A Royal Insult, a Modern Diaspora and the Myth of Chinese Control

A recent video essay has revived the phrase “Jews of the Orient” to describe ethnic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, but the expression was coined in 1914 by a Siamese king during a political crisis—not by a neutral observer of diaspora economics. The comparison contains a serious insight about minority commerce and majority resentment, yet its original language was designed to turn a domestic minority into a national threat.

The phrase came with a political charge

The video begins with a familiar urban image: the Chinatown that sits close to the narrator’s childhood, the Chinatown he encountered in Istanbul, and the Chinese districts he noticed in Thailand. From there it moves to a larger claim. Across Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines, the essay argues, ethnic Chinese communities have occupied a position comparable to that once held by Jews in parts of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

The proposed parallel is easy to understand. Both groups were often minorities in countries where they had lived for generations. Both were associated with trade, finance, retail and the movement of capital. Both maintained strong family, religious, linguistic or commercial ties across borders. Both became economically prominent while remaining vulnerable to accusations that they were foreigners who benefited from the societies in which they lived without fully belonging to them.

That is a legitimate subject for historical comparison. It is not, however, what the phrase itself means.

“Jews of the Orient” was the title of a 1914 essay by King Vajiravudh of Siam, who ruled as Rama VI from 1910 to 1925. The essay was published in Thai and English and applied European antisemitic ideas to Chinese residents of Siam. The Chinese were presented as disloyal, exploitative and insufficiently assimilated. The academic historian Thak Chaloemtiarana describes the text as an attempt to make the Chinese into the “Other Within” of a Thai nation still being constructed.¹

That history changes the burden of proof. A commentator who revives the phrase is not simply naming a recurring social pattern. He is borrowing a label that was created to accuse a minority of having a racial loyalty stronger than its loyalty to the country where it lived.

The distinction matters because political language often survives after its original circumstances have been forgotten. A slogan can look analytical once the pamphlet, the strike and the royal anxiety have disappeared. The words then appear to describe reality when they were originally designed to organise hostility towards it.

Vajiravudh was defending a fragile nation

The Siamese monarchy did not discover a timeless truth about Chinese people in 1914. It was trying to manage a dangerous transition.

Siam was modernising under pressure from European empires. It had avoided formal colonisation, but Britain and France had imposed territorial and diplomatic concessions. The monarchy needed a stronger central state, a more disciplined bureaucracy and a national identity that could compete with the nationalism of the powers surrounding it. Vajiravudh answered with a political formula built around nation, religion and king.

That formula required an internal contrast. A nation is easier to define when its loyal members can be distinguished from an allegedly separate population within its borders. Chinese residents supplied the contrast because they were numerous in Bangkok, visible in commerce, linked to southern China and connected to Chinese schools, associations and political currents. Some were recent migrants; many others belonged to families that had lived in Siam for generations.

The king’s hostility had several sources. Chinese workers had already shown that they could disrupt the capital through collective action. A three-day strike in 1910 paralysed Bangkok after a dispute over the head tax. The Chinese-Siamese Bank failed during a financial crisis in 1913. Chinese political activism was also linked, in the royal imagination, to the republican movement that had overthrown China’s Qing dynasty in 1911. Sun Yat-sen had sought financial support from overseas Chinese communities, including those in Southeast Asia.

These were political and economic developments. Vajiravudh transformed them into a racial narrative. In his essay, the issue was no longer whether workers could strike, whether banks could fail or whether merchants could finance politics. The issue became the supposed character of the Chinese as a group. Commercial success was treated as evidence of predation. Transnational ties became evidence of disloyalty. Cultural persistence became evidence that Chinese residents refused to become Thai.

This is how the phrase acquired its force. It did not merely say that Chinese and Jewish communities had similar economic histories. It implied that both were examples of a suspicious minority type: useful to the host society, but never quite of it.

Nor was the king’s position as simple as a modern nationalist myth might suggest. The Chinese had long been part of Siamese society. Chinese merchants had served the monarchy. Chinese families had married into the Thai elite. The state had encouraged immigration and relied on Chinese labour, tax farming and trade. The very people now denounced as alien had helped build the economy and had been incorporated into royal networks.

