The Overseas Chinese: Ethnocultural Studies of the Nanyang Chinese

The Overseas Chinese have had a greatly misunderstood reputation of their history and roles in their host worlds. Even professional studies tend to categorize the Overseas Chinese as the "Asian Jewry," somewhat stereotyped as "merchant middlemen" minorities involved in pariah capitalism and the exploitation of both sides, and the benefit of none except themselves. The rise of new nationalisms throughout Southeast Asia has served to exacerbate and make more vulnerable the situation of the Overseas Chinese throughout Southeast Asia, from Vietnam, Myanmar and Thailand to Malaysia, Singapore and across Indonesia into the wider Pacific. These stereotypes persists in the world even if the bulk of evidence supports the thesis of "diversity within unity" and the historical record oof many different integrative and articulatory roles the Chinese have fulfilled through different periods of their history and in many different places of their worldwide diaspora. More informed models of the Chinese place them ranging upon a complex, multi-dimensional continuum, and as being very highly adaptable on both individual and social community levels.

What has been true of the so-called "Asian Jews" is that they have suffered chronically as scapegoats of complex state, multi-ethnic societies that experience some measure of caste and class stratification, from social and structural discrimination within their host settings, and the Overseas Chinese have periodically suffered and survived pogroms intended to destroy their identity and their means of livelihood usually within. Chinese culture and civilization, itself extremely heterogeneous in many ways, demonstrates an amazing continuity of core characteristics and a remarkable adaptive survivability across a wide spectrum of adversities.

Author: Hugh M. Lewis

Publisher: Independently Published

Publication Date: Dec 15, 1999

Number of Pages: 182 pages

Binding: Paperback or Softback

ISBN-10: NA

ISBN-13: 9798418924452