• Chinese Arrive in Southeast Asia
  The first Chinese to enter Southeast Asia were Buddhist monks, maritime traders and representatives of the Imperial Chinese government.. In ancient and medieval times, Chinese traders utilized Southeast Asian ports on maritime Silk Road but in the early days much of this trade was carried out by Arab mariners and merchants. Regular trading between China and Southeast Asia didn’t really begin in earnest until the 13th century. Chinese were attracted by trade opportunities in Malacca, Manila, Batavia (Jakarta) Some of the most detailed descriptions of Angkor Wat and other Southeast Asian civilizations came from Chinese travelers and monks. The Chinese eunuch explorer Zheng He (1371-1433) helped establish Chinese communities in parts of Java and the Malay Peninsula in part, many historians believe, to impose imperial Chinese control.
  Beginning in the late-1700s, large numbers of Chinese — mostly from Guangdong and Fujian provinces and Hainan Island in southern China — began emigrating to Southeast Asia. Most were illiterate, landless peasants oppressed in their homelands and looking for opportunities abroad. The rich landowners and educated Mandarins stayed in China. Scholars attribute the mass exodus to population explosion in the coastal cities of Fujian and prosperity and contacts generated by foreign trade. Among the early places where Chinese went to work was the Ayutthaya Kingdom (1351-1767) in Thailand.
  So many people left Fujian for Southeast Asia during the late 18th century and early 19th century that the Manchu court issued an imperial edict in 1718 recalling all Chinese to the mainland. A 1728 proclamation declared that anyone who didn’t return and was captured would be executed.
  Most of the Chinese who settled in Southeast Asia left China in the mid 19th century after a number treaty ports were opened in China with the signing of the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, which ceded the island of Hong Kong to Britain and opened five treaty ports to British trade after the first Opium War. The ports made it easy to leave and with the British rather than imperial Chinese running things there were fewer obstacles preventing them from leaving. British ports in Southeast Asia, particularly Singapore, gave them destinations they could head to.
  A particularly large number of Chinese left from the British treaty ports of Xiamen (Amoy) and Fuzhou (Foochow) in Fujian province. Many were encouraged to leave by colonial governments so they could provide cheap coolie labor in ports around the world, including those in colonial Southeast Asia. Many Chinese fled the coastal province of Fujian and Zhejiang after famines and floods in 1910 and later during World War II and the early days of Communist rule. Many of the legal and illegal immigrants from China continue to come from Fujian.

  2022年10月17日

• History of Chinese in Vietnam
  The Chinese did well in the French colonial period in the 19th and early 20th century. French laws discouraged participation in commerce by the native population but encouraged Chinese participation. There was a substantial increase in the Hoa population. The country’s limited foreign and domestic trade were already in the hands of Chinese when the French arrived. The French chose to promote the Chinese role in commerce and to import Chinese labor to develop road and railroad systems, mining, and industry. French colonial policy that lifted the traditional ban on rice exports at the end of the nineteenth century also attracted new waves of Chinese merchants and shopkeepers seeking to take advantage of the new export market. Vietnam’s growing economy attracted even more Chinese thereafter, especially to the South. Already deeply involved in the rice trade, the Chinese expanded their interests to include ricemilling and established a virtual monopoly. [Source: Library of Congress]
  In 1970, Chinese Vietnamese made up 5.3 percent of the population of South Vietnam and controlled 70 to 80 percent of the commerce. In mid-1975 the combined Hoa communities of the North and South numbered approximately 1.3 million, and all but 200,000 resided in the South, most of them in the Saigon metropolitan area.
  Restrictions on economic activity following reunification of the north and south in 1975 and the subsequent but unrelated general deterioration in Vietnamese-Chinese relations, which led to war in 1979, negatively impacted the Chinese-Vietnamese community. After the Vietnam War, the Chinese were targets and many fled or were driven out. Beginning in 1975, the Hoa bore the brunt of socialist transformation in the South, especially after the communist government decided in early 1978 to abolish private trade. This, combined with external tensions stemming from Vietnam’s dispute with Cambodia and China in 1978 and 1979 caused an exodus of about 250,000 Hoa, of whom 170,000 fled overland into China from the North and the remainder fled by boat from the South. Many “boat people” left when the government closed down private businesses in 1978. An estimated 450,000 ethnic Chinese left Vietnam. Many were officially encouraged and assisted and some were expelled across the land border with China. The 1989 census counted 962,000 Chinese, barely changed from the 949,000 recorded in the 1979 census.

