ASIA: The Sojourners

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The pattern was repeating itself throughout Southeast Asia. In Thailand, four Chinese businessmen were shot to death in public on suspicion that they had burned their shops to get the insurance. In Cambodia, Chinese residents were barred from 18 occupations, ranging from barbering to pawnbrokering to, curiously enough, espionage. In Indonesia, Chinese traders and their families—some 300,000 people—were ordered to get out of rural villages by year's end. Not since the Japanese swarmed into the South Pacific in World War II have Asia's Overseas Chinese felt their position so threatened.

Southward to Fortune. The 14 million Overseas Chinese living in the area they call Nanyang, the Southern Ocean, looked desperately for a way out of the rain of repressive laws. Some turned to Red China and some to the Nationalist stronghold on Formosa, but all felt that their existence was at stake. The matter was hotly argued last week in Manila's tiny sari-sari shops by the flickering light of kerosene lamps, in Bangkok's "thieves' market," where peddlers cautiously hawk rare Siamese antiques, in Singapore's Tanjong Rhu, the "millionaires' club," where wealthy Chinese dine on shark's fins and suckling pigs while outside stand row on row their parked Cadillacs and Daimlers.

The crisis is one that has been faced before by the Overseas Chinese, an unassimilated group that has lived for centuries among alien peoples. As early as 300 B.C., Chinese merchants in clumsy junks coasted along the shores of Viet Nam. When European adventurers and explorers first made their hesitant way into Southeast Asia, they found, as Britain's Sir Thomas Herbert wrote in 1634, that in every major seaport were the "infinitely industrious Chyneses."

The European imperialists regarded them as rivals. The Spanish in the Philippines were nearly wiped out before they rallied to slaughter 23,000 Chinese at Manila in 1603. At midcentury, a Chinese exile and pirate named Koxinga drove the Dutch from Formosa; later the Dutch retaliated by wholesale murders of Chinese on Java. But the colonial powers and the Overseas Chinese soon recognized that they were destined to be allies, not enemies. The one supplied technology and power, the other shrewdness and hard work; between them they reaped the fortune of the Indies.

The Hard Workers. Britain's entry into the Orient brought new swarms of Chinese to Nanyang as indentured coolies to work in tin mines and on plantations, to load ships and build roads and carry burdens. Each new trading city—Penang, Singapore, Malacca, Hong Kong—became heavily Chinese. As agents and middlemen, the ubiquitous Chinese followed the Dutch troops into Sumatra, Borneo and Celebes, the British into Burma, the French into Indo-China. Even in Thailand, which never became a European colony, the Chinese were advisers to the king, and controlled the nation's commerce.