The contradiction was not a marginal detail. The monarchy needed the Chinese and feared their independence. It wanted the wealth, labour and commercial connections while demanding cultural and political submission. “Assimilation” in this setting meant more than learning a language or acquiring citizenship. It meant accepting the state’s definition of who counted as properly Thai.

The economic pattern is real, but it is not a conspiracy

Discarding the royal insult does not require denying the economic pattern that made it attractive to later writers.

Colonial Southeast Asia was organised through unequal commercial systems. European governments controlled ports, taxation and law, but they lacked the personnel and local knowledge to run every layer of trade. They depended on intermediaries: merchants who could deal with European firms, labour recruiters who could organise workers, shopkeepers who supplied the urban population, and tax farmers who could collect revenue on behalf of the state.

Chinese migrants were well placed to fill those roles. Migration from southern China had created networks based on dialect, village, kinship and credit. A trader arriving in one port could often find relatives, fellow villagers or members of the same dialect group in another. A family firm could move goods and information through a chain of trusted relationships that did not depend entirely on the formal institutions of a colonial state.

That advantage was not mysterious and it was not unique. Jewish, Armenian, Gujarati, Lebanese, Hadhrami and other trading diasporas developed comparable methods in different places. When migrants cannot rely on political power, secure land ownership or equal access to public institutions, they tend to invest in portable assets: education, reputation, family connections and commercial knowledge. Those assets can be carried across borders.

The result can be a concentration of wealth in the hands of a minority. It can also create a dangerous visual distortion. A population may be widely distributed through ordinary households, while its richest and most visible members occupy the commanding positions in trade, property or industry. The majority then encounters the minority through shop signs, banks, family conglomerates and urban wealth rather than through the full range of occupations in which most minority citizens actually live.

The comparison with European Jews has a further foundation. Minority commercial groups often became useful to rulers while remaining politically exposed. Governments could tax them, regulate them, protect them or abandon them. Majorities could resent their economic position without examining the colonial policies and state contracts that helped produce it. The same group could be welcomed as an economic asset during expansion and blamed as an alien force during crisis.

But a structural explanation is not an ethnic indictment. It does not say that Chinese people possess an inherited instinct for commerce. It says that migration, institutions, exclusion and opportunity can produce concentrated networks. It also says that those networks change when laws, education, citizenship and markets change.

The strongest version of the video’s argument is therefore sociological: a commercially successful minority can become a scapegoat when economic power is distributed unevenly and national identity is defined in ethnic terms. That proposition can be tested. It can be compared across countries. It can also be falsified.

The weaker version is the one that turns the pattern into a racial essence. Once the argument becomes “the Chinese are naturally like this” or “the Chinese community controls the economy as a collective”, evidence has been replaced by folklore.

The numbers expose the weakness of the “tiny minority owns everything” story

One of the most persistent claims in discussion of Chinese Indonesians is that they make up about 3 per cent of the population while controlling roughly 70 per cent of the economy. It is a striking statistic because it appears to compress the entire problem into one sentence: a tiny foreign minority, a vast economic empire, and an obvious explanation for popular resentment.

It also poorly describes Indonesia.

The 2000 census was the first Indonesian census in decades to ask respondents to identify their ethnicity. It found that ethnic Chinese Indonesians represented about 1.2 per cent of the population, not the 2.5 to 5 per cent that earlier estimates had commonly suggested. The 2010 census produced a similar proportion, recording about 2.83 million people. The University of Melbourne’s Indonesia at Melbourne project notes that the result was confirmed even after the immediate trauma of the 1998 violence had passed.³

This is not a technical correction with no political meaning. Population denominators shape public imagination. A community believed to represent 3 per cent of the country is already vulnerable to claims that it is unusually small and unusually powerful. A community measured at about 1.2 per cent is even more likely to be described as an occupying commercial caste. The smaller the denominator, the more sensational the wealth claim appears.

