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2 CHINA'S THIRD WAVE, Part
1 A new breed of migrants fans
out By Bertil Lintner
CHIANG MAI, Thailand - A disorderly line
of Chinese citizens jostle through check-in at the
airport in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai on
their way to boarding a flight for Bangkok. They
are jabbering away, though not in the rough
Teochew dialect spoken in nearby Yunnan province
and long familiar in the markets of northern
Thailand. Rather, they are speaking in the
standard Mandarin of mainland China.
Nor
are they tourists: ill-fitting suits, battered
briefcases and
mobile phones mark them
out as business people flying to Bangkok to seek
trade deals or land jobs. They're among the new
wave of Chinese migrants who have over the past
decade opened shops and eateries in Chiang Mai and
other towns in northern Thailand - a creeping
invasion that a growing number of local Thais are
watching with unease.
"As a Thai, I feel
overwhelmed," says a Bangkok-born woman who now
lives in Chiang Mai. "Of course, Chinese have been
moving south for centuries. But we have never seen
as many new businessmen, and settlers, as now."
Northern Thailand is only one of their
destinations. Large numbers of Chinese are also
moving into northern Myanmar, northern Laos,
Cambodia and further abroad - including the
Pacific islands, Australia, the United States, the
Russian Far East and Japan. More recently, South
Korea has become a popular destination for Chinese
migrants - both legal and illegal - as it's easier
to enter than tightly sealed Japan.
China's new migrants are a breed apart
from their peripatetic forebears, who spoke
regional dialects and exhibited little
nationalism, identifying more with the localities
in China from which they hailed. The recent
arrivals not only speak the national Mandarin
language, but also tend to identify with China as
a whole.
This new wave of Chinese migrants
to Southeast Asia and beyond - what some
Sinologists are referring to as the "Third Wave"
of outward Chinese migration - is unprecedented in
Chinese history not only because the migrants
originate from northern and central Chinese
provinces, but also because travel has become
easier due to better transportation links both
inside and outside of China. That's resulting in
potentially larger numbers than previous waves of
Chinese migration throughout the globe.
"The new-wave Chinese are very different
from those who migrated in the past," says Andrew
Forbes, a Chiang Mai-based China expert who has
spent more than 20 years studying China's
relations with Southeast Asia. "They've grown up
in a country which is far more unified than
before. There's now a different sense of being
Chinese: the new migrants are patriotic and loyal
to the motherland."
Nyiri Pal, a Hungarian
Sinologist and academic, agrees that unlike
earlier Chinese settlers in Southeast Asia, the
United States and Australia, these new migrants do
not feel they have stopped being part of China.
According to Nyiri, they see themselves not as
local minorities, but as a "global majority" with
an attachment to China that has nothing to do with
territorial nationalism. Not only is China their
ethnic and cultural base, but it remains the
foundation of their economic success - a place
where they continue to invest in and draw on, he
says.
Official blind eye It's
quite possible that Chinese authorities are not
actively encouraging this migratory development.
But there seems little doubt that Beijing's
mandarins appreciate the benefits of the
large-scale migration out of its overpopulated and
resource-constrained country. First, the new wave
of outward migration serves as a social safety
valve at a time when unemployment is high and
masses of young people are on the move looking for
jobs inside the country.
Second, the
foreign currency-denominated remittances they
often send back to their families in China are an
important source of national income. The third
consideration is longer term: outward migration
strengthens China's presence and economic
influence around the world.
To underscore
official thinking on the trend, Nyiri refers to an
article in a Chinese magazine which quoted the
State Council's "Opinion on Unfolding New Migrant
Work":
Since reform and opening, people
have left mainland China to reside abroad
(called "new migrants" for short) and have
continuously become more numerous. They are
currently rising up as an important force within
overseas Chinese and ethnic Chinese communities.
In the future, they will become a backbone of
forces friendly to us in America and some other
developed Western countries. Strengthening new
migrant work has important realistic meaning and
deep-going, far-reaching significance for
promoting our country's modernizing
construction, implementing the unification of
the motherland, expanding our country's
influence and developing our country's relations
with the countries of residence.
One
such country is Nyiri's own: Hungary. Fifteen
years ago, Chinese migrants were few and far
between in Hungary. But the fall of communism in
Eastern Europe opened new markets for private
entrepreneurs and, ironically, many of them came
from the world's last major communist-ruled
country: China.
There are currently
between 20,000 and 40,000 Chinese in Hungary, and
most of them have arrived by a very long train
ride from Vladivostok across the border in the
Russian Far East.
It is increasingly
obvious that China's growing political and
economic clout has given the recent arrivals in
Hungary, Southeast Asia and elsewhere greater
ethnic confidence and assertiveness. But this
sense of national pride is also a factor that has
provoked tensions between new generation migrants
and older settlers, who fear that the new
arrivals' outward displays of nationalism could
reignite latent animosities and rekindle
longstanding suspicions towards ethnic Chinese
communities in their adopted countries.
There have been incidents of anti-Chinese
hostility that bear out those concerns. For
example, in May 1999, 300 "new" Chinese massed
outside the US Embassy in the Cambodian capital of
Phnom Penh to protest against the bombing of the
Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, which at the time the
Americans asserted was a unintentional mistake.
A smaller gathering of ethnic Chinese
Cambodians, who had been in the country for
generations, then held a counter-demonstration,
heckling the protesters: "You're not our
brothers," one of them yelled. "Your people killed
my people during Pol Pot's time." Cambodia's
Chinese suffered particularly badly during the
1975-1979 Khmer Rouge regime, led by Pol Pot,
which was backed by Beijing.
In the
northern Myanmar city of Mandalay, newly arrived
Chinese settlers have bought shops, restaurants,
hotels, karaoke bars - and identity papers. Given
the relative wealth of the Chinese
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