  2022年10月17日

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  Vietnamese Boat People
  Unknown 1984
  More than two million “Vietnamese Boat People” fled their homeland between 1975 and 1995, seeking asylum in neighboring countries and leading to a humanitarian crisis that ended with more than half of the refugees being resettled in the United States. This photograph shows thirty-five refugees awaiting rescue by the USS Blue Ridge. After spending eight days at sea, the thirty-five foot fishing boat was spotted three hundred fifty miles northeast of Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam

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  1982, A 35 foot fishing boat approaches the amphibious command ship USS BLUE RIDGE (LCC 19). The BLUE RIDGE rescued 35 refugeees 350 miles northeast of Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, after they had spend eight days at sea in the boat.

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  Chinese in the Philippines in 1899
  A Typical Chinese Coolie. Before and for some time after the American occupation, the corabao [sic] and coolie were the only competitors in the city’s heavy transportations.

  2022年10月17日

• Kidnapping of Ethnic Chinese in the 1990s
  Because they are seen as being richer than other Filipinos, Chinese Filipino are often the targets of crime such as kidnapping. Seth Mydans wrote in the New York Times, “The highly visible role of the Chinese in Philippine economic growth — the Chinese-owned shopping malls and high-rises that are transforming Manila — have made them obvious targets for extortion. Members of the Chinese business community agree that investment has been affected but say it is impossible to estimate the amounts involved.”

  2022年10月17日

• Filipino Chinese Weddings The Chinese, like the Filipinos, have unique wedding traditions, ceremonies, and even superstitions. Because China is a large country, each clan has its own special tradition and customs. Their traditions mixed with the Filipinos, made Filipino-Chinese weddings even more colorful. Here is a guide on the basic wedding rituals of the Filipino-Chinese.

  2022年10月17日

• Chinese in the Philippines in the 19th and 20th Centuries
  Spanish decline of the Philippines began in the 1700s when the power of Spain was eclipsed in Europe by the England, France and the Netherlands. Foreign competition in the late 1700s disrupted the trans-Pacific trade routes and independence of Mexico and other Latin countries in the early 1800s brought an end to Spain’s trans-Pacific monopoly.
  Mestizos (people of mixed Malay, Chinese and Spanish ancestry) began to move into positions of influence and take the place of the Spanish. The opening of trade created a wealthy class that was educated in Europe, where they were exposed to the same kind of liberal ideas and philosophies that fostered the independence movements in the U.S., France and Latin America.
  In the late nineteenth century, Chinese immigration, now with official approval, increased, and Chinese mestizos became a feature in Filipino social and economic life.
  In 1931 there were between 80,000 and 100,000 Chinese in the islands active in the local economy; many of them had arrived after United States rule had been established. Some 16,000 Japanese were concentrated largely in the Mindanao province of Davao (the incorporated city of Davao was labeled by local boosters the “Little Tokyo of the South”) and were predominant in the abaca industry. Yet the immigration of foreign laborers never reached a volume sufficient to threaten indigenous control of the economy or the traditional social structure as it did in British Malaya and Burma.