The economic figure is just as unstable. Estimates from the 1990s referred to the market capitalisation of listed companies, excluding foreign and state-owned enterprises, and then migrated into the broader claim that ethnic Chinese “controlled 70 per cent of the economy”. Those are not equivalent statements. Market capitalisation is not national income. Owning a group of listed firms does not mean controlling every shop, farm, public institution, informal business, and state enterprise in a country of more than 200 million people.

There was, and remains, a serious wealth disparity. A small number of Chinese Indonesian family conglomerates became exceptionally powerful. Patronage under Suharto’s New Order connected business families to the state. Many ordinary Chinese Indonesians, however, were shopkeepers, employees, professionals or small business owners. Describing the whole community as a single economic actor confuses the most powerful families with everyone who shares an ancestry.

Malaysia demonstrates why context matters. The 2020 census recorded ethnic Chinese citizens as 23.2 per cent of the population, down from 24.6 per cent in 2010. This is a large national minority, not a hidden sliver. Chinese Malaysians have held economic influence greater than their population share, but that fact exists alongside their size, urban concentration, historical role in commerce and the state’s long-standing system of Malay preference.⁴

In other words, the same sentence cannot describe Indonesia and Malaysia without distortion. In Indonesia, the Chinese population is small and the wealthiest firms are concentrated. In Malaysia, the Chinese community is nearly a quarter of the population and is politically embedded in a constitutional order that gives Malays special protections. “Disproportionate economic weight” can be a useful description. “A tiny foreign group owns the country” is a political myth.

Singapore turned an ethnic quarrel into a state crisis

Singapore offers the clearest example of what happens when commercial power, demographic arithmetic and competing definitions of citizenship collide.

The island did not leave Malaysia because of a simple dispute between two personalities. Malaysia was formed in September 1963 from Malaya, Singapore, Sabah and Sarawak. Singapore left on 9 August 1965 after relations between the island’s government and the federal leadership deteriorated to the point that separation seemed safer than continued confrontation.

The political dispute was inseparable from the question of who the new country was for. The United Malays National Organisation defended Malay political primacy and special rights. The People’s Action Party, led by Lee Kuan Yew, campaigned under the slogan of a “Malaysian Malaysia”, meaning a state based on equal citizenship rather than a permanent racial hierarchy. In Kuala Lumpur, the PAP’s challenge looked like an attempt to overturn the political settlement on which Malayan independence had been built. In Singapore, Malay preference looked like a demand that Chinese citizens accept second-class status.

The numbers gave the argument its explosive quality. Singapore was already overwhelmingly Chinese. Including the island in the federation altered the balance among the major communities. The Chinese were not a small commercial minority in Singapore; they formed the majority of the island’s population. But the federation’s political institutions were built around Malay leadership and the protection of Malay interests.

Street violence in Singapore in 1964 demonstrated that the conflict was not an abstract constitutional disagreement. Communal riots exposed how quickly electoral competition, economic grievance and racial language could move into physical confrontation. The National Archives of Singapore preserves the documents of the separation, including a letter from Tunku Abdul Rahman urging agreement to Singapore’s departure and a record describing the decision as the “expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia”.⁶

The episode complicates the “Jews of the Orient” analogy. Singapore’s Chinese majority could not be treated as a marginal diaspora in the same way as Chinese Indonesians. Yet the island’s commercial position and Chinese political dominance were still interpreted through the fears of a Malay majority elsewhere in the federation. Economic success became attached to demographic anxiety; demographic anxiety became attached to constitutional power.

Separation placed a border around the conflict, but it did not solve the intellectual problem. Malaysia retained a politics of ethnic preference. Singapore built a state that formally rejected communal domination while maintaining its own system of racial classification and management. Neither model made ethnicity disappear. Each turned it into an administrative fact.

Thailand shows that assimilation can change identity without destroying networks

Thailand is the country where the analogy works least well if it is treated as a fixed portrait of a permanently separate Chinese caste.

