Shows that the history of the ethnic Chinese in the Philippines is a history in its own right as well as part of Philippine history. Dwells on the demographic, social, and international forces that have shaped that history.

This book maps out the state of China Studies in seven Southeast Asian countries from different perspectives. It looks at the history, current status, and characteristics of the study of China in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and Myanmar, and what factors shaped the development and prospects of Sinology and Chinese Studies in these countries. For the first time, China experts from within and outside of this region, using a wide range of biographical, historical, bibliographical and comparative methodologies, tell the stories of how intellectuals and scholars in selected Southeast Asian countries understand, study, and research China. Their studies are providing different perspectives and discourses on China. Chapters discover and explore common factors such as the presence of sizeable ethnic Chinese communities, historical and current interactions between China and Southeast Asia, and the diverse intellectual influences in the region. A novel insight into the study of China in Southeast Asia, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of China–Southeast Asia relations, the intellectual history of Southeast Asia, the intellectual history of Chinese Studies in the world and the politics of Knowledge production.

What binds overseas Chinese communities together? Traditionally scholars have stressed the interplay of external factors (discrimination, local hostility) and internal forces (shared language, native-place ties, family) to account for the cohesion and "Chineseness" of these overseas groups. Andrew Wilson challenges this Manichean explanation of identity by introducing a third factor: the ambitions of the Chinese merchant elite, which played an equal, if not greater, role in the formation of ethnic identity among the Chinese in colonial Manila. Drawing on Chinese, Spanish, and American sources and applying a broad range of historiographical approaches, this volume dissects the structures of authority and identity within Manila’s Chinese community over a period of dramatic socioeconomic change and political upheaval. It reveals the ways in which wealthy Chinese merchants dealt in not only goods and services, but also political influence and the movement of human talent from China to the Philippines. Their influence and status extended across the physical and political divide between China and the Philippines, from the villages of southern China to the streets of Manila, making them a truly transnational elite. Control of community institutions and especially migration networks accounts for the cohesiveness of Manila’s Chinese enclave, argues Wilson, and the most successful members of the elite self-consciously chose to identify themselves and their protégés as Chinese.

Among the extremely limited English language literature on the Chinese resistance movement in the Philippines during the Japanese occupation, this book is unique in making use of documents from the United States National Archives, supplemented by memorials and articles recently published in China and the Philippines. While the reliability of these original sources is questionable, the difficulty of interpreting these sources was dealt with openly and effort was made to compare contradictory accounts objectively. Meanwhile, the characteristics of the Chinese resistance movement were summarized in its historical social context, and the long-term effect of the resistance movement on the Chinese community in the Philippines was addressed. The book thus fills an important gap in Philippine historiography on the Second World War and in the understanding of the Philippine Chinese community and the effect of Japanese occupation upon it.

Gnnter Dux, Dr. iur., University of Bonn, is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Freiburg University; Germany. He has published mainly on the sociology of culture, sociology of social and cultural change and sociology of politics. --

In June 1985, a symposium, "Changing Identities of the Southeast Asian Chinese since World War II" was held at the Australian National University in Canberra. This volume includes many of the papers from that symposium presented by ANU scholars and those from universities elsewhere in Australia, North America and Southeast Asia. Participants looked at the current thinking about the parameters of identity and shared their own research into the complex issues that overlapping categories of identity raise. Identity was chosen as the focus of the, symposium because perceptions of self - whether by others or by the individual Chinese concerned - appear to lie at the heart ' of the present-day Chinese experience in Southeast Asia, It is also evident that identity wears many guises and that we cannot talk about a single Chinese identity when identity can be determined by the different political, social, economic or religious circumstances an individual faces at any given time. One of the distinctive characteristics of all the essays in this volume is that they are written from an historical perspective. While the papers forcus on how recent developments in Southeast Asian society have shaped Chinese identity, they also discuss those changes in terms of the historical matrix from which they developed. Because many of the essays in this volume combine an historical overview with more recent statistical data, it should serve as a useful companion to the increasingly popular case studies in which much of the writing about the Chinese in Southeast Asia is now cast.

The study of slavery and coerced labour is increasingly conducted from a global perspective, and yet a dual Eurocentric bias remains: slavery primarily brings to mind the images of Atlantic chattel slavery, and most studies continue to be based – either outright or implicitly – on a model of northern European wage labour. This book constitutes an attempt to re-centre that story to Asia. With studies spanning the western Indian Ocean and the steppes of Central Asia to the islands of South East Asia and Japan, and ranging from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, this book tracks coercion in diverse forms, tracing both similarities and differences – as well as connections – between systems of coercion, from early sales regulations to post-abolition labour contracts. Deep empirical case studies, as well as comparisons between the chapters, all show that while coercion was entrenched in a number of societies, it was so in different and shifting ways. This book thus not only shows the history of slavery and coercion in Asia as a connected story, but also lays the groundwork for global studies of a phenomenon as varying, manifold and contested as coercion.