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• Chinese Rebellion in the Philippines
  Spanish rule was punctuated by periodic revolts, many of them involving Chinese who lived outside the walls of Manila in a place called the Parian. In 1574, a Chinese pirate named Lin Tao Kien unsuccessfully attacked Manila. In 1574, the governor of Manila was assassinated by Chinese mutineers on his galley. Even though 12,000 Chinese were expelled in 1596, settlers continued to arrive from the mainland.
  There were anti-Chinese riots in 1603, 1639, 1662, 1686, 1762 and 1819. The one in 1603 was particularly nasty: some 6,000 armed Chinese set fire to Spanish settlement outside Manila and began marching on Manila itself. A Spanish attack was quickly repelled and Spanish leaders were beheaded and had their heads displayed on stakes. Spanish reinforcements from the south saved for the Spaniards. The rebels were turned back and Parian was set on fire. The Spaniards and their Filipino and Japanese allies then took their revenge and massacred 20,000 Chinese.
  The Chinese remained afterwards because the Spaniards couldn’t conduct trade without them.

  2022年10月17日

• Chinese and Chinese Mestizos in the Philippines in the Spanish Era
  In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, deep-seated Spanish suspicion of the Chinese gave way to recognition of their potentially constructive role in economic development. Chinese expulsion orders issued in 1755 and 1766 were repealed in 1788. Nevertheless, the Chinese remained concentrated in towns around Manila, particularly Binondo and Santa Cruz. In 1839 the government issued a decree granting them freedom of occupation and residence. [Source: Library of Congress]
  In the latter half of the nineteenth century, immigration into the archipelago, largely from the maritime province of Fujian on the southeastern coast of China, increased, and a growing proportion of Chinese settled in outlying areas. In 1849 more than 90 percent of the approximately 6,000 Chinese lived in or around Manila, whereas in 1886 this proportion decreased to 77 percent of the 66,000 Chinese in the Philippines at that time, declining still further in the 1890s. The Chinese presence in the hinterland went hand in hand with the transformation of the insular economy. Spanish policy encouraged immigrants to become agricultural laborers. Some became gardeners, supplying vegetables to the towns, but most shunned the fields and set themselves up as small retailers and moneylenders. The Chinese soon gained a central position in the cash-crop economy on the provincial and local levels. *
  Of equal, if not greater, significance for subsequent political, cultural, and economic developments were the Chinese mestizos. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, they composed about 5 percent of the total population of around 2.5 million and were concentrated in the most developed provinces of Central Luzon and in Manila and its environs. A much smaller number lived in the more important towns of the Visayan Islands, such as Cebu and Iloilo, and on Mindanao. Converts to Catholicism and speakers of Filipino languages or Spanish rather than Chinese dialects, the mestizos enjoyed a legal status as subjects of Spain that was denied the Chinese. In the words of historian Edgar Vickberg, they were considered, unlike the mixed-Chinese of other Southeast Asian countries, not “a special kind of local Chinese” but “a special kind of Filipino.”
  The eighteenth-century expulsion edicts had given the Chinese mestizos the opportunity to enter retailing and the skilled craft occupations formerly dominated by the Chinese. The removal of legal restrictions on Chinese economic activity and the competition of new Chinese immigrants, however, drove a large number of mestizos out of the commercial sector in mid-nineteenth century. As a result, many Chinese mestizos invested in land, particularly in Central Luzon. The estates of the religious orders were concentrated in this region, and mestizos became inquilinos (lessees) of these lands, subletting them to cultivators; a portion of the rent was given by the inquilino to the friary estate. Like the Chinese, the mestizos were moneylenders and acquired land when debtors defaulted.
  By the late nineteenth century, prominent mestizo families, despite the inroads of the Chinese, were noted for their wealth and formed the major component of a Filipino elite. As the export economy grew and foreign contact increased, the mestizos and other members of this Filipino elite, known collectively as ilustrados, obtained higher education (in some cases abroad), entered professions such as law or medicine, and were particularly receptive to the liberal and democratic ideas that were beginning to reach the Philippines despite the efforts of the generally reactionary — and friar-dominated — Spanish establishment.

  2022年10月17日