Chinese migration was central to the development of Siamese commerce, but generations of intermarriage, Thai-language education and political incorporation produced a large Sino-Thai population that could be both Chinese-descended and fully Thai. Families adopted Thai surnames. Children entered the civil service, military and political class. Business dynasties became part of the country’s ruling establishment rather than remaining a foreign enclave outside it.

The process was neither peaceful nor equal. Assimilation often meant pressure to abandon Chinese names, schools, languages and public associations. The state’s demand was not simply that Chinese residents participate in national life. It was that they accept a national identity defined by the monarchy and Thai culture. Those who complied could be accepted; those who resisted could remain marked as suspect.

That distinction is visible in the literature examined by Chaloemtiarana. Thai writing often presents the “good” Chinese person as someone who loves Thailand, speaks Thai, and serves the state, while the “bad” Chinese person is attached to the Chinese language, Chinese institutions, and transnational loyalties. Ancestry itself is not always the decisive issue. The decisive issue is whether the state believes the individual has become politically and culturally Thai.

Yet assimilation did not erase the underlying networks. Family businesses continued to rely on relatives and trusted partners. Old commercial relationships survived name changes. Intermarriage added Thai connections without necessarily eliminating Chinese ones. A network can remain useful after the public identity of the people inside it has changed.

This is a point the video notices but interprets too narrowly. It observes that some Thai-Chinese families preferred to deal with other Chinese families. That may reflect trust, language or shared experience, but it does not prove a coordinated ethnic project. A family firm that hires relatives is not the same as a secret national organisation. A merchant who chooses a known supplier is not necessarily acting on behalf of an ethnic bloc.

Every society contains networks that outsiders cannot see clearly. Lawyers hire lawyers’ children. Political families trade access among themselves. Universities recruit through old connections. Business groups form around schools, regions, clubs and professional associations. When the network is ethnic, it is more visible and easier to portray as evidence of collective disloyalty.

Thailand’s history therefore reveals both sides of the argument. Cultural assimilation can broaden citizenship and allow migrants’ descendants to enter the national elite. It can also obscure how much pressure people faced to abandon parts of their inheritance. Meanwhile, commercial networks can persist without proving that the people who use them form a unified political community.

Indonesia demonstrates the cost of turning economic resentment into ethnic politics

The most serious omission in any discussion of Chinese economic prominence in Southeast Asia is the price paid by Chinese minorities when the “foreign wealthy group” story becomes a tool of political mobilisation.

In Indonesia, discrimination under the New Order was institutional. Chinese Indonesians faced restrictions on language, names, public cultural expression and political activity. The state encouraged assimilation while continuing to treat Chinese identity as a problem to be managed. The result was a double demand: Chinese citizens were expected to disappear into Indonesian national identity, yet their ancestry remained available whenever politicians or mobs needed an explanation for economic inequality.

The regime’s relationship with a small group of Chinese Indonesian conglomerates intensified this vulnerability. Suharto’s political economy relied on patronage. Some Chinese business families became closely associated with the regime, while most Chinese Indonesians had no such access to power. A system that concentrated privilege among a few families was then used to represent an entire ethnic group as privileged.

When the financial crisis and political collapse arrived in 1998, the old story was ready to be used. After four students were killed at Trisakti University, violence spread through Jakarta and other cities between 13 and 15 May. Chinese-owned shops and homes were targeted. Human Rights Watch reported that the majority of the more than 1,200 people who died were probably not Chinese—many were trapped in burning shopping centres—but it also documented that Chinese property was singled out and that sexual violence against ethnic Chinese women formed part of the wider assault.⁵

The distinction between victims matters. It is wrong to describe every person killed in the riots as Chinese. It is equally wrong to use that fact to minimise the ethnic targeting. A mob can burn a shopping centre in which Chinese and non-Chinese people die while still selecting Chinese shops, neighbourhoods and women as particular objects of hatred.

The debate over the number of rapes also became a second injury. Some officials and organisations denied or questioned the reports, while human-rights investigators warned that official scepticism was obstructing the search for victims and evidence. Human Rights Watch noted that the argument over numbers was obscuring the larger facts: sexual assaults occurred, Chinese communities were attacked, and security forces failed to protect them.

