Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

KEN YOUNG 63
Singapore, which might on the surface seem to be a place where there would be
relatively few challenges to questions of what it means to be Chinese, there have
been major shifts and real tensions among intellectual protagonists, influenced by
both local historical developments as well as those emanating from China itself.
Lee Kuan Yew articulated one clear point of view of the contemporary reality in a
recent address to Chinese entrepreneurs in Hong Kong:
We are ethnic Chinese, but we must be honest and recognise that at the end
of the day our fundamental loyalties are to our home country, not to China…
After two or three generations away from China, we have become rooted in
the country of our birth. Our stakes are in our home countries, not China
where our ancestors came from. The Chinese Thai is a Thai, and in the end
he wants Thailand to prosper… So too, Chinese-Singaporeans, Chinese-
Indonesians, Chinese-Malaysians and Chinese-Filipinos.
(Hicks and Mackie 1994:47)
The issue here is not whether Southeast Asians of Chinese descent take pride in
their ethnic and cultural origins. Plainly they do, and with great passion on some
occasions (for example, Gilley 1996). The overseas Chinese, many of whom
identify first with the nation to which they belong, nevertheless find themselves
deemed to be Chinese, 5 and to be part of the Chinese diaspora. Most of these
diasporic groups are in a situation where their ‘Chinese cultures are both Chinese
and Other to China, just as they are Other’ to the mainstream culture of their
Southeast Asian homeland (Lee 1996:ix). The cultural inheritance of Southeast
Asians whose ancestors came from provinces in southern China (Guangdong,
Fujian and so on) were culturally plural in the Chinese context, and are plural in the
diaspora (Lee 1996:264—71). The ‘folk models’ of contemporary Guangdongese
(Cantonese) leave little doubt that their culture is different to that of northerners
and other southern regional groups (Hakka, Chauzhou Lo, Hoklo and others) and
certainly to the overseas Chinese (Guldin 1998). That is not to say that the
Guangdongese do not think of themselves as Chinese–they do, and consider
themselves to be the best Chinese (Guldin 1998). Thus notions of Chineseness
embrace a plurality of cultures (Lee 1996), and the question that then arises is
whether the shared sense of Chineseness is sufficient to sustain the kinds of
coordinated action that can overcome the cultural and other differences that exist
between regional cultures within China and the cultures of the diaspora. I do not
intend to solve that issue here, even though I do note that the real complexity of the
issue of Chinese identity does not sit comfortably with the tidy schemas found in
works like Naisbit’s (1996).
The situation is further complicated by the fact that there are pressures on
Southeast Asian communities to reinterpret their narratives of identity in terms of
the unity of Chinese culture. From Beijing’s perspective, much depends on
maintaining unity in ‘greater China’ (The People’s Republic, Hong Kong and
Taiwan), and these pressures, though not directed at Southeast Asian populations,