BOOK REVIEWS

Edmund Terence Gomez and Michael Hsiao Hsin-Huang eds., Chinese Business in South-East Asia. Contesting Cultural Explanations, Researching Entrepreneurship

This work, the publication of which has been supervised by Edmund Terence Gomez (University of Malay, Kuala Lumpur) and Michael Hsiao (Academia Sinica, Taipei), brings together various contributions to a workshop held in Taipei in November 1997 on the theme of Chinese capitalism in South-East Asia. The text, which naturally echoes the innumerable press articles and popular works that have already appeared, thus draws up an inventory of the academic research on this subject. One of its qualities, and not its least, is to collect all this research in 25 pages of bibliography. The work opens with a long and passionately interesting introductory chapter signed by the two co-editors, which puts into perspective the attainments and the weaknesses of the academic works that have already been realised. There then follow six texts, of varying quality, dedicated to the specific cases of Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and Taiwanese investments in South-East Asia. Each time, the authors devote themselves both to a critique of the existing literature and to an account of a research programme still to come.

Two primary criticisms directed at the existing bibliography emerge. First of all, the literature has had the tendency to consider the Chinese business communities in South-East Asia as homogenous entities, whereas they are actually riven with numerous schisms. The communities are pluralistic because they are the fruit of successive migrations. Differences between generations also exist, as those who have been born in the host country do not enjoy the same relationship to the society and to the nation-state of this country. These differences are also geographical or dialectal, as these communities originate from distinct regions of China. Finally, these communities are also divided socially—not all the Chinese entrepreneurs of South-East Asia are at the head of multisector conglomerates!

Secondly, the question of the contribution to economic prosperity made by networks or organisations particular to the Chinese community (intra-ethnic business networks) has very generally yet to be posed. The best example that there is of economic co-operation within a Chinese community is without doubt the creation in 1932 of the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation (COB) on the foundations of three banks controlled by Singapore’s Hokkien entrepreneurs. But the regional or dialectal organisations have lost their economic efficacy, and new organisations, such as the Rotary Club, the Lions Club or the alumni associations, are playing an innovative role still to be clarified. The accent has too often been placed on the supposed harmony of business communities, which are in fact traversed with conflicts that have not been sufficiently studied. In the case of the Philippines, Theresa Chong Carino reveals that one of the factors in the success of the big Chinese entrepreneurs is due to their capacity to develop with the non-Chinese elite of the country (p. 114).

One subject that has been particularly disregarded by the academic research but would merit more detailed attention is the small and medium-sized enterprises that form the essential character of the demography of Chinese businesses in South-East Asia. While the interest that has been shown in the large enterprises and in their managers has been overly exclusive, the dynamism of the SMEs has yet to be explained. Future research should focus on answering three questions. How do public policies contribute to explaining the forms of development of the Chinese enterprises? and How, historically, have the local capital markets been constructed?

Finally, the authors all agree on the necessity of conducting a reasoned critique of the culturalist arguments, which would lay the foundations for the existence of “a Chinese capitalism”. It would be necessary to come back in particular to the question of the manipulation by individuals, social groups or the states in question of the idea of an inherently Chinese identity.

In this respect, the last chapter is especially illuminating, as it tests the hypothesis of cultural affinity as a basis for economic co-operation against the investments actually conducted by Taiwanese business in Malaysia. Is it because Malaysia is the country in South-East Asia with the largest Chinese communities (28% of the population) that Taiwanese investments are especially numerous there? The response of I-Chun Kung is clearly in the negative. If Taiwanese entrepreneurs set up shop there, it is because they can find Malay staff to employ on site who have pursued higher studies in Taiwan itself. It is thus not because the investors share a same Chinese cultural identity—a very vague concept—with their host country, but because a large number of Malaysian students are familiar with Taiwanese realities that there is here a basis for economic co-operation.

On certain points, the reader remains rather frustrated. Why have the authors limited themselves to South-East Asia while it might have been desirable, from a personal perspective, to take into account Hong Kong or Taiwanese enterprises? The theoretical and methodological questions raised by the authors concern the modes of organisation of capitalism in the Chinese area in general. It would thus be possible to envisage these questions being referred to the attainments of the economic history of pre-communist China or to the forms of development of the entrepreneurial sector of contemporary China. To find their way out of the impasses of culturalism, the authors have chosen to give priority to the study of those enterprises that are controlled or managed by minority populations (but then why look at the case of Singapore, where the Chinese population is in the majority?). One waits with impatience to see how a comparative analysis that they wish for (p. XIII) between the Chinese enterprises in South-East Asia and the enterprises of the other diasporas (Indian, Japanese, Korean, Jewish or Armenian) in other parts of the world might contribute to the debate. Such a comparison could in particular serve as the basis for the production of conceptual tools that, for the time being, are sorely lacking. It is understood that these texts, rich in methodological and theoretical questioning, and which call on an economic sociology that is both political and historical, form only the first in a series of volumes, the publication of which is now awaited with impatience.

Translated from the French original by Nick Oates