Economic resentment did not cause the violence by itself. Political collapse, military factionalism, a severe financial crisis and an authoritarian regime were all involved. But ethnic mythology supplied the target. The story that Chinese Indonesians were rich, foreign and connected to interests outside the nation made it easier to recast the destruction of their businesses as punishment rather than persecution.

This is why the language of “Jews of the Orient” cannot be treated as a harmless metaphor. The metaphor does not force anyone to commit violence. It does, however, place a minority inside a familiar narrative in which commercial success is evidence of exploitation and cultural persistence is evidence of disloyalty. Once that narrative is established, a crisis can give it physical consequences.

The flattering stereotype is still a stereotype

The video’s most interesting turn comes when it looks at how Jewish success is imagined in China.

Chinese bookstores have carried popular titles promising to reveal the supposed secrets of Jewish wealth, business skill and family education. Lihong Song, a Chinese scholar of Jewish studies, has described the phenomenon as an interest not so much in real Jews as in “the Jew as trope”. In this popular imagination, a Jew may be anyone who is intelligent, wealthy and successful. Non-Jewish figures have even been treated as Jewish because they fit the stereotype.⁷

This is not the same as the hostile stereotype used by European antisemites. It is admiring rather than contemptuous. But the underlying mistake is similar. A complicated history of migration, education, persecution, law and economic adaptation is compressed into an ethnic character. The group is imagined as possessing a transferable secret.

That secret is attractive because it promises an explanation for national success. Chinese readers interested in Jewish commercial achievement are often asking questions about China’s own experience: how can a people preserve identity across borders? How can family and educational institutions sustain a community through political upheaval? How can a society become rich without losing its cultural confidence?

Those questions are not foolish. The problem is the answer the popular genre supplies. Instead of examining institutions, history and political conditions, it attributes achievement to an inherited Jewish or Chinese disposition. The story becomes easier to consume and harder to test.

Flattery can also become a burden. If Jews are assumed to possess an instinct for money, ordinary Jews are treated as representatives of an abstract economic type. If Chinese people are assumed to be naturally disciplined, commercially minded and loyal to their own networks, Chinese citizens abroad may be asked to explain the actions of a business family, an embassy or the government in Beijing.

This mirrors the hostile accusation that a minority is incapable of loyalty. The flattering version says that the group is exceptionally intelligent, united and successful. The hostile version says that the same qualities make it dangerous. Both deny internal disagreement. Both treat individuals as expressions of an ethnic essence.

The comparison also carries a further irony. Chinese communities in Southeast Asia are not one community in any simple sense. Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka, Cantonese, Hainanese and other groups have different histories. Some families are recent migrants; others have lived in the region for centuries. Some speak a Chinese language at home; others speak Malay, Thai, Indonesian or English. Some identify strongly with Chinese ancestry; others see themselves primarily as citizens of their host country.

A stereotype works by eliminating those distinctions. It creates a single Chinese subject who can be praised, feared or claimed. History does not provide such a subject.

Beijing has made the diaspora politically important in a new way

The video’s strongest contemporary point is that the relationship between the Chinese diaspora and China has changed. For much of the twentieth century, overseas Chinese communities lived outside a China that was poor, politically unstable or cut off from the world economy. Today they live alongside a major power with the capacity to project capital, technology, political influence and national narratives across borders.

That change is not a matter of sentiment. It is built into Chinese state policy.

A 2022 research paper from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs records that Beijing estimates around 60 million people of Chinese origin live outside the People’s Republic. Chinese policy treats overseas Chinese as a resource for economic development, science and technology, diplomacy and soft power. Under Xi Jinping, diaspora work has been connected more closely to the Communist Party’s united-front system, which seeks to cultivate support for Chinese interests and influence among groups outside the country.⁸

Beijing’s language is expansive. Beijing describes overseas Chinese as the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation, regardless of the passport they hold. They may be encouraged to support Chinese companies abroad, defend China’s “core interests”, promote Chinese positions in their host societies and facilitate investment or technology transfer. In this framework, diaspora members can become unofficial ambassadors.

