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Chinese Economic Activities in Colonial Indochina
Organizer: Tracy C. Barrett, Cornell University
Chair: Nola Cooke, Australian National University, Australia
Discussant: Patricia M. Pelley, Texas Tech University
When the French conquered the three eastern provinces of Nguyen southern Vietnam (Nam ky or Cochinchina) in 1862, Chinese people had been long established there. As political and economic actors, from the later 17th century they had pioneered important centres like Bien Hoa and My Tho and later the great market town of Cholon. Upriver in Cambodia, Chinese had played a similar role, with settled commodity producers living alongside wealthy merchants in Phnom Penh for generations. Under French rule in Indochina, Chinese immigrant numbers climbed in all regions from the late 1880s, despite the various restrictions and comparatively high taxes imposed on them. Although a single colony, French Indochina was no unified state but a union of “countries” with differing economic conditions. Chinese immigrants thus needed to learn to operate within a range of local environments, from the minimal protectorate of later 19th century Cambodia through to the regulated urban workforce of Saigon-Cholon, the trading sphere of the French concession of Haiphong, in northern Vietnam (Bac ky or Tonkin), and the uncertainty and opportunities of decolonization in the south. Using archival-based case studies or analyses, this panel seeks to move beyond the well-known, generalized accounts of Chinese economic activities and their “middleman” role in a colonial “plural society” to try to reveal more of their complex grassroots situations, at different times and in different parts of colonial and immediate post-colonial Indochina. The panelists’ wider goal is to help better illuminate and historicize the variety of Chinese experience in Indochina.
The Impact of Chinese Economic Activities in Norodom’s Cambodia (c. 1860-1900)
Nola Cooke, Australian National University, Australia
Chinese and Sino-Khmer had been peaceably employed in Cambodia for generations before the French fully established their protectorate there in 1863. They were mainly merchants or junk traders, who collected and exported local produce, cash crop farmers, and fishermen. During the reign of Norodom I (r. 1860-1904), however, the Cambodian economy began to change: if French fiscal control largely remained more nominal than real until 1893, Norodom presided over a revenue farming system that ultimately impacted considerably on Cambodian economic life. In the process it created a new economic function for Chinese in the local economy. As the voracious revenue farming system of the 1870s and 1880s moved into overdrive, Chinese immigrants were among the most obvious beneficiaries of its excesses. At that time, some newly wealthy Chinese took advantage of changed taxation arrangements in the local fishing industry to begin to transform its operations: whereas earlier in the century commercial fishing had involved all resident ethnic groups and produced relatively small catches, by the 1890s it had become a large-scale export industry, dominated by Chinese and Vietnamese and worth millions of francs annually. This paper draws on unpublished archival and little known published sources to analyze changing Chinese economic activities and opportunities in later nineteenth-century Cambodia and their consequences locally, ranging from the emergence of anti-Chinese sentiments among Khmer people to the ethnic reorganization of the export fishing industry.
The Rise of Chinese Labor Organizations in Cochinchina in the 1920’s and 1930’s
Tracy C. Barrett, Cornell University
As the 20th century dawned, and nationalistic sentiments among Cochinchina’s Chinese bloomed, strikes and boycotts enacted from within the Chinese community increased as well. In the colonial environment, strikes and boycotts are particularly instructive because they allow sudden flashes of insight into the motivations and true power of the overseas Chinese masses. While French colonial law might have governed daily life in Indochina, organized resistance on the part of the Chinese community as a whole could and did affect French policy by making the price for certain colonial actions too high to justify the intended results. Even when collective action was organized against individual employers rather than French colons, these acts give insight into the ability, how ever limited, of workers to affect their own labor conditions. With the introduction of Chinese trade unions into the colonial milieu, collective action not only achieved greater efficacy within Indochina and vis-à-vis the French, but the connections between Indochinese based Chinese and organizations within China proper were strengthened as well. This paper examines these issues by addressing two types of strikes and boycotts: those inspired by the deeds or misdeeds of individuals, and those with overtly political characteristics, reflecting the realities of colonial or global affairs. Special attention will be paid to the establishment and operations of Chinese trade unions in Indochina, the ties these unions retained to similar unions in China, and the strikes and boycotts managed by the Indochinese unions in the 1920’s and 1930’s.
Sino-Vietnamese networks in southern Vietnam during the First Indochina Conflict (1945-1954)
Joerg Engelbert, University of Hamburg, Germany
The interior of several southern Vietnamese provinces served as “safe havens” for the communist VM, but in part also for other anti-regime forces who first fought alongside the VM or later turned against them. As in earlier periods of time, a flourishing Chinese junk trade smuggled weapons, drugs, and other items from southern China via the Philippines, or from Siam and Malaya. Transported to the VM “Liberated Areas”, they were exchanged for agricultural commodities. In the VM areas, local Chinese, or their Sino-Vietnamese or Sino-Khmer descendants helped establish markets and trading co-operatives. Bangkok and Chantaburi in Thailand, and the islands of Koh Kong and Phu Quôc, served as transit stations and depots for this trade. It became so flourishing that it forced both main contenders in the First Indochina War to change their economic policies. The VM had to keep the Piaster and had to modify policies that promoted communist transformation. Instead in the south, the private business and trade upon which the survival of the VM partly rested, had to be accepted. The French had to lift an earlier ban on rice exports from the VM controlled Transbassac. There were also illicit activities in the north or in the centre of Vietnam. However, the geographical scope, the extent and the manifold character of these activities are different in the south, as was the multi-ethnic character of Chinese, Vietnamese, Khmer and mestizo participants.