indigenous in much of Southeast Asian culture. This book demonstrates the depth of that relationship. Ten of the most distinguished specialists in the field pool their expertise in considering the multiple ways in which Chinese have interacted with the region. Jamie Mackie sets the scene in a survey of the Southeast Asian Chinese, particularly during the last fifty years. Wang Gungwu considers their history in terms of the concept of 'sojourning', while Anthony Reid considers the oscillating pattern of interaction from the thirteenth century to the twentieth, giving rise to new Sino-Southeast Asian elites in times of mutual isolation, and to a more 'Chinese' character at times of close contact. G. William Skinner provides a new explanation of why stable Sino-Southeast Asian creole societies were able to exist throughout the nineteenth century in Malaya, the Philippines and Java, and Claudine Salmon shows how one of these groups, the peranakan of Java, coped with pressures to become more Chinese in the second half of the nineteenth century. Oliver Wolters and Craig Reynolds reflect upon the difficulty of disentangling the two cultures in Vietnam and Thailand respectively. Leonard Blusse reveals new Chinese sources on the junk trade with Java, while Mary Somers Heidhues surveys the neglected but numerous Chinese rural settlers in the arc around Singapore.