That policy gives overseas Chinese communities new leverage. Access to the Chinese market can increase the value of their networks. Chinese firms can deepen partnerships with family businesses in Southeast Asia. Governments may compete for investment and trade. People whose ancestors left China generations ago may find their heritage strategically valuable to a state with global ambitions.

But a claim from Beijing is not the same as a response from the diaspora. People of Chinese descent do not automatically accept that the Chinese state represents them. Their political loyalties may lie with Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, Britain, Australia or the United States. Some may feel cultural affinity with China; others may feel little connection. Many will hold mixed views.

This is where the video’s celebratory language becomes misleading. A powerful ancestral state can be a source of pride and opportunity, but it can also make citizens of Chinese descent suspect in their own countries. If Beijing insists that ancestry creates a political bond, host governments may begin to treat ancestry as evidence of divided loyalty. Chinese citizens abroad are then trapped between two claims they did not make: that they belong to China by blood, and that their connection to China makes them untrustworthy.

The old minority problem has been altered, not abolished. The Chinese diaspora is no longer simply a commercially successful minority facing a weak homeland. It is a commercially successful and politically visible diaspora that a powerful state wants to speak for.

That is a genuine historical development. It does not prove that overseas Chinese form a single bloc. It proves that states have political interests in treating them as one.

What the Singapore comparison reveals about citizenship

The argument becomes clearest when viewed through citizenship rather than ancestry.

In Malaysia, the constitutional settlement reflects a compromise between a Malay-led political order and a multi-ethnic society in which Chinese and Indian communities have substantial economic and electoral weight. In Indonesia, the state spent decades demanding assimilation while permitting the Chinese minority to remain a convenient symbol of foreignness. In Thailand, generations of Sino-Thai families entered the national mainstream, but only after navigating pressure to prove that they had become Thai. In Singapore, a Chinese-majority city-state made equal citizenship the basis of national legitimacy while continuing to manage race through official categories.

These are not variations of one ethnic story. They are different state responses to the same problem: how to build a nation from populations whose histories do not fit a single ancestry.

The phrase “Jews of the Orient” obscures that problem because it makes the minority look like the constant and the state look like the passive setting. In fact, governments created the conditions in which Chinese communities became intermediaries. Colonial authorities assigned commercial functions. Nationalist governments later demanded assimilation or offered protection. Constitutions distributed rights by group. Police and armies either restrained or enabled violence. Markets rewarded some families and excluded others.

The diaspora was not simply acting upon society. Laws and institutions shaped it.

That point also changes how we should discuss economic inequality. If a Chinese business family receives state contracts, the relevant questions concern patronage, competition and regulation. If Chinese Malaysians are over-represented in private commerce, the relevant questions concern colonial history, education, urbanisation and the distribution of land and political privilege. If Chinese Indonesians are believed to control the economy, the relevant questions include the concentration of conglomerate ownership and the regime that protected it.

None of these questions is answered by saying that the Chinese are the Jews of Asia. The phrase substitutes a familiar ethnic picture for a country-specific investigation.

There is also a moral danger in treating “the Chinese diaspora” as a political actor with one interest. The successful tycoon, the market trader, the factory worker, the mixed-marriage family and the young professional may share ancestry while having little else in common. Their legal status, class position, religion, language, and political loyalties may differ. A state that claims to protect them may serve only a narrow elite. A host society that suspects them may punish people with no relationship to that elite.

Citizenship is the only workable answer to this confusion. It does not require people to erase ancestry. It requires the state to distinguish between a citizen’s individual conduct and a population’s presumed intentions.

A serious comparison must separate structure from slogan

The comparison between Jewish, Chinese diasporas, and Asians in Africa can survive, but only after removing the slogan.

Researchers can ask whether minority communities become concentrated in commerce when they face restrictions on land ownership or public employment. They can examine whether family and language networks reduce the cost of credit. They can compare how colonial administrations use intermediaries and how postcolonial governments respond. They can study why minorities become targets during economic crisis and why some states protect them while others abandon them.

Those are serious questions. They concern institutions, incentives and political choices.

The first discipline is to check denominators. Is the community 1.2 per cent of the population, as the Indonesian census found, or 3 per cent, as older estimates claimed? Does “control of the economy” mean the ownership of listed shares, the market capitalisation of selected firms, the retail trade or national income? Does the statistic describe a handful of conglomerates or millions of ordinary people?

The second is to distinguish over-representation from collective control. A minority may be over-represented among the richest business owners without controlling the state, the labour market or the entire economy. The distinction is not pedantic. It is the difference between a claim that can be investigated and a slogan that invites resentment.

The third is to ask who created the label. In this case, the answer is clear: a monarch writing during a period of political anxiety, borrowing the language of European antisemitism to attack a domestic minority. The source does not make every later comparison illegitimate, but it does tell us that the phrase arrived with a political purpose.

The fourth is to look at what a group is being asked to prove. Chinese Indonesians were expected to assimilate, but their ancestry remained available as evidence against them. Chinese Malaysians were asked to accept a system of Malay preference, while their economic success was used to justify that preference. Sino-Thai families could enter the national elite, but the majority state set the terms of belonging. In each case, the minority was expected to demonstrate loyalty in a way the majority did not have to.

The final discipline is to resist the difference between flattering and hostile stereotypes. “The Chinese are naturally successful” and “the Chinese control everything” appear to point in opposite directions. They are closer than they look. Both turn history into character. Both make internal diversity invisible. Both allow outsiders to treat a population as a single instrument.

The Chinese communities of Southeast Asia do not need a borrowed insult to make their history significant. Their story includes colonial labour systems, maritime trade, family firms, intermarriage, schools, riots, constitutional bargains, authoritarian discrimination, migration and the rise of China. It is the history of people often told they were foreign even when their families had lived in the country for generations.

The phrase “Jews of the Orient” tells us something—but not what its modern users usually think. It shows how quickly economic difference can translate into ethnic suspicion, how national identities are built by selecting an internal outsider, and how a minority can be made responsible for the political failures of the state around it.

The better question is not whether Chinese Southeast Asians are the Jews of the East. It is why governments and commentators keep needing a “Jew” of somewhere: a minority whose success can be admired when the economy is growing, blamed when it falters and claimed by a distant power when its ancestry becomes strategically useful.

References

1. Thak Chaloemtiarana, “Are We Them? Textual and Literary Representations of the Chinese in Twentieth-Century Thailand,” Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3, December 2014. https://englishkyoto-seas.org/2014/12/vol-3-no-3-thak-chaloemtiarana ↩
2. Adam Garfinkle, “The Sino-Semitic Connection,” The American Interest, 26 March 2020. https://www.the-american-interest.com/2020/03/26/the-sino-semitic-connection ↩
3. Charles A. Coppel, “Reassessing assumptions about Chinese Indonesians,” Indonesia at Melbourne, University of Melbourne. https://indonesiaatmelbourne.unimelb.edu.au/reassessing-assumptions-about-chinese-indonesians ↩
4. “Census 2020: Bumiputera population increases to almost 70pct,” Malaysiakini, 14 February 2022. https://www.malaysiakini.com/news/610656 ↩
5. Human Rights Watch, “Indonesia: The Damaging Debate on Rapes of Ethnic Chinese Women,” 1998. https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports98/indonesia3/intro.htm ↩
6. National Archives of Singapore, “Independence of Singapore – Original Documents 1965.” https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/government_records/record-details/84f1f1ac-d18d-11f0-8b09-0050569c7836 ↩
7. Lihong Song, “Mapping My Judaic Studies Career in China: An Academic Confession,” eJewishPhilanthropy, 9 March 2011. https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/mapping-my-judaic-studies-career-in-china-an-academic-confession ↩
8. Jasmin Lorch and Anja Senz, “China’s Diaspora Policy under Xi Jinping: Content, limits and challenges,” SWP Research Paper No. 10/2022, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik. https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/266411/1/1821525108.pdf ↩